Nuigini Singsing

 

Chanting & other meditation skills must be ancient. Traditions in Asia go back thousands of years. The Australian Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime,’ the Music & Dance of Nuigini & similar traditions go back tens of thousands of years. I taped a ‘SingSing’ village group in the Gagidu School grounds one afternoon in 1975. Gagidu is in Finschafen, Morobe District, Nuigini. The first Lutheran missionaries settled in the area in 1885 & all died of Malaria. It wasn’t an ethnomusicological ‘field study.’ Just my response as a musician to what I found to be vibrant, spontaneous & fascinating. The dancing, drumming & singing was hypnotic. The performance continued from dusk until dawn as SingSings commonly do. I recorded a discussion about the performance with the primary school principal, an elder from that tribal group, a high school student & the old man’s grandson who spoke the local languages. We sat drinking tea on the verandah & watched the wonderful exuberant yet focused & serious performers in the background. They were rehearsing for a big SingSing in Lae.

In the centre of the group the main feature was 3 towering totem figures, strong male dancers carrying  decorated frames about 5 metres high. One dancer carried a goblet shaped object made from bush materials on his pole.  That represented a sacred cave on tribal land. The other 2 principal dancers carried ‘spirit guardians’ representations of a python & a crocodile. The other male dancers, around 40 of them playing Kundu, the Nuigini hour glass drums moved around the totems. The women danced in pairs in an outer circle. They wore ill fitting bras that had been soaked in tea leaves to darken them. Most women & girls do not cover up their breasts when performing in SingSings. We were in a Lutheran area but local traditions were still strong. The women all wore khaki shorts with grass tufts covering their buttocks. They moved in pairs arms linked together. The people condensed the circle to ‘consult’ with the ‘spirit guardians’ & then moved out in a wavelike motion for the chorus sections.  When they crowded around the totems they bent forward into a crouch. After talking at length with his grandfather the high school boy explained that the structure of the song was a bit like ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm.’  They all had to move into the centre to find out what the message from the spirits was.

The performance did have a serious spiritual purpose. The spirit guardians were informing the tribal group on all sorts of matters & issues to do with relationships within the group & in the wider community. As well, there were traditional things to do with respecting the land, the sea & the movements of nature. Finally it was mentioned that the whole performance was a fertility ritual. The cave was a vagina & womb. The spirits of the crocodile & snake were the male components. When I was living in Kimbe, West New Britain the following year my neighbour, a Hungarian Anthropologist invited me over & showed his wonderful collection of ‘Yoni,’ huge beautiful elaborate exquisitely carved vaginas. We discussed ritual & how Nuiginians realised the importance of sexual intercourse as the source of life & that the the introduced religious rites were just a sterile form of spiritual cannibalism. All over the world people go to church to eat the god on Sundays in the hope that they will live for ever. Just that day 2 of other neighbours in that little street with the jungle as our back fence, the police chief & his second arrived back from Bali Vetu where they had been to arrest the whole island for cannibalism. The people of that island had buried grandma. After 10 days they raised her up out of the ground & ate her. But that’s another story.