Learn the Hula Hawaii

“I loved learning how the hula is broken down into basic steps, each intended so that your body’s motion mirrors something observed in nature. I could close my eyes, even in the dead of winter in Washington, D.C., and my body could make the motion of the waves on the sand or the raindrops from the sky. The hula, with every step, transported me to Hawai‘i. It wasn’t always easy. Our kumu made it clear when he was unhappy that our group hadn’t memorized a chant properly or practiced our hula between classes. “You should all know this chant by now. There are no excuses,” he would say. Or: “This is a hula about love. I do not see any love in your faces.” As a newcomer, I struggled to dedicate four hours on a weekend to attend the class. As a working mother with kids, I did not have a lot of time to spend perfecting my chant pronunciation, and often I was so stressed about doing the dances correctly—with proper foot and arm placement—that I knew I was one of the people not smiling.”

“I am not a natural performer. I have a hard time faking a smile. And although I am comfortable being on a stage, I’m not necessarily the gal to ham it up. So I was a little nervous for our hālau’s first big hula performance in Washington, D.C. When I heard that we were going to perform at a public-high-school auditorium that seated 600 people, I thought: Dear God. It was one thing to be confident in moving my body correctly, to feel and tell a story through hula. It was quite another to do it in front of hundreds of people. [...] On the day of our performance, the kids and I were all excited and nervous. As we got ready backstage with our hālau, the room was electric. Our kumu gathered the entire hālau onto the stage with the thick curtains drawn. The room was quiet, and he began to chant. The chant was one that we’d said together at the beginning of every gathering of our hālau as a way to enter the space and be seen by our ancestors. As our voices joined together, I felt myself grounded in that generational line again, sharing the stories of those who’d come before and holding my children’s hands on either side of me.”

“I started studying hula on Kauai, not with a kumu, but with Kalena, a local friend of my massage teacher. I had learned my first hula and hula steps from her as part of my training as a practitioner of Hawaiian lomilomi nui massage. [...] We would be a few people coming together at a pavilion by the beach every Wednesday before Kalena went to play live guitar at a local bar called “Side out”. “Side out” was my first stage and where I had my first encounter with hula as a living dance form. The crowd was definitely not all Hawaiians by blood. [...] But when it came to dancing we were all one. The musician would call out the next song inviting anyone to come and dance it! He knew his audience [...] and he always got people up on their dancing feet, or got the waiter to put down his tray and do a number. So there I shared what I had just learned and danced along with others who had different interpretations of the same song. An appreciation was expressed for the willingness to share what one knew of hula.”