Our dominant global culture is failing us.
Our planet’s natural ecosystem on which we depend for our very survival is collapsing around us. The evidence is tangible, lived and indisputable.
Yet we fail to respond with the resolve and urgency that nature and future generations demand.
Culture is the framework through which we understand our relationship to our environment. It is our shared patterns of behavior, interactions, and beliefs. Fluid, ever-evolving and whether we are aware of it or not, it is the core of our guiding personal narratives, our sense of self.
Those of the ocean have maintained successful communities on fragile islands for countless generations, their cultural lineage embodies this.
Small Island Big Song is an ensemble of such people, artists who against all sensible mainstream cultural advice, have made a choice to sing foremost in the language and maintain the musical sensibilities of their heritage, they are the songkeepers continuing and unbroken cultural lineage back to their first ancestors to step, sleep, die and be born on their homelands, their music embodies this knowledge regardless of what they sing about. And as with music itself it is only revealed through movement as it is shared, through your listening it lives.
During the pandemic we have been meeting online from across the Pacific & Indian oceans to share the voice of our island homes and experiences of the environmental collapse, some of us will lose our island homes to rising sea levels and all of us are witnessing the death of our reefs and disappearing sea life, it’s soul-destroying.
Our response is to share that loss in song, supporting each other and you the listener, but also to celebrate nature and our cultures. We do live in extraordinarily beautiful places and we want to share that too, we have to, for our island we all share.
BaoBao & Tim (photo: press Small Island Big Song)
