The Hula Show 2013 continues the breakout of the hula dance-form into an art so popular around here there are enough fans to fill big theaters night after night. San Francisco's own hula company Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, which may be "the mainland's" premiere hula company, opened to a packed house last Friday night at the Palace of Fine Arts; their shows continue through this weekend.
What's not to like about hula? The music is seductive, sweet, nostalgic, beautiful, but also capable of austere power, and the dance that accompanies it is varied and fluid as the waves of the sea, deceptively soft but again capable of tremendous power. And truth to tell, human beings rarely look more appealing than when moving with such power and softness, with the hips rolling in powerful circles beneath tranquil shoulders and shining faces, while the arms extend in liquid tendrils, like vines about to flower, and the hands express as many emotions as we normally think belong only to the eyes.
Hula is, in fact, a complex dance form with many possible inflections, from the austere, sacred forms through the royal modes down to the sweet local dances that praise beaches, waterfalls, villages. The dances interpret chants or songs, and the gestures of the hands are sign language for the words.
What is most wonderful is the way a master like Patrick Makuakane can bring his traditions into the contemporary world, making new dances in a mode he calls hula mua that are smarter than anything I see coming out of ballet choreographers or modern dancers (except Mark Morris). Nothing on this year's show was as stunning as last year's "Birth-Certificate Hula," which hit the boards during the run-up to the re-election of Hawaiian-born Barack Obama. (President Obama was, in fact, born in the same Honolulu hospital as Makuakane).
At this point, hula mua is restricted to small forms, so a whole evening's work will have the shape of a song cycle, like Schumann's Dichterliebe or the Beatles' White Album. But as with those, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This year's hula show, The Voice of the People, was grounded in last year's discovery of a huge trove of 19th-century Hawaiian newspapers, nearly a century's worth of papers that served a culture wherein almost everyone could read.
Thank God, Makuakane is smart. He is very smart. In an era when "research" is almost the buzz-word for what contemporary choreographers actually do, he's turned this treasury of news, reports, classified ads, and obituaries into fascinating windows onto a culture that got taken over by Christian missionaries, fought back in various ways, and finally got annexed to the United States. There's a hip-hop hula in honor of the young Kamehamea's rebellious period, as well as a group dance in honor of his male lover and their friends, with some very explicit hip-rollings by a cohort of sexy men who look like they could keep up on the surfboard with their Prince Harry king. Gershwin songs that are appropriate to the idea but anachronistic by 100 years get pressed into hula service to convey that "I want to be bad" mentality of the young king.
All across the evening, Makuakane's dances evoked the things people a hundred years ago in Hawaii cared about �" things they really cared about, like the death of the 5-year-old young prince on whom the hopes of the people were pinned (a haunting lament, sung by the guest artist Kumu Hula Shawna Alapa'i), or the gossip in the newspaper, the classified ad saying, "I will not be responsible for any debts incurred by my former wife," or the poem written by the king about his new telephone. There is a gorgeous sequence of dances that retell the epic myth about the rise of the Hawaiian people from the seed of the lord who was the beloved of the goddess Pele, but who mated with her sister �" and thereby hangs a tale, which ran in the newspapers like a serial novel, with many episodes and contretemps, "like Honolulu's Next Top Model meets The Bachelor " (to quote Makuakane himself). My favorite episode was the ritual dance of raising the hero from the dead. It was really spooky, all the dancers on the floor like ants around the supine figure of the warrior, fluttering their arms like witches, using many gestures from the old religious hula that preceded the arrival of Captain Cook.
Makuakane's dances seem a sovereign antidote to the piety and political correctness that afflict the work of most politically aware choreographers.
The Hula Show continues this weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts: Fri., Oct. 25, at 8 p.m., Sat., Oct. 26 at 8 p.m., and Sun., Oct. 27 at 3 p.m. Tickets: (415) 392-4400, or cityboxoffice.com.