A Most Indecent Song & Dance
The young girls whenever they can collect 8 or 10 together dance a very indecent dance which they call Timorodee singing most indecent songs and useing most indecent actions in the practice of which they are brought up from their earlyest Childhood.
-- Capt. James Cook, after seeing his first Tahitian dance show in 1769
The Tahitian dances described by the great explorer in 1769 left little doubt as to the temptations that inspired the mutiny on the Bounty a few years later. At the time Cook arrived, the Tahitians would stage a heiva (festival) for almost any reason, from blessing the harvest to celebrating a birth. After eating meals cooked in earth ovens, they would get out the drums and nose flutes and dance the night away. Some of the dances involved elaborate costumes, and others were quite lasciviously and explicitly danced in the nude or seminude, which added to Tahiti's reputation as an island of love.
The puritanical Protestant missionaries would have none of that and put an end to dancing in the early 1820s. Of course, strict prohibition never works, and Tahitians -- including a young Queen Pomare -- would sneak into the hills to dance. Only after the French took over in 1842 was dancing permitted again, and then only with severe limitations on what the dancers could do and wear. A result of these varied restrictions was that most of the traditional dances performed by the Tahitians before 1800 were nearly forgotten within 100 years.
You'd never guess that Tahitians ever stopped dancing, for after tourists started coming in 1961 they went back to the old ways. Today traditional dancing is a huge part of their lives -- and of every visitor's itinerary. No one goes away without vivid memories of the elaborate and colorful costumes, the thundering drums, and the swinging hips of a Tahitian tamure in which young men and women provocatively dance around one another.
The tamure is one of several dances performed during a typical dance show. Others are the o'tea, in which men and women in spectacular costumes dance certain themes, such as spear throwing, fighting, or love; the aparima, the hand dance, which emphasizes everyday themes, such as bathing and combing one's hair; the hivinau, in which men and women dance in circles and exclaim "hiri haa haa" when they meet each other; and the pata'uta'u, in which the dancers beat the ground or their thighs with their open hands. It's difficult to follow the themes without understanding Tahitian, but the color and rhythms (which have been influenced by faster, double-time beats from the Cook Islands) make the dances thoroughly enjoyable.
