2025 Pacific Austronesian Joint Harvest Festival

About The Entry

The 2025 Pacific Austronesian Joint Harvest Festival was a vibrant summer celebration that united performing groups from Hualien’s six Indigenous tribes with Austronesian artists from across Taiwan and the Pacific. Through music, dance, chants, and intergenerational creations, the festival showcased the spirit and essence of Austronesian culture.

Beyond its diverse performances, the event featured a culinary market, handicraft exhibitions, and tribal micro-tours. The highlight was the “Thousand People Dance,” where participants joined hands on the grass to dance together—embodying collective emotion and inscribing cultural memory through movement. The festival revealed the beauty, strength, and unity of Austronesian heritage.

The theme of 2025, “Return to Hualien, Resonating Austronesia,” invited the world to experience Taiwan’s Indigenous aesthetics and wisdom through open space and embodied participation.

A key highlight was the first-ever Taiwan performance by Easter Island’s renowned Cultural Ballet Kari Kari, whose Rapa Nui rhythms and movement language brought the Pacific wind to Taiwan’s east coast. The program interwove local and international elements, anchored on the six Hualien tribes’ representative music and dance while connecting troupes from other counties and communities to form a shared Austronesian heartbeat.

For the first time, the festival introduced a “Living Culture Exhibition,” curating objects, visual cards, and everyday ritual crafts to portray how each tribe lived—through food, clothing, shelter, and mobility. Visitors were invited to move beyond sight and sound to touch and practice, experiencing the flow and resonance of Indigenous wisdom between mountain and sea.

The circular stage design created an immersive relationship between performers and audience, allowing dancers to move freely through the lawn and invite the public into the circle—a holistic and tradition-inspired form of interaction.