Hawaiian Troupe Artfully Spins Warrior’s Tale

The warrior-king Kamehameha the Great not only united the Hawaiian people early in the 19th century, but so completely embodied the ideals of Hawaiian culture that he immediately became a mythic figure: a name to conjure with. However, in the mainland premiere of its three-act dance drama “Kamehameha,” the Hilo-based Halau O Kekuhi foundation didn’t so much depict his life as invoke his legend as an example to train a new generation in the traditions that sustained him.

At the Japan America Theatre on Friday, two dozen performers used ancient ritual chants and dances to fuse past and present, summarizing the beliefs, virtues and skills that Kamehameha stood for and using them as the basis for a sense of contemporary Hawaiian identity. The role of Kamehameha might be assumed in one scene by 9-year-old Kauilanii Santiago, but elsewhere distilled in group action, with a sense that any participant--old or young, male or female--might emerge from the rites of initiation as the new warrior-chief, the new unifier of a disjointed Hawaiian people.

Like the bracingly militant sequences dominating the last act, this sense of Kamehameha as a dynamic living presence in Hawaiian consciousness took the performance way, way beyond the middlebrow cultural tourism exploited by the first generation of international world-dance companies. No regional sampler programming a la Ballet Folklorico. No balletic technique displays a la Moiseyev. No illusion that the only people allowed to dance in a foreign culture are 18-to-24-year-olds of intimidating fitness and inexhaustible smiles. No hint whatsoever of traditions on sale.

Directed by Pualani Kanaka’ole Kanahele and Huihui Kanahele-Mossman, Act 1 proved the most conventionally biographical, with narrative vignettes evoking the omens surrounding Kamehameha’s birth and his flight into hiding (both strikingly Christlike).

As the chants expanded into vibrant songs and the walking steps into full-bodied dances, two of the company’s earth-mother icons presented solos of indomitable authority: Kekuhi Kanahele-Frias in an intense birth-chant as Kamehameha’s mother and Huihui Kanahele-Mossman in a bold, varied kneeling dance as his guardian, accompanied by Kano’eau Noguchi.

In Act 2, directors Kekuhi Kanahele-Mossman and Kaipo Frias used the beating of bark-cloth to punctuate episodes evoking childhood growth and education, with the rapid tossing of stones leading to increasingly complex tasks.

Perhaps the most virtuosic sequence found 13 performers striking the floor with wooden poles, each of them wielding a long one and flipping a short one at high speed, as well as striking the poles of neighbors, before tackling the biggest challenge: doing it all while blindfolded.

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However, such exciting displays of prowess remained subordinate to the prevailing richness of Hawaiian ritual existence: the sense of lives lived and actions taken with a profound sense of spiritual context.

In the final act, Nalani Kanaka’ole’s direction emphasized dancing as a preparation for battle, with the thrusting of spears and the swinging of truncheons forming part of an engulfing attack-rhythm unifying all the sequences.

Once again, the performance honored Kamehameha’s name, lineage and achievements but refused to consign him to an obsolete, irrelevant past. And once again, the older women serving as the evening’s directors, accompanists and consciences reminded at least one viewer of how many of Hawaii’s most potent gods are female.

Unfortunately, the company’s purposeful, pertinent dramaturgy was often burdened by floridly decorative design indulgences: notably all the swoony blush-pink and apricot light-washes glamorizing the warriors-in-training plus the inevitable smoke machine filling the theater with oily stink.

Happily, such Pacific performing groups as the well-known Raun Raun Theatre of Papua New Guinea and several emerging ensembles from New Caledonia and Vanuatu have created a lean, tough-minded style of movement theater that serves both ancestral legends and modern realities far more imaginatively than the outmoded candied stagecraft on view Friday.

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* Halau O Kekuhi performs “Kamehameha” on Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. in Campbell Hall on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. $10 (children)-$25. (805) 893-3535.