The Heart of Hula

More than a beautiful dance, hula holds both the foundation and survival of Hawai‘i's culture.

 

Jill Engledow

 

Kumu hula Hokulani Holt-Padilla joked as she welcomed participants to the second World Conference on Hula, held on Maui in July.

A thousand dancers laughed and clapped. Most of them had already accepted the kuleana, or responsibility, with which they had just been charged. Though they might have begun studying hula for its beauty or for exercise, their applause signaled agreement with Holt-Padilla’s statement that the practice of Hawai‘i’s indigenous dance carries a serious responsibility—nothing less than the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

Hula is much more than entertainment. This cultural practice reaches levels of tradition and meaning never imagined by the Hollywood purveyors of the tinsel-skirted hula girl image.

But the media that spread that glittering, shallow icon also intrigued dancers around the world. When top hula teachers called for the first world conference on the dance that symbolizes Hawaii‘i, about 900 practitioners from all over the United States and many other countries responded by traveling to Hilo in 2001.

Four years later, 1,100 participants and 125 presenters gathered for Ka Aha Hula ‘O Halauaola at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center and neighboring Maui Community College. They came from as near as Wailuku and Lahaina—and from as far as Arizona, Switzerland, Tahiti and Mexico—to learn more about this sacred repository and expression of Hawaii‘i’s history and culture.

Surprisingly, many of those who dedicate hours to hula in thousands of halau, or schools, across the globe have never set foot in the Islands. Hula dancers, and even teachers, from Europe to Japan chant of the journeys of Pele, mimic the flutter of leaves on a certain tree, and memorize words that recall the scent of a particular fern —all without having ever experienced the place that is the source of these images.

That fact inspired Hawaii‘i’s most respected kumu hula, let by Pualani Kanahele Kanaka‘ole, Hokulani Holt-Padilla and Leina‘ala Kalama-Heine, to create a conference that would bring dancers from around the world to study with island experts and to feel the sense of place so essential to the dance.

When Holt-Padilla began talking to Maui County officials about co-sponsoring the upcoming conference, she say, the response was often, “Hula conference? You’re going to dance hula all day for ten days?”

But the practice of hula involves far more than the movements of the body.

“Hula touches every aspect of Hawaiian life,” Holt-Padilla said. “The more we can learn about history, culture, literature, art, plants, place names and all those things, the better we can understand the poetry that is the foundation of hula.”

“It is first and foremost the words. The mele (chant or song) is of utmost importance,” Holt-Padilla told participants. “You must make an effort to understand Hawaiian. The body is ‘frosting;’ the ‘cake’ is the words.”

The Kanaka‘ole tradition of hula and mele oli (chants) “teaches how to respect family, appreciate natural phenomena, memorize lengthy chants, love the land, understand hierarchy, recognize life and death cycles and acknowledge and honor the presence of life,” Pua Kanaka‘ole Kanahele wrote in her book Holo Mai Pele.

Chants are the history books of the Hawaiian people. In  he days before Western contact, before missionaries devised an alphabet that allowed the Hawaiian language to be written, chants recorded the memories most precious the culture.

With strict accuracy, chanters recounted the genealogy that determined a person’s place in society. They gave voice to the sacred rituals that kept all nature in balance. They celebrated the birth of a child, praised a chief’s procreative powers and mourned a death. They told stories of love and of the beauty of a favorite place. Hula is the physical expression of the chants’ words—quite literally poetry in motion.

To do hula correctly requires an understanding of the language and of the rituals and accessories that accompany it. And to prepare the rituals and accessories requires skill at using the elements and materials of nature upon which every part of Hawaiian culture depended.

All of which is a long way from a starlet in a sarong doing “Lovely Hula Hands.”
For the first two days of the conference, masters taught the hands-on arts of flower, shell and feather adornment, the creation of musical implements from gourds, animal skin, and lauhala, the cordage and thatching of the kuau, or altar, and the making and decoration of kapa for costume.

Among the teachers was Lisa Schattenburg-Raymond, executive director of the Maui Nui Botanical Garden, whose lifelong interest in Hawaiian ethnobotany has drawn her into the study of traditional Hawaiian dyes. Students visited the garden and used  native plants to prepare dyes in a surprising rainbow of color. While the common image of kapa fabric today is of earthy browns and black, Schattenburg-Raymond has been able to reproduce the pinks, blues, greens and yellows that dazzled early visitors to Hawaii‘i.

Another teacher, lei expert Marie McDonald, stressed the protocols that are paramount to hula practitioners: Ask permission from the forest spirits before picking materials from the wild, say a prayer of thanks, remove only what you need, and take responsibility for the care of the place where you find lei materials.

As the conference moved into more esoteric matters, students were captivated by vivid stories of the gods, as well as accounts of famous dancers, costuming traditions and kumu hula of the past. They learned specific chants, ‘ukulele and even hapa haole (part Hawaiian, part foreign) songs, Hawaiian games, the techniques of dramatic presentation, the history of Hawaiian medicine, the importance of protecting and giving back to the land, and, oh yes, the movements of the dance.

Speakers included revered kupuna (elders) like Nona Beamer and Uncle George Holokai, along with several bright young scholars who are delving into 19th-century Hawaiian newspapers to translate chants and stories recorded by Hawaiians in the years just after their language was first written down.

The visitors traveled around the island, seeing the places they had heard of in chant, practicing their skills of plant gathering and lei making and learning more about the history behind the hula. They cleaned beaches and restored trails, removing invasive foreign weeds and planting native species.

In the evening, the festivities moved to the lawn of the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s A&B Amphitheater, where participants enjoyed performances by halau from Hawaii‘i and afar, and on the last two nights they listed as the voices of dozens of chanters filled the Castle Theater.

They experience was an unparalleled opportunity for spiritual grounding—especially for those who had never been to Hawaii‘i. Among that group were some of the 50 students accompanying San Francisco kumu hula Kawika Alfiche, whose Halau o Keikialai]i danced at the first evening performance.

Studying hula and Hawaiian culture “teaches you how to be a person,” Alfiche says. “Simple things, like how you approach life, how you approach people.” Born and raised in San Francisco, Alfiche also has spent time with family in Kaneohe and Hilo and studied with kumu hula Ray fonseca. Alfiche has established a cultural center in South San Francisco to promote the study of everything Hawaiian, from chanting to the language to making lei and kapa. He says there are about two hundred halau in the Bay Area.

Julianne Hughes of Berkeley is one of Alfiche’s students. An art teacher, she saw the Maui group Hapa play at the Sonoma County Fair and fell in love with the first real hula she had ever seen. Hughes finds hula a vigorous workout of both body and mind, “a sort of personal journey of finding out how I learn, how I deal with difficulties.”

Excited about her first visit, by midweek Hughes was reveling in the sensory experiences of the Wailuku District, feeling the powerful force of winds she’s heard described in chants, seeing plants she’d known only from pictures. It’s all quite different from the place of white sandy beaches she had imagined Maui to be, she confided.

“Now I know what I don’t know, so I know what I need to study,” said another visitor, Tomoko Sasaki, a Japanese native who now lives in Los Angeles. Sasaki wore a shirt listing life’s priorities, as seen by a hula practitioner: Eat. Sleep. Hula.

“When you find yourself dreaming about hula, you know you’re hooked,” said Melody “Aunty Honey” Stant, who got involved with hula to ensure that her children would stay connected to the culture of their Hawaiian father after his death. Stant came to the conference with a group of 80 from Arizona—kids, kupuna, whoever wanted to come and could make it.

Others also traveled in groups, like the 12 lomilomi practitioners from Germany and Holland who study iwth a former Hawaii‘i resident who now teaches this Hawaiian style of massage in Europe.

Whatever their understanding of the deeper meaning of hula when they arrived, all left with the same kuleana, articulated on the first day by Holt-Padilla.

“Don’t let it die,” she told them. “You must share it. Your teachers are giving freely to you. Don’t let it disappear. Don't’ let it sit in your book. You must continue this. These teachers give knowledge to you because they want it to live. It is through hula that these things are continued and perpetuated. As long as hula lives, Hawaiian culture lives.”

“These teachers give knowledge to you because they want it to live.
When hula lives, our Hawaiian
culture lives.”–Hokulani Holt-Padilla