The best things in island life are free, and that includes the Paliku Arts Festival at Windward Community College up in the green Koolau.
Art supplies are provided free of charge for painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, woodcarving, sculpture and jewelry-making workshops led by WCC staff. Bring a T-shirt to print.
“Most activities are mixed in age, with kupuna and keiki working side by side,” said Ben Moffat, festival chairman.
Paliku Arts Festival
An interactive arts experience
Where: Windward Community College, Kaneohe
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday
Cost: Free; all ages
Info: palikuarts.com or 724-1808
You can take home what you make, but you don’t have to make anything. You can simply experience, say, being inside a camera with photography professor Mark Hamasaki.
“I convert a classroom into a camera obscura, also known as a pinhole camera, and the public is invited to come inside and experience how low-tech a ‘camera’ can be,” said Hamasaki, co-author of “E Luku Wale E,” a book of large-format landscape photographs of the building of H-3 through the Koolau.
Instruction in music, acting and, for the first time, creative writing will be offered.
Mo‘olelo (stories), Hawaiian music, hula and Hawaiian arts will take place in Hale A‘o, WCC’s new Hawaiian studies complex, which includes music spaces with a Steinway grand piano. Bring instruments for a kanikapila at 3 p.m.
Roving players will enact snippets of Shakespeare throughout the day. Kundiman Prize-winning poets Janine Oshiro, Henry Leung and William Giles will give a reading at 2 p.m., and the world premiere of “Tales of Ko‘olaupoko,” by Hawaiian playwright Moses Goods, will be performed at Paliku Theatre at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
On the outdoor stage, live music will fill the air. To fuel creative energies, there will be shave ice, burgers, pizza, hot dogs, sandwiches and Indian food for sale.
In six hours, you can easily take in a variety of things. “Most workshops last an hour or so, and activities take from 20 to 30 minutes,” Moffat said.
For the first time, and only for those older than 8, Pink Floyd’s 43-minute “The Dark Side of the Moon” will be shown at WCC’s Hokulani Imaginarium ($5 admission). Younger audiences can enjoy the full-dome show “Secrets of the Dragon” ($3).
