This Isn’t Your Grandmother’s Hula

The sweet smell of plumeria, swaying palm trees and seductive, shimmying hips--add chanting or ukulele music and you’ve got hula, right?

For Patrick Makuakane, who was born and raised in Honolulu and began studying hula at age 13, the equation adds up differently. Makuakane, who moved to San Francisco in 1984 to attend San Francisco State University, still dances his native hula, but as often to the music of Madonna, Tony Bennett and opera composer Leo Delibes as to more traditional accompaniment. And while he knows how to set hips to swaying, he also amplifies tradition with new torso and arm movements.

Fifteen years ago, Makuakane, now 40, founded the hula company Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, which translates as “many feathered wreaths held in esteem.” The troupe will perform what Makuakane calls hula mua, or “progressive hula,” Friday evening at Watercourt Plaza in downtown L.A. as part of the Grand Performances’ 15th anniversary season. (The Southland troupe Hula Halau O Lilinoi performs traditional hula that afternoon.) The plumeria will be there (flown in from Hawaii), but this is definitely not your grandmother’s hula.

“I came up with hula mua about five years ago because of my interest in different kinds of music,” explains Makuakane by phone from San Francisco, where he also teaches hula and is a part-time personal trainer (he earned a degree in physical education from San Francisco State). “In the hula nomenclature, there are two kinds--the traditional dancing done to chanting and to the gourd or drum, and hula auana , which is more contemporary and done to a musical instrument, like the ukulele.” Makuakane’s dances fit loosely into the second category.

“Traditional hula is dancing to poetry, to lyrics [the text of the chants],” he says. “The misconception people have is that the arm gestures and miming tell the story, but lyrics tell the story; gestures are secondary. By using songs with English words and having the dance match the words, then you allow people to make that connection with the poetry, which is what hula is all about.”

Makuakane says that the 45 dancers in his company (only 22 will be performing in Los Angeles) are traditionally trained, and his dances incorporate movements that are thousands of years old. But some of his choreography falls “outside the realm of hula [in that there is] more elaborate use of the dancers’ upper bodies and hands, as well as [incorporating] some spinning and leg extensions.” Finally, Makuakane has added some politically charged narratives to the stories his dancers tell, including dances based on issues like AIDS and Hawaiian independence.

“Sometimes I’ll use wordless house music, making the movement [more] abstract, and create a story that way,” he says.

David Gere, assistant professor in the department of world arts and cultures at UCLA, says Makuakane is an enormously exciting artist. “[I] find his work provocative. [He uses] hula not just to make beautiful pictures, but to make political points.”

The artistic director of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, David Roche, agrees. To him, Makuakane’s “Salve Mea” in which dancers depict the destruction of native culture to a techno track by the group Faithless, is a work that “may some day be regarded with the same reverence as Alvin Ailey’s ‘Revelations’ or Martha Graham’s ‘Appalachian Spring.’ ”

The jury is still out on that one, and Makuakane will not be performing the work in Los Angeles (“I want to keep the show light,” he says). But the company will be undulating to Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” The dance, in which the women wear long, black velvet dresses designed by Makuakane, calls for flat-footed, precise line formations while the dancers sway in perfect hula unison.

Also on the L.A. program is the Tony Bennett standard “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Makuakane says the ballad is about home, and to Hawaiians, “home is a very important place,” where pride in the past still exists. At least it does for Makuakane, who has a European American mother (from Pennsylvania) and a Hawaiian father, and who considers himself a native Hawaiian.

When he looks back at the roots of his hula mua , it’s all in the blend. In the 1970s, he started in hula in part because it was a time that Hawaiians were seeking their cultural roots. That led dancers to focus on ancient dances and the poetry that hula was meant to illustrate. At the same time, however, Makuakane says his teacher dabbled in less traditional forms, and that others were “tweaking songs--adding synthesizer, drums and guitar.”

Ultimately, says Makuakane, he just kept pushing that envelope in San Francisco. It has worked well there: The company has been performing sold-out seasons (two weekends in October) at the Palace of Fine Arts since 1995. But how does this hybrid hula play in the motherland, where the troupe performed last year?

“I was concerned whether people would like it or hate it. Hula is the last bastion of tradition in Hawaii,” he said. “Some dances and chants have come from antiquity, and you don’t touch those. People don’t like you screwing around with hula, but [with] hula mua, we were blessed. They loved it.”

Traditionalists need not worry that the grass skirt will be entirely missing in the Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu performance. Makuakane includes a number featuring the costume in a dance parody set to what he calls “cheesy Hawaiian music with steel guitar.” Makuakane explains, “Smiley hula girls are insipidly waving their arms from side to side, engaged in Busby Berkeley-like choreography. I also tell a story about how the grass is cut [to make the skirts] through different priestly rituals, when, in reality, it’s not true. The skirt was introduced from the Gilbert Islands.”

Makuakane, who won a 1999 Isadora Duncan Dance Award recognizing excellence among Bay Area dance organizations, and a two-year Irvine Foundation Fellowship that allows him to continue his dance studies in Hawaii, is also determined to keep traditional hula alive through teaching.

He began with six pupils in 1985 and has since seen more than 600 people pass through his studio, where, he says, he’s proud to smash myths and preserve the past.

“Thanks to Hollywood, we had Rita Hayworth in a grass skirt. The image was that Hawaiians are those happy, simple folk in the grass skirt. There’s so much more [to] hula. It’s a whole spectrum of things, from social [and] political issues to spiritual aspects and a reverence for nature. I like to say it’s a three-dimensional experience. Hula is life. [It] expresses everything we see, feel, hear, smell, taste and touch.

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NA LEI HULU I KA WEKIU, Watercourt Plaza, 350 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Date: Friday, 8 p.m. Also: Hula Halau O Lilinoi, Watercourt Plaza, noon Friday. Price: Both events are free. Phone: (213) 687-2159.