In 1961, before independence, someone had the idea of getting highland groups who had been fighting to come and dance at each other instead. Sixty-odd years later more than eighty sing-sing groups fill a park in Mount Hagen with feathers, shell and ochre for three days in August.

A show instead of a fight

Mount Hagen is the third-largest city in Papua New Guinea, capital of Western Highlands Province, 46,250 people at 1,677 metres. It is named after a volcano twenty-four kilometres to the north-west, which was itself named after Curt von Hagen, a German colonial officer who lived from 1859 to 1897.

The show was first staged in 1961, fourteen years before independence, and the point of it was unity: to bring together tribes from across the highlands who had reason not to be in the same field. It is now one of the largest cultural events in the country, and groups come from well beyond the highlands — regional, provincial and national.

Sing-sing

The form is the sing-sing: a group performs its own dance, in its own dress, together. More than eighty groups take part across the three days. What that means in practice is feathers — bird of paradise, cassowary, parrot — built into headdresses, shell ornaments at the nose and chest, ochre and charcoal and pigment on the face and body, drums, and a great deal of noise made deliberately. Each group is showing what it is, next to everyone else showing what they are, which is the whole idea.

It happens at Queen's Park in the middle of Mount Hagen city. The National Cultural Commission and the tourism authority publish the dates; they have fallen over the third Saturday in August in each recent year.

The other one

Papua New Guinea's other great show is at Goroka, in the Eastern Highlands, in September. The two are often done as a pair by people who have come a long way, and between them they are how most outsiders ever see a sing-sing.