Dance group wows French audiences

The 37 members of the Cook Islands Te Korero Maori Cultural Performing Arts Group, under the leadership of Mr Vaitoti Tupa, have finally returned to the Cook Islands after a successful tour of Los Angeles, France and Las Vegas.

The group accepted an invitation from the Association Nationale Cultures et Traditions of France to perform in various festivals in the French cities of Paris, St. Florent, Bourges, Nevers and Breve. The team was away from July 14 to 30.

It has taken the cultural group two years to plan and prepare for the trip and they enjoyed every minute abroad.

They stopped over in Los Angeles to spend time with our Cook Islands families and the new members of the group enjoyed every minute of the visit and took part in many activities at Disneyland and also visited the famed Hollywood movie sites at the Universal Studio.

After four days in Los Angeles, the team travelled to Paris via the busiest airport in the world Heathrow, London and the team immediately joined the Olympic fever by performing at Heathrow - with our beautiful girls in their colorful muumuu dress.

With thousands of athletes and supporters arriving at the London Olympic Games, the group proudly accepted the invitation by the games organisers and mascot to demonstrate and perform our culture to highlight the games fever.

Our junior dancers were the crowd favourites with their elegant muumuu dress and head ei.

The team also performed at CDG Airport in Paris after a request by British Airways ground staff while the team members were waiting for their luggage to arrive from London.

In Paris the team visited the famous Eiffel Tower, museums and the site where the late Princess Diana was tragically killed in a motor accident in August of 1997.

The team travelled to St Florent near Bourges and performed two shows at that festival and travelled again to St Bernadette of Nevers for further performances at a river bank festival.

The drumming and performances by former Cook Islands dance champion Uirangi Bishop and 2012 International dancer of the Year Alex Nicholls were more popular than the bigger nation’s teams such as Ireland, Malaysia and Russia.

The team returned to Paris for an overnight stopover before travelling back to Los Angeles via Heathrow Airport and again performed at the Air New Zealand VIP lounge to show our appreciation to Air NZ for its sponsorship in relation to the team’s excess luggage freight of drumming instruments and costumes on the trip from Rarotonga to France and back.

From Los Angeles the team took the seven hour drive to Las Vegas where they were hosted by our Cook Islands community and performed a cultural dancing exchange for our Cook Island US-born girls and boys. The team was proud to showcase our cultural performance and drumming to our Cook Island, Tahitian, Samoan and Hawaiian families.

It dedicated its last performance, at Los Angeles Airport, to Air New Zealand staff in acknowledgement of their great support.

The team acknowledges the support of Minister of Tourism Teina Bishop, Air New Zealand manager David Bridge, Terry Rangi and his team at BTIB, and families and friends in Rarotonga for their great support of the team tour to the French festival. They would also like to thank families in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for their great hospitality in hosting the team, under the guidance of Joe Monga’s family, assisted by Tapae Haurua, Henry George’s family, Arerangi Tongia’s family and others.

The team now looks forward to touring Hawaii in 2015 and accepting new dance members to sustain and share our culture with our younger performers.