A new audience for Maori culture
A hand-picked group of Northland youth are bound for Italy to showcase Maori culture at a festival expected to draw up to 200,000 people.
The roughly 20-strong party, aged 11 to 24, plus other adults from every corner of the Far North, were invited to take part in the 38th Artevento International Kite Festival on the beach at Cervia, in northern Italy, over April 20-May 1.
Every year festival organisers choose one or two “cultures of honour,” this time focusing on Thai and Maori.
The young people will spend the 10 days performing kapa haka and waiata, demonstrating flax weaving and teaching traditional games such as ki-o-rahi. They will also make and fly traditional manu tukutuku (kites).
The group is led by Maori games expert Harko Brown of Puketona, whose connection with European kite festivals began with a chance meeting at a kite-making workshop in Ngaruawahia more than 10 years ago. Also there are Wiremu Sarich, a games and taonga puoro (traditional instruments) expert from Taipa, and te reo teachers from Taipa and Kerikeri.
The group will assemble in Bologna on Thursday 19 before taking a bus to Cervia.
Highlights for the Northland group are expected to include taking part in an Anzac Day service at a war cemetery in Ravenna, where soldiers of the 28th Maori Battalion are buried. Mr Brown said the Maori Battalion had been revered in that part of Italy ever since 14 soldiers lost their lives resisting a German attack so several hundred villagers could escape to safety.
The group will also receive a civic welcome at nearby San Marino, one of the world’s smallest countries.
Festival organisers are expecting at least 170,000 spectators, and 20,000 participants from 35 countries.