Hip-hop, humour, art and film at Lima – Pacific Arts Festival

24 January 2005

A new brown package stuffed full of talent – ranging from bilingual rapper Feelstyle to the creaters of the hit cartoon series BroTown – will be on show at the Lima – Pacific Arts Festival this year.  

Held at various Christchurch venues from Wednesday 2 February to Sunday 6 February, the celebration of contemporary and traditional Pacific art, music, dance, and film will showcase some of New Zealand’s most exciting Pacific talents.

Hosted by Christchurch drama and music group Pacific Underground, which helped launch such talents as hip hop artist Scribe and Oscar Kightley of BroTown fame, the festival is also sponsored by the City Council.

The festival opens with the Lima Exhibition at 6pm on Wednesday 2 February at Te Toi Mana Maori Art Gallery (Arts Centre) with some of New Zealand’s most promising up-and-coming Pacific artists such as Sheyne Tuffery, Felolini Maria Ifopo,  Bonni Tamati and Ralph Stowers alongside master carver and moko artist Riki Manuel,  tatau (traditional Samoan tattoo) artist, Peter Suluape, and renown artist/sculptor Michel Tuffery. Siapo (tapa cloth) Tour by Roger Fyfe will also be at the Canterbury Museum on 3 February.

For the youth, the Lima Bus Tour to malls around Christchurch will take such acts as Sunga from Melbourne, and locals Tribalincs and friends to the suburbs before they perform at lunchtime concerts in Cathedral Square and the Christchurch Art Gallery. In the evenings they will also perform as part of the Late night at the Dux de Lux series from Wednesday 2 to 4 February. Pacific Underground will appear at the Dux de Lux on Friday 4 February just after the launch at 7pm of the play script Fresh Off the Boat by Simon Small and Oscar Kightley, which has been published for the first time by The Play Press.

The Naked Samoans are also holding a seminar on how they created the hit TV3 cartoon series BroTown at the Arts Centre Venues Centre, corner Hereford Street and Rolleston Avenue at 4pm on Friday 4 February - so bring your BroTown DVDs along for signing.

Spend Friday evening, 4 February, at the Great Hall with the Wellington-based Samoan comic duo of Eteuati Ete and Tofiga Fepuleai, The Laughing Samoans,  whose characters must prepare for a Samoan wedding in “The Small Samoan Wedding”. They magnify weddings as one of those things that can bring out the best and worst of any culture.

Family Day in the North Quad of the Arts Centre on Saturday from 10am to 4pm is traditionally a very popular event, giving people a chance to taste traditional Pacific food from stalls while watching brackets from some of New Zealand’s best Pacific talent such as hip-hop artist Freestyle and his bi-lingual raps “I’m not mad at you” and “Suga” and Pacific Underground’s “Island Summer”. The Fia Fia Night in the Great Hall from 8pm, the same day, will host traditional dance and song groups as well as Pacific Underground’s “Island Summer”.

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