Exploring The Roots Of Hawaii's Beauty

Ask Kekuhi Kanahele about hula and the first thing she mentions is not dancers in grass skirts or musicians strumming ukuleles. If that's your image of hula, says Kanahele, an award-winning singer and recording artist, hula dancer and Hawaiian studies instructor at Hawaii Community College, think again. "Hula in its most archaic form is ritual," she says from her office on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Kanahele performs, choreographs, sings and dances with Halau O Kekuhi, a hula troupe and school that encompasses seven generations of Kekuhi's family. Kanahele was taught by her late grandmother "Aunty" Edith Kanaka'ole, who learned music, dance and chants from her own mother and grandmother before teaching them to her daughters, current kumu hula -- hula masters -- Nalani Kanaka'ole and Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele, Kekuhi's mother.

Saturday at Wolf Trap, 16 members of the company, joined by Keali'i Reichel, one of Hawaii's most popular recording artists, and Hawaiian slack-key guitarist and fusion musician Ledward Kaapana, will bring a taste of hula culture to the expansive open-air theater. "Face of America: Hawai'i," part of an ongoing, multiyear project that celebrates America's national parks, features high-definition, giant-screen video footage of the breathtaking vistas and native vegetation of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park.

Instruction in the tradition of hula, Kanahele says, begins soon after birth, when the infant is brought to the hula school. She recalls her own youth on the Big Island: "I spent a lot of my early years under my grandmother's training. . . . There is an important link that my grandmother and my grandfather maintained between what we learned in the formal school and our connections to the ancestral lands here. They made sure that we were introduced at a very early age to where we came from."

The landscape -- mountains, sea, forest and volcanoes -- is as much a part of hula as the red ohia blossoms woven into leis the dancers wear. "You cannot be disconnected from the land," Kanahele says. "Once there's a disconnect between the hula and the natural environment in our particular tradition, it's not hula anymore, because there's such a strong dependence on the forest and the ocean for our resources."

And so, before the company boarded its plane to fly east earlier this week, its 16 members were directed by their kumu hula to walk into the forest and collect vegetation for their costumes. Performers fashion the costumes they wear from such materials as ferns, seeds, branches, leaves, grasses and flowers. Before a performance they dress in silence, focusing on the gravity and import of the ritual about to take place. And once the music and dance are finished and the costumes wilted, dancers return their costumes to the forest.

Halau O Kekuhi will reenact the creation myth featuring Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano. But Kanahele isn't worried if audiences aren't familiar with Pele: "It's not necessary to give a synopsis. The Pele is Earth-centric. It's required for life here. It's a reflection of the rhythms of the volcano, and the volcano is the basis of everything else -- the water, the forests, the corals, the reefs, the fish -- and then the people came after the land was created."

She says she believes that audiences should free their imaginations to the possibilities they're seeing: "We want them to discover their own fire."

Face of America: Hawai'i Filene Center at Wolf Trap 877-965-3872 Saturday