Tamure Dance – Tahiti (French Polynesia)
A rhythmic invocation of joy, vitality, and embodied fertility within a mythic structure of tempo and torque
Thinking Through Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)’s work, La Pensée Sauvage
Introduction
The Tamure (also known informally as ‘ori Tahiti) is one of the most globally recognized dance forms of Tahiti. Distinguished by its rapid hip-shaking, grounded stances, and synchronized group formations, it is often performed to the fast-paced beats of To‘ere drums, ukulele, and vocals. While the term “Tamure” is relatively modern—popularized in the 20th century—the form it refers to is deeply rooted in Polynesian ritual practice related to fertility, celebration, seasonal festivals, and social cohesion.
Through the lens of Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, the Tamure dance is a mythic kinetic system—one that channels bodily energy into structured form, organizing cultural oppositions such as eros and order, land and sea, tradition and spectacle. The Tamure is not just entertainment, but a codified ritual of symbolic dynamism, echoing ancestral rhythms with every tremor of the hips.
Tamure as Bricolage: Ritual Energy Constructed from Cultural Elements
Lévi-Strauss argues that mythical thought constructs symbolic systems from available cultural materials. Tamure incorporates:
Drumming patterns and tempo shifts rooted in older fertility or harvest rituals,
Costumes made from ti leaves, shells, tapa cloth, and pareo, which echo materials used in ancient ceremonies,
Gendered movements: women shake the hips; men stomp or sway powerfully,
Circular or linear group formations, reminiscent of Polynesian canoe navigation structures and village assemblies.
In Lévi-Straussian terms, Tamure is mythic bricolage—a reassembly of cultural fragments (sound, costume, gesture) into a symbolic field of vitality, where the body becomes the site of cultural and ecological narration.
Binary Oppositions: Eros ↔ Structure, Earth ↔ Sea, Motion ↔ Stillness
Tamure dances ritually enact and suspend the following structural tensions:
Binary Opposition Ritual Mediation
Erotic / Sacred Sensual movements structured by tempo and group symmetry
Nature / Culture Natural materials (skirts, leaves) shaped into cultural costumes
Male / Female Contrasting energies—masculine verticality vs. feminine horizontal motion
Earth / Sea Steps rooted in ground, while hips undulate like waves
Spontaneity / Discipline Free-flowing motion housed within strict rhythmic constraints
Lévi-Strauss emphasizes that myth doesn’t resolve opposites, but frames them within symbolic coherence. Tamure does precisely this—it channels raw physical energy into choreographic order, transforming ecstatic spontaneity into community ritual.
The Body as Fertility Drum: Structure through Tremor and Torque
In Tamure:
Women isolate the hips, vibrating side-to-side in ‘ōte‘a movements (fa‘arapu),
Men often perform with knees bent, echoing the volcanic pulse of the island,
Arms are gracefully extended or gesture toward the land, sky, or sea,
The torso remains relatively still, highlighting the intensity of localized motion.
For Lévi-Strauss, ritual form is a way of ordering biological forces. In Tamure, the erotic is sublimated into structured motion—a bodily ritual of regeneration, echoing volcanic fertility, island abundance, and oceanic flow.
Structure and Event: Festival as Mythic Recurrence
The Tamure is central to:
Heiva i Tahiti, the national festival of Polynesian culture,
Village ceremonies, weddings, rites of passage,
Cultural competitions and diaspora gatherings.
Though each performance may be new—different dancers, lyrics, choreographies—the structure persists:
Opening processional → Tempo acceleration → Climax → Resolution,
Gendered counterpoint: female and male dancers alternate or synchronize,
Musical scaffolding ensures ritual rhythm governs spontaneous energy.
Lévi-Strauss would identify this as structure absorbing the event. The dance, though improvised in spirit, is always mythic in form—a ritualized performance of cultural identity.
Mythic Ecology: Island Cosmology in Motion
Polynesian mythology sees islands as:
Born of gods (e.g., Tangaroa, Tane),
Shaped by volcanic fire and cooled by sea,
Connected by canoe routes and genealogical lines traced through navigation and story.
Tamure reflects this:
Circular motion mirrors island topography,
Pulsating hips echo magma beneath the earth,
Group formations recall canoe arrays, where each dancer is a crew member of ancestral lineage.
For Lévi-Strauss, myth is about structuring one’s relation to nature and society. In Tamure, the body becomes the interface between earth and sky, past and present, desire and discipline.
Rhythm as Mythic Pulse: Drumming the Body into Being
Tamure's music, driven by:
To‘ere (slit drums), beating with increasing tempo,
Pahu and fa‘atete drums grounding deeper rhythm,
Accompanied by chants, ukulele, and group vocals.
The music is structurally layered: certain beats cue movement shifts, others punctuate breath and focus. Lévi-Strauss would liken this to myth’s use of motifs and refrains—the drum is the metric law that transforms physicality into symbolic act.
Modernity, Tourism, and Ritual Reclamation
Since colonization, Tamure has:
Been commercialized in tourist luau shows, often stripped of its sacred context,
Sparked cultural revival, particularly through Heiva festivals and school programs,
Become a site of identity reclamation, especially for young Polynesian women asserting both tradition and empowerment.
Lévi-Strauss would affirm that ritual persists not through unchanging content, but through structural fidelity. Even as Tamure evolves, its symbolic framework—the tempo, the counterpoint, the circular coherence—preserves its mythic function.
Conclusion
From a Lévi-Straussian perspective, Tamure is a structured eruption of vitality, where the contradictions of nature and culture, eros and poise, individuality and communal ritual are suspended within rhythmic choreography.
It does not merely represent myth—it incarnates it. The hips become seismic calligraphy, the body becomes ancestral drum, and the group becomes island moving in joy.
Tamure teaches that structure need not silence energy—it can amplify it into sacred rhythm.