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  • We Dance for Knowledge
  • Sharon Mâhealani Rowe (bio)

History shows the dancer his heritage, his place in a line of distinguished, artistic ancestors. It is a legacy to instill a sense of pride—and responsibility. (Cohen 1974, 3)1

Every year, for hundreds of thousands of tourists, seeing “real Hawaiian hula” in a hotel or in a packaged lū‘au setting is standard fare. Commonplace too is receiving one’s introduction to hula through any of the many competitions that take place annually in Hawai‘i and, with increasing frequency, throughout the world. Still others find hula marketed for its exercise benefits, peddled as the latest fitness fad in gyms and malls across the country. But is hula the allure of exotic dancers evoking prurient responses from tourists, one moment tantalized by undulating hips only to be teasingly chastised the next to “keep your eyes on the hands”? Is it the crisp, impeccably synchronized movement danced before panels of judges at the several hula competitions that mark the year for many hula hālau? Is hula the movement, the meaning conveyed through the movement, or the full context out of which movement casts itself into an art form that inspires passion and perpetuates a traditional way of living?

For Mary Kawena Pukui, credited with helping to bring the rich traditional context of hula into the present, hula is “a general name for many types of Hawaiian folk dances” (1942/1980, 70). Pukui’s laconic description says everything, and nothing. Everything because hula is the unique dance of the Hawaiian people. Everything because despite the homogenizing influence of hula competition, which has brought only a limited range of the vast hula repertoire to the public’s attention over the past thirty-five years, hula encompasses many different styles and types of dances. But it says nothing because hula simply cannot be reduced to Hawaiian folk dance. Hula is a moving encyclopedia inscribed into the sinews and postures of dancers’ bodies. It carries forward the social and natural history, the religious beliefs, the philosophy, the literature, and the scientific knowledge of the Hawaiian people. It is, therefore, more than the dance form of a particular Polynesian people, more [End Page 31] than swaying hips and talking hands, more than competitions, vacation entertainment, or a weekly workout routine. Because the story of native Hawaiians is an ongoing one, hula is important in the living present, and because that history and its politics are still very much evolving and revolving around unresolved questions, it is important to understand hula as a vital, creative art form and a lived experience that preserves a culture’s values, continually forming and reforming identity in and through movement.

Once the same could have been said of the court dances of Europe (ballet de cour), where, prior to the intellectual and social changes we call the Enlightenment, first the dance floor and then the proscenium stage were places for political discourse construed in a language of gesture and story. Louis XIV’s daily dance lessons culminated a long tradition of royal dancing in which “French court ballet was essential to the legitimation of the monarch in his double status as real and ideal body” (Franko 1993, 4). Dances before and by the Hawaiian court had an analogous signification. David Malo notes their function in “conferring distinction upon the ali‘i” (1898/1980, 231). Gifted dancers and kumu (teachers) had their place in the royal courts of Hawai’i as they did in European courts, and members of the ali‘i (chiefly) class were themselves known as talented dancers and composers.2 In dance both the European and the Hawaiian royal courts represented the idealized body of their people. The symbolic and political context of sixteenth-century European court dance would thus resonate with hula practitioners of old, who could easily recognize the significance of the royal genealogies that flowed from the Medici court of France. A Hawaiian chief or chiefess would see no incongruity between the political status and function of European royalty and their numerous stage appearances. Easily recognizing the signifying layers of court protocols, they would easily take their appropriate place within its order.3 Hawai...

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