Polyfest Trip 2017

WALT: Learn more about our cultures and other cultures.

Ever heard of Polyfest? Well if not, it’s a festival where Polynesians perform and compete in a competition. There are a lot of stages for different cultures. I hope to perform next year.

In our group we decided that our name would be skittles (cause we're all different colours). Two boys from Aorere college were our tour guides. They lead us to this stall called, ‘Pasifika Proud’.

(this is another group)

Two groups from Pt England joined with a group from Glen Eden. First we went into a stall called ‘Pasifika Proud’. The whole group split into six mini teams. Each team had a word they had to focus on. Those words were… Respect, Tapa relationships, Genealogy, Love and faith and language. There was one more I forgot. I was placed in the genealogy team and we were called ‘the pacific’. I learnt that genealogy is like learning about your ancestors, identity, family and where you're from.

Our next stall was ‘Te Wananga o Aotearoa’.On the way to the next stall, I bumped into Matthew. He’s one of my quad bloggers. I said ‘Hi’ then left. We waited for a bit before we began. A -360° camera was filming as we had dance battle. It was the right side against the left. The first round was Hone against Christian. Everyone was shouting and crowding around the dancers. Next round had the music ‘ju ju on that beat’. Tevita and another girl had to dance. I have to say that was intense round.

(this is another group)

Morning tea time came and everyone was eating. I had some shapes and an apple. We thought we were going to go to another stall but we didn’t. Point England was sitting down. We had a talk from our teacher then were handed goody bags. Tempted to open it, I didn’t. Then we were told to go have a roam around. All of the groups walked away but our group ran to the diversity stage. Our leader wanted to her friends son perform. Turns out, his performance was late.

I really enjoyed Polyfest. My goal was to learn more about my culture and things about it. But the Samoan stage had nobody performing. Next year I head into year nine. I hope to make it into Polyfest even if it is the non competitive. The one main thing I did learn was the word Genealogy. That word will stay in my mind forever.

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Polyfest was so cool and it was so cool to write about it. My highlight was seeing Matthew (one of my quad bloggers). I also enjoyed spending time with my group Skittles.