Rom dance
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Thu 29 Aug 2013 11:23
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Highlight of the festival, and unique to Ambrym,
was the Rom dance. I have been unable to find out the meaning of the dance (much
of Ambrym's history is regarded as magic and secret by the locals) except that
the guys dressed in the fantastic banana leaf costumes and masks are supposed to
be spirits. The costumes and masks are destroyed immediately after the dance to
ward off evil spirits. The dance festival was held on the traditional village
site at Olal in north Ambrym; this village was abandoned and destroyed at the
order of the local Presbyterian pastor many years ago and the population
resettled on the coast a mile away. I took some heart from the fact that, here
at least, the church has clearly lost some of its stultifying power since
then.
 The dance is lengthy, dusty, very energetic and
very noisy. Here are some of the guys letting it go. The chaps with the pigs'
tusks are more senior grades - pigs were a sign of wealth here, used almost as
currency, and their lower tusks were grown into these circular shapes by
knocking out the upper teeth. Pigs with curled tusks were especially
valuable. The darker guy right of centre in the foreground is Chief Sekkor, the
organiser and one of the people being advanced to the eigth grade that day. He
is a bit of an entrepreneur; speaks English, French, Bislama and North Ambrymese
(Vanuatu has the greatest language density on earth with over a hundred local
languages still in use - tiny Ambrym alone, with less than two thousand
inhabitants, has five).
  As I said earlier, this was a real cultural
festival for the locals, who far outnumbered the tourists in the audience. Here
are some of the younger generation, clearly paying rapt attention:
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