Every Savage Can Dance

 ... as Darcy remarks in Pride and Prejudice.  As I explained in And A Star To Steer Her By, I have just spent nearly two weeks sailing in a brigantine around Vanuatu.  One of the constant themes of the voyage was the dancing, which greeted us on every island.  The social, spiritual and political framework of these societies is called kastom, and the dancing is always referred to as kastom dancing.  In fact, some of the dancing, and more especially the singing, we saw was clearly the product of marketing men and tourist authorities.  On several islands, the song “Welcome, welcome, warmly welcome” was tirelessly and repetitively dinned into us, and in one place a different welcome song was set to the tune of God Save The Queen (in spite of its name, Soren Larsen is a British ship)!

But some of the dancing was both excellent and original, although my photographs will only bear the shadow of a witness to it.  A unique feature of these islands is the water dancing, performed only by women; indeed the men profess not to know how it is done.   A group of women stand in the sea above their knees, and clap in a highly coordinated way.  They clap beneath the water and above it, they clap in the spume and the splash, and they beat the surface with their hands.  The whole is intensely coordinated percussion which is briefly very impressive, although I suspect it lacks the range and variety for a long performance; the ladies make all the water sounds you can imagine, but also a deep resonant sound which none of us could explain (or replicate, when we tried ourselves!).  Can a physicist help, please: could it possibly be a cavitation effect, whatever that is?

 

On the tiny island of Ra, we witnessed a sacred snake dance; this always makes me a little uncomfortable, because it was not a sacred occasion, and I imagine we would resent a suggestion that we conduct Easter Mass or the Coronation for the convenience of this week’s busload of tourists from the other side of the world?  But these people seem genuinely to want to perform, and they are the local villagers themselves – there is no-one else – so there is no question of a special troop of actors enacting a gutted or spiced up tourist version.  And there is also the economic question: these people are extremely remote, and have few opportunities to earn money, which they need for schooling and other services and supplies (though they seemed mainly to rely on local produce for building materials, food etc, and live in what a colleague called affluent subsistence).  In some of the Banks Islands, the visit of the Soren was the first by a ship of any size – the odd private yacht makes it up here – for over six months, and we carried supplies for them from  Port Vila and Luganville.

But the snake dance, to return to my moutons, is very impressive.  A small troupe of musicians stand in the centre, and sing and play small drums held for them by boys, and beat a sunken wooden drum in the sand.  The snake dancers emerge from three directions, and chase back and forth round in tight circles, running, stamping, and tuning.  It’s hard to give a real impression of the dynamism of the dance, but one can imagine it being very powerful indeed by night and a fire, compared with the calm of our tourist performance on a sunny beach.

Finally - and this is hardly a dance at all, since most of the women kneel or squat in two rows facing each other, clapping rhythmically and in doing so, make patterns with their partners’ hands and arms, reminiscent of a very sophisticated version of the schoolyard game.

Comments

[Peter the flautist]

So please remember that Dark Puss's tame physicist is not in any way an expert (or even knows anything much at all) about acoustics in what follows. If you wish to find out for yourselves about cavitation (rapid collapse of low-pressure bubbles in a liquid), then let me recommend to you Vol 38 of the journal Applied Scientific Research (1982) which is devoted to a whole conference worth of relevant papers. I'll summarise briefly the paper by Cramer and Lauterborn "Acoustic Cavitation Noise Spectra".

The opening two sentences are worth quoting, "Many attempts have been made up to now to explain the spectrum of acoustic cavitation noise, but a complete insight has not yet been found. The various lines in the noise spectrum are closely related to the frequency fo of the driving sound field." So one would expect quite low frequency noise to arise from a low frequency dricing field. I think the interesting conclusion of this paper is that not only are harmonics of the fundamental produced but so are sub-harmonics (e.g. fo/2, fo/3 etc.).

Now whether this IS the explanation for the deep resonant noise that Lindsay refers to I have absolutely no idea, but it MIGHT be.

[glo]

This is very interesting indeed and you are asking the key questions about how to behave as a tourist. And it is not easy to find the right answer. Personnally, I also wonder wether I should visit a zoo or not, although I already went as a child and I fancy seeing some animals for real again; animals are jailed but zoos also help preserving endangered species - what to do then...

Unfortunately, even these people are now infected by a plague called marketing! I am wondering wether Westerners could bring along
diseases, viruses and bacteria that these islanders are not prepared to face physically and medically... Are they aware of this risk?

The sand is so white!

[Harriet]

What a fascinating post and what an extraordinary life you do lead! What on earth kind of job must you have to enable you to do these sorts of things?

[Peter the flautist]

A physicist I know will give your interesting question some thought ... Dark Puss

[Cornflower]

The juxtaposition of these posts is interesting: first Mr. Paxman on the English, then cultural details of a very foreign people. Shall we have a portrait of "An Englishman Abroad" soon, I wonder - you must be well-versed in the subject, Lindsay, both from personal experience and from your extensive reading.