OLOBATCH VAKAKARE
Everyone knows New Caledonia but very little about the Kanak people, their culture, their origins and the artistic richness of their painting, sculpture, music or architecture that they have preserved or developed throughout its history.
Geographically, New Caledonia is the archipelago "closest" to Australia in the heart of the Coral Sea. This territory consists of the Grande Terre whose capital is Nouméa and a series of archipelagos located on its flanks, including the island of Lifou which is part of the Loyalty Islands. This mountainous archipelago leads to the Coral Sea through a wide and beautiful area of shallow waters that form a coral reef. It is humid as a whole, which gives it a richness of vegetation sometimes exuberant.
The history of New Caledonia begins with successive waves of settlements from the northeast, starting from 2,500 BC. Pottery and petroglyphs testify to the existence of the first inhabitants of the archipelago. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, Polynesian navigators came from the east on pirogues to the Loyalty Islands. It was in 1744 that she was discovered by the English navigator James COOK before she changed hands to become French in 1853.
From this story, there is a Kanake identity that the "Olobatch Vakakare" dance and song ensemble illustrates with a strong culture, which it expresses with a very lively talent. And this is the role of all the small islands like that of the island of pines, more than that of the Grande Terre where the Neo-Caledonian are more numerous. The richness of this culture can be discovered with patience. It is rich in its myths, based on complex ceremonial exchanges. The Kanak people, dispersed on a crowd of sometimes tiny islets, thus preserve their gods, their cosmogony, their organization of the ground and the sky, their knowledge which is transmitted from generation to generation, from elders to leaders. Their language is complex. The vigour of the customary tribes is based on the notion of a village whose chiefdoms are par excellence living memories.
You will be surprised by the strangeness of this folkloric ensemble, its costumes, symbolic weapons, music, songs and dignity. He defends a culture of which he is totally imbued and that ancient or modern events have never succeeded in erasing. He is aware of playing an initiating and respectable role in the light of the past. The nations of the South Pacific want to remind the world that their ocean is populated by men probably from Asia in canoes, carrying a rich civilization and that they base their future on the return to custom.
Under our eyes interested, surprised or passionate by this rebirth and this discovery of a universe broken but not adrift, the show of the Ensemble de chants et danses "Olobatch Vakakare" of New Caledonia will be an authentic astonishment.
