Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2005

HULA for the World
By Leslie Lang

It’s not just about the dance

I peer at the faded black-and-white photographs taken maybe 50 years ago and my great-grandmother smiles back at me. Pinned to her long, floral-print dress is a corsage; piled atop the tidy bun on her head are orchids.

As far as I can tell, these are pictures of her 70th birthday and she’s having a large, Hawaiian-style party here on the same screened länai where I write these words. Friends and family fill the room; they overflow into the kitchen. They are old, they are young, a few are very young. Most of the men wear slacks and aloha shirts. The women wear long, floral-print dresses. In one of the photos, I can see a distinguished older Hawaiian gentleman, with gorgeous white hair and a small black bow tie, who is playing a guitar. Around him people are singing. Someone is playing an ‘ukulele, There’s lots of laughing. Oma—everyone called my Hawaiian-Chinese great-grandmother Oma, which is German for grandmother, after she married a German man who was known affectionately as Opa—blows out birthday candles.

In my favorite party photo, Oma is dancing hula. Her arms, in elegant, long, flowing sleeves, are outstretched in a hula motion. A woman sitting on the floor shakes an ‘ulī‘ulī, a gourd rattle. Oma’s friends, some Hawaiian, some haole and others of many ethnic mixes, sit in chairs or on the large lauhala mat that she wove. A big smile on her own face, my great-grandmother is obviously in her element—friends, family and laughter all around—at a party that includes traditions of her Hawaiian heritage.

Oma wouldn’t have thought of it that way, of course. She would have thought that these were just the kind of get-togethers that everybody liked.

I don’t know much about Oma’s hula. I can’t even remember ever seeing her dance. I know she was raised by her Hawaiian grandfather, who was born in the early 1800s, that Hawaiian was her first language and that she carefully wrote down a chant about an ancestor from Kamehameha’s time, which, by the time I came along, nobody could remember anymore. I like to think she wrote down the chant so that I would find it 50 years later. And I did.

My great-grandmother didn’t teach me to dance hula or weave lauhala or speak her language. I grew up far away, didn’t see her often and was 13 when she died. What I inherited, along with her name and her gold Hawaiian bracelet, was her drive to learn about and honor our culture’s traditional ways.

A Rare Bird

This summer when I attended Maui’s World Hula Conference, Ka ‘Aha Hula ‘o Hälauaola, I discovered that I wasn’t alone in that endeavor. Hula is alive and well in 21st-century Hawai‘i.

If you think of hula as a ticky-tacky Hollywood dance in which a woman wiggles her hips and flutters her hands twice to the right and then twice to the left, you’re not even close.

Hula is an ancient Hawaiian tradition, which garners tremendous respect in Hawai‘i. It has its own genealogy, as hula styles and traditions are passed down through families or individuals in carefully perpetuated lineages, with many of these lines going back generations. Haumāna (students) in a halau hula (hula school) learn a certain style of dance, one that their kumu hula (hula teacher) learned after many years of study under their kumu hula, who eventually found them ready to teach and gave them permission to do so.

A hālau teaches more than just dance. Hula students are also students of Hawaiian history, language, chant, poetry, ritual, protocol and ceremony. They learn about costuming, medicinal practices, plants, cordage and how to make hula implements. Instruction is never casual, and it is often strict. Much is expected of the students, who also learn discipline and commitment. Many spend years with the same halau. Often, studying hula becomes an all-encompassing way of life.

That was certainly the case with legendary hula master ‘Iolani Luahine. When I asked her friends what made Luahine so extraordinary, they would lean forward and tell me mysterious-sounding things. They would say that she wasn’t “there” when she danced, or that she became the place or the deity she was dancing about. Or else, they would say that you could see she was communicating with the gods when she danced, and the gods were communicating with her. They would note how she was totally mesmerizing and you couldn’t take your eyes off her, because you knew you’d never see anything like her again.

A film of her dancing, even to my untrained eyes, reveals a haunting, ancient, unforgettable hula. This thin, lithe woman whom everyone called Aunty ‘Io, paid visual and spiritual tribute to her gods with every motion in her body—her fingers, her eyebrows, her toes. It’s difficult to describe how different her hula looked when it’s compared to what we’re used to seeing today.

Luahine passed away at the age of 63 in 1968, but there are many who knew her well and saw her dance. After the conference, I sat with master hula dancer and teacher George Na‘ope on a poolside lānai at the Maui Seaside Hotel. A dapper man dressed in flamboyant, signature, all-red finery complete with pheasant-feathered hat, he told me about the time his dear friend ‘Io, as he calls her, danced at the first Merrie Monarch hula festival in Hilo, in 1964. This celebrated kumu hula still shakes his head in disbelief at the memory of the unexpected. “The birds from the volcano filled the building,” he said. “Nobody was looking at her; everybody was looking at the birds.”

It’s the kind of story you often hear about this legendary dancer of hula. Filmmaker Tip Davis, who for three years photographed Luahine dancing, for a National Endowment of the Arts project, and later turned the footage into a video, talked about once going with her to a shopping mall and noticing a crowd gathered at a pet store. Glancing around, he discovered Aunty ‘Io talking to a cockatoo, which was talking back to her. “Do you know that lady?” asked the storekeeper. “That bird’s never talked before.” The name ‘Iolani can be translated as “the hawk from heaven,” and everyone agrees she was a rare bird.

Preserving the Foundation

Hula is now hugely popular around the world. About 1,100 participants showed up for Maui’s World Hula Conference, flying in from the U.S. mainland, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland, Holland, Germany and French Polynesia. One-hundred-twenty presenters taught and spoke at the weekend conference. The growth of hula beyond Hawai‘i’s shores is both a blessing and a worrisome trend to the Islands’ kumu hula these days. They worry that, beyond Hawai‘i’s shores, hula is moving away from its traditional core culture, changing in unacceptable ways. They are chagrined that some persons are calling themselves kumu hula, even though they learned hula from videotapes, instead of tutoring for years with a master.

The World Hula Conference was organized to teach not only dance, chant and culture, but also protocol. Kumu hula Hokulani Holt-Padilla, one of the conference organizers (along with respected kumu hula Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele and Leina‘ala Kalama Heine), describes hula as a creative art that cannot help but change.

“Hula is a lot like ballet,” she says. “Ballet is the classic of Western dance. Out of ballet comes creative movement, modern dance, jazz dance. But there must always be the place that you can go back to, to regain the foundation.”

Hula, she says, must always remain within certain cultural parameters. “If it moves too far into other dance or creative forms and loses its direct connection to Hawaiian cultural forms, it’s not hula anymore,” she says. “Am I concerned about the direction of hula? In some instances, yes. That’s why we do Hälauaola. People can come to the home of hula to gain the foundation that ultimately should manifest itself into the dance.”

To prepare for the conference, Hālauaola organizers sent teams a year in advance around the world to teach the dances and chants required for the opening ceremonies. With grants from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and Maui County, teams sponsored by Holt-Padilla’s Hawaiian learning center, Kauahea, traveled and taught three hula and four oli (chants) to kumu hula and their alaka‘i (lead dancers) in eight-hour training sessions. The kumu hula and alaka‘i then brought the training back to their hālau and taught the others.

The training paid off in surprising ways. Melanie Panui, who today lives “a very Hawaiian life” in Tacoma, Wash., has studied hula since she was 9 and living on the island of Lāna‘i. “It was wonderful being able to come here and do the songs and dances as a whole, and knowing that people from around the world wanted to do this.” Hula, she acknowledged, is her foundation in life. “It’s something I can take with me and nobody can take away. It makes me feel whole. It makes me feel that I have a place I know I came from.”

The Bones of a Song

Dancing hula is how Hawaiians traditionally recorded and perpetuated their stories, but hula is not just about the dance. You’ll never, for instance, see a dancer dancing to a melody without words. Indeed, hula cannot exist without words, which tell the story that the dancer interprets through his or her movements.

One person who understands the mana, the power, of words is Hawaiian language scholar, poet and teacher Puakea Nogelmeier, a speaker at the World Hula Conference. His short, brown, wavy hair combed back from deeply tanned skin, he looked like he came from an earlier era, when Hawaiian was still the dominant language, when expert chanters were accorded high rank.

He told a big crowd that even though there was a drastically diminished use of the Hawaiian language for a hundred years after missionaries banned it, many of the songs written by Hawaiian songwriters today—and danced by hula dancers—“have in them the bones of a song written 300 years ago.” The continuity in form to the present day is remarkable, he said, because nobody wrote down the “rules” of Hawaiian poetry in old times. There was no reason to; they were just known. “It would be a bit like me discussing with you in detail about brushing teeth. You know and I know, so why do I have to tell you to put the toothpaste on the top? I just say brush teeth.”

Poetry written by Hawaiians in the 1800s has the same structure as verse written in the 1930s by persons who didn’t know the old chants. “Something that modern songwriters like Manu Boyd or Keali‘i Reichel wrote last week has ancient structures. It’s exciting that it’s been perpetuated, by just what sounds right,” said Nogelmeier.

Research has helped Nogelmeier uncover some of the specifics of how word choice, sounds, junctures, grammar and imagery are used consistently in Hawaiian poetry. Poets and songwriters who compose the mele for hula dancers today should, he believes, redevelop their fluency in these techniques. “These are the tools and the toys of the poet. It’s a kind of a rebuilding of strength and a recognition of the past, and it’s exciting.”

Sideways on a Path

Kumu hula and popular contemporary Hawaiian musician Keali‘i Reichel sipped from a bottle of homemade ice tea as we talked. He was packing up his Power Point presentation on Hakuko-le, or traditional “chants of ridicule.” Wouldn’t he have wanted to live in Old Hawai‘i? I asked.

“Mixed feelings,” he said. “I can watch my MTV, VH1, Discovery Channel, the Food Network. But I also enjoy wearing a malo [loincloth] and doing ceremony at dawn. Actually, I like to stand sideways on a path where I can see the past and I can see the future. If you face the future, you’re leaving everybody behind and you’re turning your back on them. Shouldn’t you want to take them with you as you go?”

I asked Reichel why it’s important to perpetuate the ancient traditions of the hula.

“It’s the ultimate link from past to present,” he said. “And we are the link to the future. It’s important to be able to do the same things your ancestors did a thousand years ago, or at least get close to it. It’s important to be able to vocalize a chant that’s 500 years old, and to make that view of the universe real again just by speaking it.”

Chanting the Future

The World Hula Conference ended with a performance called “Pagan Pride,” subtitled “Ancestral Connections: Chanting the Past into the Future.” It was obvious by then that, if you didn’t understand it was all about ancestral connections, you hadn’t been paying close attention.

On the stage, before a red curtain, sat seven Hawaiian drums. I sat with my husband and our 16-month-old daughter.

Suddenly, about 30 chanters streamed in from what seemed like every direction. Adorned in traditional dress of different styles, lei and other finery, they lined the stage and both sides of the room.

Abruptly, they began chanting in unison or, rather, almost in unison, because, although everyone chanted the same words, there were so many different chant styles that the sounds seemed to collide and then hang together. Now we could hear strong voices coming from all sides of the theater, which rolled across the room, and up and over and around it. These sounds rang in my ears and were powerful and absolutely overwhelming.

Our daughter took this all in, smiled, clapped delightedly. Named for her great-great grandmother Oma and with her own Hawaiian ancestral connections on both sides of her family, she was fascinated. I took this to be a good sign that an appreciation of hula and chant was in her future, as it was in her ancestors’ past.”                                                                                                                                                   

LESLIE LANG has written for regional and national magazines, including Islands, and for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her articles have won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists, Hawai‘i chapter. Her co-written book, Mauna Kea, A Guide to Hawai‘i’s Sacred Mountain, was recently published by Watermark Publishing. She lives on the Big Island.

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