Hula – Hilo, Hawaii

The Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo is one of the last legit places to see the real Hawaii, ancient and modern, on full display

The lights dim, and the arena goes quiet. Though it’s never truly quiet – Edith Kanaka’ole Stadium is vault-ceilinged and cavernous, and coughs echo through the space – you can sense the audience stilling itself; you can hear the bleachers creak as people lean forward.

Then the first of the men walk onto the stage, I and the crowd – some 5,000 people – sigh their appreciation and shout their approval. Flashbulbs blink throughout the stadium like fireflies. There are 20 men, and at first, they appear to be iden­tical: their chests and legs and armpits freshly waxed, their hair slicked back with pomade, their foreheads and ankles and wrists and necks circled with bushy fern leis. They are naked but for a malo, a poufy fold of stiff cotton, which covers the crotch and resembles an origami rose. They stand, arms stretched before them, thumbs aligned, or with fists on their hips, and wait for the sound of their teacher’s hand slap­ping against his ipu, a large dried gourd that provides the percussive beat for all hula chants. Many hulas that are danced to chants begin with a call-and-response, and the teacher sings out a first line in Hawaiian – Are you ready? – and his troupe shouts out their affirmation: Yes, we’re ready. And then the dance begins.

Hula prizes uniformity above almost everything else. There might be 9 dancers, or 14, or 21, and they might be arranged in three or four or five rows, but no matter their number, you can be certain that hours of practice have been devoted to the group’s conformity of step and gesture. But the strange thing about hula is that the better syn­chronized a troupe is, the more it encourages you to notice the dancers’ differences: As they move, you see that this one is a teenager, and that one I in his 60s. This one is white, and that one is Asian (though most are distinctly “local,” that inimitable ethnic mix of Polynesian, Asian, and Caucasian that is the modern face of the Hawaiian Islands). This one is fat and tall, and that one is short and thin. Offstage, they are doctors and mechanics and social workers and civil servants. Onstage, though, they are only dancers.

Too soon, it’s over. There is one final call-and- response. The dancers hold their pose. Applause fills the stadium like birds. And then the troupe halves itself and exits, one group going stage left, the other stage right. Their dance is finished.

To love Hawaii is to love hula, and to love hula is to wait all year for the islands’ most prestigious competition, Merrie Monarch. The festival, which is held every Easter weekend, was founded in 1963 in part to revive the for­tunes of Hilo, the small, very rainy former plantation town on the east coast of the Big Island, the largest of the seven inhabited islands. Most of the year, Hilo resembles what it is: a sleepy post-colonial outpost, a place where, until recently, parking meters accepted pennies, and where locals like my parents can visit from Honolulu and pretend they’re still in pre-statehood Hawaii, a place so remote that newspapers from the mainland arrived a day late.

But for one week a year, Hilo becomes the hub for hula fanatics. There are the troupes themselves, called hālau, but there are also their entourages: the family members and friends who will spend the days before the event mend­ing, sewing, fixing hair, feeding, prepping, and encouraging. There are the fans – securing a ticket to the festival is a byzantine and frustrating process, one that was until very recently conducted completely by mail – and there is the media: The two-day competition is broadcast live locally, complete with the land of color commentary and personal-interest featurettes you get with any sports competition. The result is a cross between Burning Man, the Super Bowl, and the Miss America Pageant, but with a lot more mud.

In order to dance in Merrie Monarch, you have to be very good. Competition is by invitation only, and while the most renowned hālau are more or less guaranteed a slot, part of the excitement is seeing who was, and wasn’t, allowed to attend. The 20-odd troupes, who come from across the islands, but also California, Nevada, and Texas, compete in two styles of dance: The first is kahiko, or ancient, hula, which is danced to a chant and percussion. In kahiko, the costumes, too, are traditional: typically, a malo for men, and a pa’u or voluminous cotton skirt, paired with a strapless cot­ton top, for women. The dancers are solemn during kahiko, and a signifi­cant number of the chants are about the islands’ creation stories, the gods and goddesses people here worshipped for millennia. ‘Auana, or modern, hula is what most of the world recognizes as hula: Danced to a mele, or song, it was developed during Hawaii’s post-war tourism boom, an acces­sible bastardization of the dance intended purely as entertainment. But over the decades – and in a feat of cultural reappropriation – ‘auana was transformed and elevated into a legitimate form of hula, one that has transcended its commercial ori­gins. The songs – many of which are ’50s standards, winking, playfully provocative tunes about sex and romance – are danced without irony, the dancers’ faces bright with smiles. One night of the competition is devoted to kahiko (men in one group, women in another), and the second to ‘auana. Along with dif­ferent costumes, each performance requires different ornamentation: Thousands of blossoms are required to make a hālau’s leis, and by the end of the event, the air is redolent of bruised flowers.

I come from a hula-mad family. I never danced it myself, but my brother did and my mother still does. We watched Merrie Monarch annually from our living room in Honolulu, and when he was in high school, my brother’s hālau was invited to attend. My mother went with them and spent the week threading leis, ironing pa’u and generally acting as a kind of hula handmaiden. She was giddy upon her return, excited to have spotted the famous kumu hula (hula teachers, who choreograph the dances) she knew of but had never seen in person, including the kumu – Nalani Kanaka’ole, Sonny Ching, and Kekuhi Kanahele among them – who had done more for the revival of the art than perhaps anyone.

And yet when I moved to the mainland for col­lege, I had difficulty articulating what made hula so elemental.

After all, many places have their own cultural rituals that they consider essen­tial to their identity: Think of rodeo in Texas, or 4-H in Indiana. But hula, I’d argue, is more than just a regional particularity – it is Hawaii itself. When you watch or dance hula, you are becom­ing a participant in both a 1,600-year-old tra­dition, one practiced since the first Polynesian settlers arrived from the present-day Marquesas Islands on outrigger canoes, and a concerted and ongoing effort to resurrect Hawaiian culture, to make it a fundamental part of life in the islands. For years, Hawaiian dance, language, and music were endangered, banned or obliterated by nineteenth-century Christian missionaries and American imperialists, who hoped to rid the islands of their pagan practices. But today, thanks in large part to generations of historians, linguists, activists, and artists, the greatest expression of native art still lives, and thrives, in hula. Now, you can watch hula – ‘auana or kahiko – almost anywhere in the islands. Now, you can listen to Hawaiian music on the radio on your choice of three stations. Now, you can live in a culture in which men see no contradiction between dance and masculinity. Now, you can hear – as I did, this past summer, moved nearly to tears – the beautiful, rhythmic, glottal-filled Hawaiian language being spoken on the street in downtown Honolulu between two businessmen on their lunch break. Being in Hawaii and not seeing hula is like being in Hawaii and not going to the beach: It is a living, ever-changing palimpsest of the islands’ history and the islands’ future. It is proof that a culture near extinction can resuscitate itself.

That evidence is found most thrillingly at Merrie Monarch, which is named in honor of the bon vivant King David Kalākaua, who reigned over the Hawaiian Islands from 1874 until his death in 1891. Few people outside Hawaii have ever heard of him. But it was he who overturned the public ban on hula, which had been imposed by the former queen, a Christian convert, in 1830. Hula, he knew, was inextricable from what Hawaii is. When you watch hula, then, you watch it for – and because of – him.

By the time Merrie Monarch concludes on Saturday night, everyone is exhausted. The dancers, certainly. The helpers, equally. The audience, unex­pectedly – it’s stressful, cheering and hoping for your favorite troupe. There is no big cash prize at this competition, no international fame. If lucky enough to be invited, a hālau will spend all year fund-raising. If they are lucky enough to be invited again, they will do the same. There is no glory but the glory of the performance.

After all the dances are finished, the judges meet to tally their scores and confer. And here’s when the best, most magical part of the weekend begins: the kumu dance, when all the competing troupes’ teachers take the stage. Kumu – who, once they reach that position, are generally just called kumu, their personal identities eclipsed by their stature – tend, like cult leaders, to be equal parts terrifying and magnetic, despots capable of great benev­olence and beauty. In a hālau, the kumu’s word is absolute and inarguable. They can be withering in their assessments.

And yet before they were kumu, they were dancers. Up onstage they climb, some of them so old they totter, and together, they begin to dance. Hula is defined by its spirit of generosity, and to be a good hula dancer is to be humble: Many of its gestures are about offering something to someone else, and this is the kumu’s opportunity to offer something to their fans and their dancers, both. The band plays something familiar, a mele the kumu know so well that their feet and hands register the song before their ears do. Together, they dance, mouthing the words to the song, their necks and shoulders heaped with leis from their students and admirers. Because it is a mele, and an ‘auana hula, they are all smiling. In their movements, they look the same, but they also look different. They break in the middle of their dancing to embrace one another, and to blow lasses to the crowd, which is screaming for them. If the band has chosen well, it is a song that not only the kumu know but everyone in the audience, at home and in the stadium, knows too. In that moment, you can hear the islands sing.

For Kuhao Zane, dancing hula was sort of inevitable. He took his first lesson at 9, and today, the 34-year-old is the sixth generation to perform with Hālau O Kekuhi, one of the oldest dance companies in Hilo, co-founded in 1970 by his grandmother, Edith Kanaka’ole. (Kanaka’ole also helped establish the Merrie Monarch Festival, whose stadium is named for her.) The troupe specializes in kahiko, or tradi­tional hula, as opposed to the ukulele and hip-swinging ‘auana, which Zane describes as “the difference between a religious form of yoga and hot-booty yoga.”

In kahiko, there’s no music, just chanting and percus­sion (drumming, stomping, and clapping). Tightly packed lines of dancers move in sync through a mix of fast-paced steps reminiscent of martial arts and slow, undulating arm gestures that mimic the ancient Hawaiian religious rituals directed toward the gods – notably the fire goddess Pele, who, according to legend, created the islands. The regalia the dancers wear is as significant as the dance itself, with every element – the hand-printed cloth skirts, plants like ti leaves and jasmine flowers – symbolizing a divine offering.

For weeks leading up to the festival, the 100 or so danc­ers – most of whom have day jobs – train like a pre-season sports team, practicing four or five times a week. “I stop surfing and skating so I don’t get injured,” Zane says. The troupe can’t actually compete since Zane’s mother, Nalani Kanaka’ole, is one of the head judges, but they open the festival on exhibition night. Zane says that he and his cousins, many of whom also dance, weren’t raised fluent in Hawaiian. But by dancing hula, he says, they speak “the language of the land.”