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Organizers of the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture or FESTPAC announced today that the event to be hosted by Hawaii will now be held in June 2021.
The public event to be held June 18-27 was originally scheduled for this summer, but organizers postponed the international festival due to coronavirus concerns.
The festival is held every four years and hosted by a different Pacific Island nation.
In a statement today, Sen. J. Kalani English, chairman of the FESTPAC Hawaii commission, said, “History will be witnessed in Hawaii in 2021. When our Pacific Island cousins come here, they will experience the welcoming, unifying, life-changing experiences they have graciously shared with our delegations over the decades.”
The South Pacific Commission, now known as the Pacific Community, held its first event in Fiji in 1972 to showcase arts and culture in an effort to halt “the erosion of traditional practices through ongoing cultural exchange,” organizers said.
The festival was postponed once before in 1984 because of political unrest which forced the event to be moved to French Polynesia from New Caledonia.
Approximately 3,000 delegates from 28 nations are expected to attend the 2021 FESTPAC Hawaii festival.
Organizers anticipate thousands to attend the public event which drew an estimated 90,000 visitors when Guam hosted the festival in 2016.
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