Hula finds new Alloy - cross-cultural dance program

Dance Magazine, April, 1997 by Dean Lokken

THE BIG ISLAND, Hawaii--For Dance Alloy, artistic director Mark Taylor had a tough assignment: Leave Pittsburgh for the frigid month of January and live on Hawaii's sunsplashed Big Island, learning to hula.

The result of the company's labors--a cross-cultural performance using six Dance Alloy performers and ten performers from Halau Hula Ka No'eau, a hula school in Waimea, Hawaii--will be seen April 26 at Pittsburgh's Byham Theater. It premiered in January in Hawaii.

Taylor's interest in creating an entirely new work that merges modern dance with an art form practiced for centuries by Hawaiians brought him together with Michael Pili Pang, founder and kuma hula, or teacher, of the Waimea school. Their joint work, which both say was a 50/50 endeavor, is based on the kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant. The chant, more than 2,300 lines long, was passed on from generation to generation of Islanders and never written down until the late 1800s (Hawaiians missionaries arrived more than a century ago).

"We have taken 125 lines and divided them into four sections, basically dealing with creation and evolution," says Pang, who has studied with some of the best hula chanters and teachers in Hawaii. The kumulipo lacks a recognizable melody, since whoever performed it over the years provided whatever melody they wanted. So Pang wrote one for `Ike: Body of Knowledge, as the new work is called. `Ike is Hawaiian for "body of knowledge," or "to see, know, or feel." The sections of the thirty-minute piece begin with the formation of the world out of cosmic dust and end with the creation of plant forms on land, an environment ready for the arrival of humans.

Pang says writing the melody was his biggest challenge. He turned to some traditional Hawaiian instruments, like split bamboo sticks and seashells, to reproduce the sounds of wind and surf.

"The next biggest challenge was for the dancers themselves," he says. "Both sides had to learn someone else's music and their language of dance."

To prepare the visiting Dance Alloy company for its artistic adventure, the Hawaiian hosts started with a four-day study of Hawaiian customs, behavior, and poetry. University of Hawaii lecturers and elders from the local community explained the intricacies of Hawaiian culture. The dancers made a trip to Kilauea volcano, currently the most active one in the islands, to explore the importance that Hawaiians place on the life-giving force of the volcanoes that created the mid-Pacific islands. And they made an excursion to the beach to experience the ebb and flow of the ocean.

Pang's halau demonstrated for the Dance Alloy performers how hula dancers make their own instruments and fashion their costumes from leaves and other items they find in the forest. "We live in a much more stratified society," Taylor says of his dancers, comparing them to the way a hula halau functions. "It's really been great to have Michael ask our dancers to walk into the woods to find their own ferns."

Barbara Furstenberg, director of community services at the University of Hawaii, had a hand in organizing the `Ike project, which she says challenges assumptions about dance, its origins, and its presentation. She points out that the work by Taylor and Pang gives a much different view of hula than that held by most Mainlanders--the hip-swaying hula popularized and stereo-typed decades ago by Hollywood through Jeanette MacDonald in Let's Go Native (1930) and Shirley Temple in Curly Top (1935), or in songs like Honolulu Hula Girl, written to entertain tourists and radio audiences. True hula, Furstenberg says, is the "quintessential expression of Hawaiian cultural values," deeply rooted in tradition and legend. For Hawaiians, studying and performing hula is a lifelong undertaking, requiring concentration, discipline, and constant practice.

Hawaii has been experiencing a resurgence of hula since the 1970s, partly as a result of a Hawaiian Renaissance that has established schools where Hawaiian is the central language, a vigorous Hawaiian studies program at the University of Hawaii, and a native sovereignty movement. The dance was nearly extinguished in the 1800s by missionaries who called it a sign of "destitution, degradation, and barbarism." The language and the chants that are the core of hula were suppressed by teachers and public authorities.

Today, both young and old Hawaiians and haole, or Caucasians, embrace hula. It's taught in public schools, and its students practice in church auditoriums, school cafeterias, corporate conference rooms, and public parks.

Taylor sees the collaboration with Pang's halau as an opportunity for Dance Alloy to create a piece that does not represent either of their past bodies of work. "I feel like there's something really contemporary growing out of the work, something that feels unique," he says.

For Dance Alloy, Taylor adds, the monthlong residency in a sunny paradise was also a chance to explore a culture where "dance is not about what technique they are using, but about the way they share their spirit with people. And that's something I think Western dancers have lost."