The lakalaka (walking briskly) is a Tongan group dance where the performers are largely standing still and make gestures with their arms only. It is considered as the national dance of Tonga and part of the intangible human heritage. It is the ideal dance at formal occasions, like the birthday of the king or the opening of a church.
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The lakalaka (walking briskly) is a Tongan group dance where the performers are largely standing still and make gestures with their arms only. It is considered as the national dance of Tonga and part of the intangible human heritage. It is the ideal dance at formal occasions, like the birthday of the king or the opening of a church.
==History== The current lakalaka seems to be quite equal to the ancient meelaufola (outstretched arms dance), of which descriptions exist from early European explorers, but the dance was forbidden by the missionaries for being too 'heathen'. This was confirmed in the 1850 code of King Tāufaāhau Tupou I. Notably, an article to that effect was absent from the 1862 code, although it was reinserted by 1885. In any case, none of these laws specified exactly what was meant by 'heathen dance'. There are reports of some huge dance festivals during these times, and no reports of any arrests. Admittedly, the pre-missionary pōmee (night dances), after which couples disappeared into the bushes, did not occur anymore.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).