Chapter 3 - The Hula Within Us

What is Hula?

You might have seen this cultural dance performed at a lūʻau in Hawaiʻi or have other visions in your head of what it might be. It is essential to realize that hula is more than just dance steps though. Yes, there are the steps, but then there is all the other nā mea (things). Hula tells the story of Hawaiʻi on a level you can't even imagine unless you've experienced the dance.

To me, one of the most fundamental things a hula dancer should learn is not the dance itself but what it is that you’re dancing about. You are, as the dancer, telling a story through dance, and that story is of a person, a place, a time in history— it could be about anything, but, essentially, hula is a form of storytelling.

As a hula dancer, when a song is in the Hawaiian language you should learn the meanings of the words before you dance, especially if you are not a native speaker; or at least have an idea of what the song is about. This is a kuleana (responsibility) I took seriously early on. I was always hungry for more ʻike (knowledge) that had anything to do with the Hawaiian culture. So my pursuit in hula also meant I was learning more about the words in the songs to which I was dancing.

A song was researched, including the song’s origins, who wrote it, and why it was written. The words in the song were studied, dissected, and translated. Many Hawaiian songs have a deeper, hidden meaning called a kaona. It's what makes the songs and language so poetic. It was also an essential element when the hula was banned by the missionaries. These kaona were ways to not only continue to tell the stories, but keep them hidden from Western ears in this sort of secret language.

So in order to talk about the hula you must also talk about language because the two are intertwined. And you cannot talk about language without culture. Hula tells stories, and if you do not know and understand the words you are dancing, you cannot tell the story, which is embedded in the culture. It is both simple and complex. But many Hawaiian words are not easily translated into English or any other language.

Besides, the Hawaiians were, and are still to a certain extent, an oratory culture. Nothing was written down, as they did not have a written language until the 1820s. So listening and knowing the context was very important. A word in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) may have many different meanings depending on the context, and even a slight change in diacriticals could change the meaning entirely. In order to understand the context, you have to understand the culture (see the pattern here?). This is something I learned every time I tried to understand a word that was “foreign” to me. I had to dig deeper and know more about the culture, otherwise the true meaning would be lost and I’d only have a surface-level understanding.

Language, culture, and therefore hula, are all mixed together. One of the three cannot exist without the other two. They are intrinsically intertwined, forever bonded. 

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is an experience— you must experience the word before you can understand its meaning. Take a simple, but complex word, "Aloha." Simple in that many people have heard or seen this word before, but complex because it has so many meanings, which are understood only by knowing and experiencing the culture. One of the simple definitions is love. How would you portray that word in your dance using your arm and hand motions? Maybe your hands are near your heart or wrapped around yourself in an embrace. How about your eyes and facial expression? They are probably soft and gentle when you think about or see someone you love. A warm embrace and kind eyes could be a way to portray “Aloha” in your dance.

Another example is if the mele (song) is about rain. Our fingers flutter slightly, as if to mimmic rain coming down from the sky, as our hands move downward from high above our heads and past our face. But we are not only depicting the rain with our hands, we become the rain, and that’s the difference with hula that is absent from other dance forms. That’s how you become what it is that you are dancing and why knowing the words and what you are dancing about is so important.

A more complicated word to consider, and to go a little deeper into culture and context, take the word ʻūhīʻūhā. Out of context, it really doesn’t make sense, and its actual meaning in English makes even less sense to a Westerner. This is because there is no exact translation to English for ʻūhīʻūhā, mainly for cultural reasons. ʻŪhīʻūhā means “sonorous puffing and blowing sounds, as accompanying the surging of volcanic fires; to puff or blow thus; shish-shish.”

Shish-shish? What is that? First of all, we have to remember who the Hawaiians are and their environmental climate. They have many different words for rain, wind, clouds, rainbows, and even lava. Lava is very much a part of their natural landscape, especially on Hawaiʻi Island, so it would come as no surprise that they have many words to describe it. They are surrounded by it, live on it, and even have a most beloved and revered Goddess who is it. Where else in the world can you experience lava like you do in Hawaiʻi? Lava, and all its forms, is a part of Hawaiian culture, but not a part of every culture on earth. ʻŪhīʻūhā is Hawaiʻi-specific.

To experience ʻūhīʻūhā, imagine lava making its way down a volcano, however you believe lava to be and look like. It is hot and steamy, rolling over and covering everything in its path. Imagine its color; imagine its viscosity; imagine it going fast, then going slow. Imagine it puffing up into a bubble and popping. See the lava spurt from the burst. Listen. That sound there, that hissing sound is the ʻūhīʻūhā. It shishes and shishes down the mountainside. That’s ʻūhīʻūhā. Now place your palms down flat in front of your waist side by side. Turn your hands right and then turn your hands left, keeping your palms down. Imagine that your hands are the lava, and as you move right and left with your hands, that is the lava’s path. That’s ʻūhīʻūhā. You are becoming the lava. That’s how you dance the hula, how you embody hula— you become the word, and in this case, the natural element, that you are dancing. You are experiencing rather than just looking up the word in the dictionary.

It can go even deeper than this as well, and this was something I experienced with the recent Maui fires. In papa hula (hula class), we were learning a dance about a place called Puamana, which is a beloved area in Lāhainā. It has been destroyed by the fires. It is still on the map, but it is not how we remember it: lush with palm trees swaying in the breeze; the moon rising and setting upon the seas, calmed by neighboring Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi, cradling this precious area in front of Lāhainā. It was truly a magical place. The choreography of this hula we are learning remembers this beautiful land and is depicted in our dance and motions. Because I have visited Puamana and Lāhainā many times, dancing about it, especially after the recent devastation, hit differently. I actually felt it in my body, and not just in my head like imagining the lava and ʻūhīʻūhā.

We can understand these words, or places, or times in history, in a theoretical way in our heads when we are dancing, but there’s a level of understanding where you can experience that word in your hula dance because you can feel it in your body.

There is one particular motion where we are “remembering” this place because it is no longer there. When my Kumu hula (master hula teacher) described the motion and why he had choreographed it that way, I fell into tears. I felt it. Here was this dance being choreographed in real-time, post-Maui-fires. Here we were, depicting this place that once was, and now only exists in our memories.

And that is why we hula. We hula to remember. We hula to honor. We hula to tell the stories about special places such as Puamana. This full embodiment of what it was I was dancing about brought me to an even deeper level of hula and the purpose of hula. It strengthened my understanding of the dance form itself and of the culture. It solidified what it means when we dance the hula.

The hula becomes a part of you and you a part of the hula, capturing a feeling, emotion, and even physical description about a particular place or time. It's an experience, transcendent beyond just a dance. Hula is an experience of embodiment.

You may be doing all the steps correctly and have good form and technique, which are important, but steps are just steps. Anyone can do steps with enough practice. The feeling and understanding of the meaning you put behind the steps and hand motions make the hula the hula. Nothing can replace the melding of dance and meaning, that is, really knowing what the words mean.

There is memorization involved, of course, because to learn a dance, you must memorize the steps. No matter what discipline, be it tap, jazz, ballet, or hula, a “dance” comprises a series of footwork called choreography. The movement of the arms and hands is significant too, and most of the time, this hand movement is most important in hula. The hands tell the story thus, and every move is deliberate and meaningful right down to the look in your eyes.

My body memorizes movements and steps, not my brain. Sometimes I even close my eyes while I’m dancing because I want to know how the motions and steps feel in my body. This is how I create a relationship with the mele and hula. This melding is magical and transcendent for me. I get so keyed in on some songs that I zone out and forget where I am. I literally get lost in the dance. It's not until the end of the song that I wonder, how did I do that? How did my body remember?

You become transformed with no separation between your body and the word you are depicting. You become one with it, you own it, and you are it.

This level of connection depends on your understanding of the mele while also being able to dance it. For me, it has to do with how willing I can be open to the possibility of feeling deep within myself with whatever it is that I’m dancing. This process doesn’t have to do with skill as much as it has to do with the spirit of the dance. You don’t have to be the best dancer to achieve this oneness. We feel the music, we feel the words deep in our bones. The spirit that is the hula is within us.