NEW LIFE FOR INDIGENOUS ARTS
Festivals and performers help Austronesian cultures win wider audience.
Agroup of slender yet muscular youths clad in straw loincloths, their bodies adorned with swirls of white paint, recently marched in formation onto the modest sports field in Sorong, a coastal town in the eastern Indonesian province of West Papua. As they approached, people crowding around stalls selling the famous hand-woven bags of the region lifted their heads and moved onto the stone podiums surrounding the field.
Proud and charismatic, the young people started shaking in the traditional dance styles of Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of Papua Island. As they jumped, ran and twirled, they raised the intricately woven noken bags, a symbol of their Papuan heritage, high in the air.
The dances of the first Festival Noken held last December to mark Noken World Day, are just part of a growing series of events and projects focused on bringing threatened and under-appreciated Austronesian cultures into the limelight.
“The first Festival Noken is a grassroots attempt to celebrate the culture and identity of Indonesian Papuans through a showcase of our traditional dances, costumes, and noken handicrafts,” said Joanna Kamesrar, a Sorong resident and the festival’s main organiser. Besides the traditional dances, the event had a small area dedicated to the sale of noken bags, and featured an ethnic fashion show.
The noken is a knotted or woven bag hung from the head and used to carry goods, and even babies. Unesco has officially declared it an intangible cultural heritage of Papua and its Indonesian provinces.
Even without local sponsorship, the festival’s launch drew plenty of spectators, encouraging the organisers, who are planning to repeat and improve the event later this year.
Festival Noken is one of several projects focused on indigenous cultures in the region. The Rainforest World Music Festival, staged annually for the past 13 years in Kuching on Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo, has become one of Asia’s premier world music events. It has helped bring young local artists, such as the mixed indigenous Kelabit and British-Italian Alena Murang, to the attention of an international audience.
The Kuching-born musician has adapted the traditional sounds of the
sape, the stringed lute-like folk guitar of the indigenous Orang Ulu people, to modern tastes. The Orang Ulu, or “upriver people”, are former headhunters who still live in longhouses along the Baram River.
“I don’t try to preserve or save culture, but to keep heritage alive in the present day,” Murang, 28, told the Nikkei Asian Review.
One of the first women to take up an instrument traditionally reserved for men, Murang broke an ancient social taboo, and helped to revive a dying tradition. “I think that arts provide accessible ways for people to understand a topic or a community, and are the best language to bridge the understanding between those who wouldn’t normally talk to each other,” she said.
Murang’s most recent project is the music video of Re Lekuah, a Kelabit folk song about working hard to get by, and the first music video ever recorded in the Kelabit language, which has only 4,000 remaining speakers. Released online on Feb 21 to mark UN International Mother Language Day, Re Lekuah follows a young indigenous woman as she navigates her own heritage in the modern world.
The customs and language of this southeastern Sarawak highland tribe are fast disappearing in the face of the dramatic changes forced on them by logging, Catholic evangelisation, and fast-paced modernity, she said.
“In Kelabit and in many other indigenous languages of Borneo, there is no word that translates into ‘art’ or ‘music’,” said Murang. “Arts are instead conceived as functional parts of everyday life.” She learned the original song in a longhouse from Tepu Doo’ Ayu and other elder Kelabit women, some of whom still wear the tribe’s traditional heavy brass earrings and sport elongated earlobes.
Re Lekuah is Murang’s collaboration with another young woman, Canadian-Vietnamese filmmaker Ashley Duong, who has worked with Kelabit communities for five years, producing the award-winning documentary A Time to Swim, about a returning Kelabit exile, in 2017.
“Indigenous cultures are so often framed as something of the past, and need to create their own cultural stronghold, which is why I’m interested in amplifying the work of people like Alena, who are heading in that direction,” Duong said.
“We both wanted to show that these cultures are still alive, growing and modern. And rather than just standing stiff in a museum, we could explore how cultural preservation can be fun, and even sexy, through a music video. Art has an important role in its ability to imagine a future for indigenous cultures that goes well beyond merely preserving them.”
Murang is also among the artists participating in Small Island Big Song, a documentary by the Australian music producer Tim Cole and his Taiwanese partner BaoBao Cheng. It documents their voyage to collect the fragments of a global Austronesian “songline” spanning the heritage of Southeast Asian, African and Austronesian island nations.
In cultures without literacy, according to Cole, practical knowledge of how to maintain communities in harmony with their environment is passed down by generations through the use of song.
“The idea behind Small Island Big Song is to create a songline that unites the cultural voices of the Pacific Ocean,” said Cole, who has a decade of experience recording the songlines of Australian aboriginal communities. “I felt I should be using my skills and resources to record the songs of endangered island nations, to put the voices of their communities — who will be the first to lose their homelands because of climate change — on the world stage.”
Over the past three years, Cole and Cheng travelled from Australia to 16 ethnic island cultures including Madagascar, Taiwan, Bali, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Malaysian Borneo and several Pacific islands. “We worked with well over 100 musicians and collected around 50 sessions, which I edited and produced into one soundtrack of 18 songs, a real oceanic songline.”
Cole wanted to film the musicians in natural locations on their traditional lands, so that the project could also capture the sounds of nature, another unique aspect of each island’s heritage.
The documentary won the Best International Project award in the Asian division of the Doc international documentary film festival, held in Bangkok on Jan 30. For the rest of the year, Cole and Cheng are embarking on a world tour with a headlining main-stage musical act. They appeared at the famous South by Southwest Festival in Texas in March, and have a series of European dates scheduled for the summer.
“We want to be part of the greater momentum of people, groups and communities that acknowledge we are failing in our role as our planet’s custodians,” he said. “We believe we aren’t listening to the Earth’s true story. It’s time we redefine ourselves, and I hope that Small Island Big Song can be the soundtrack to that process.”
We wanted to show that these cultures are still alive, growing and modern. And rather than just standing stiff in a museum, we could explore how cultural preservation can be fun, and even sexy, through a music video ASHLEY DUONG Filmmaker