FESTIVAL ’90 : DANCE REVIEWS / L.A. FESTIVAL : ‘Oceania’: A Gem From Hawaii

Onstage at Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, we’re watching the aftermath of revolution. Seven women in long, tiered dresses of brilliant yellow each rapidly bend to the left (the hand on that side flicking open near the ground), then quickly reach overhead, both hands drawing together to close a circle.

As they step in place, feet pointing, their chant mixes with the offstage song and drums of Pulani and Nalani Kanaka’ole, sisters who lead the group.

Full of sudden changes in level, direction and angle of limb, this dance of earth and sky is a miraculously preserved artifact of traditional Hawaiian culture--a male temple ritual safeguarded by women through a period of colonial oppression.

To see it danced by the Halau O Kekuhi company at the Los Angeles Festival (on the Thursday “Ancient Dance of Oceania” program) is to appreciate how completely Hawaiian artists have reclaimed their culture from commercial debasement.

Say bye-bye to the so-called “hula” of revealing grass skirts, happy ukelele tunes and sentimental English lyrics decorated by hand-motions. Welcome, instead, deeply forceful poetry, percussion and movement honoring Pele, the volcano deity who destroys and creates anew. It’s about time.

On the same program: the Waiwhetu Cultural Group from New Zealand--Maoris only at the beginning of the path the Hawaiians have traveled.

Here, the key experience involves young men in trendy haircuts who make all the right faces but utterly fail to capture the warrior intensity of the classic haka ritual. Who can blame them? They’re caught between two ways of defining themselves. But who can blame us for looking away? We’re caught, too, between the consequences of our cultural imperialism and our need to see it overthrown.

It’s one thing, after all, to learn about early Christian missionaries teaching Pacific islanders to sing hymns--and forbidding them their traditional music. It’s quite another to endure an hour of pop harmonies from the 1950s applied to everything from traditional Maori songs to “We Are the World.” Sometimes, the Los Angeles Festival can be very cruel.