Hula festival keeps traditions, memories alive

Next weekend, 88-year-old Leilani Alama and her sister Pua­nani, 83, will be among the dancers at the Na Hula Festival just as they have been every year since the event’s inception in 1941.

@Body text1:"Auntie Leilani was 15 and Auntie Pua­nani was 10 when they danced at the first festival," said their niece TeMoana Makolo. "In all these years, they haven’t missed one."

Presented at Kapiolani Park Bandstand by Hono­lulu’s Department of Parks and Recreation, the Na Hula Festival is the longest-running annual hula event in Hawaii. Its founder was the late Lei Collins, a noted Hawaiian singer, dancer and composer who supervised activities at the city’s parks for many years, beginning in the 1930s.

"At the time, hula was offered at just about every park on Oahu," Makolo said. "Some of the best kumu (teachers) taught there, including my Auntie Pua­nani, Auntie Alice Keawe­kane, Auntie Alice Nama­ke­lua, Auntie Ade­line Lee and Uncle George Holo­kai. Auntie Lei Collins started the Na Hula Festival to showcase the parks’ excellent hula programs as well as private hula studios."

Then, as now, the Royal Hawaiian Band presented Sunday afternoon concerts at Kapiolani Park. Because the band went on vacation the entire month of August, Collins thought hula would provide great entertainment in its place.

Thus, the Na Hula Festival was born.

"Band concerts were about an hour," Makolo said. "Hula went on from morning until the afternoon. It was fabulous!"

Initially, festival performances were three Sundays in August. Over the years, however, the city’s budget to fund the shows and hula instruction at the parks dwindled.

Around 1992, Na Hula was scaled down to just one Sunday to cut the cost and time it took to set up and remove the stage decorations and sound equipment. In 2007 a Saturday performance was added; the event is now usually held the first weekend in August.

Leilani and Puanani Alama know the venue well. "Kapiolani Park has had four different bandstands," Makolo said. "My aunts have performed on three of them. The only reason they didn’t perform on the first one was they were born after it was torn down."

The sisters’ halau (hula schools) are busy with evening rehearsals for Na Hula. Alama Hula Studio (Leilani Alama’s halau) and Pua­nani Alama Hula Studio are down the hall from each other, on the second floor of the same building in Kaimuki.

"Word gets around, and sometimes people come and watch the practices," Makolo said. "They’re always amazed that the city puts on this wonderful show every year for free."

Makolo knows the thrill of entertaining; she was a globe-trotting hula dancer and choreographer in the 1960s and early 1970s. "I went with a USO show to Greece, Iran, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Taiwan, the Philippines, you name it," she said. "I also performed in New York, at the Lexington Hotel’s famous Hawaiian Room, for four years. Hula was my life."

It wasn’t always that way. When she was 9, Makolo had no interest in hula. As soon as her mother dropped her off for lessons at a studio in McCully, she hopped on the King Street bus and rode it from there to the route’s end points in Kaimuki and Kalihi until she figured it was time for her to go home.

"Because a lot of the bus drivers were my relatives, I got to ride for free," Makolo said. "One day my kumu called my mother and said, ‘How come baby is not coming to hula?’ When my mother found out what I was doing, she started staying at hula with me. I don’t know what happened to change my mind, but from then on I started loving hula and I didn’t want to leave the studio."

Kaiulani Kauahi, the culture and arts coordinator for the Department of Parks and Recreation, understands Makolo’s passion for the dance. Like her, she comes from a hula ohana.

Her grandmother started a halau in 1920 in Wahiawa, which her mother continued as kumu. When she retired in 1986, Kau­ahi took over.

"I was born dancing," Kau­ahi said. "I held onto the bars of my playpen and danced. My mother would put little hula implements in the playpen; those were my toys. I still have some of them. I made my debut as a dancer at a party at the Wahiawa YMCA when I was 3 years old."

Kauahi remembers practicing three hours every day except Sunday for performances at parades, carnivals, fundraisers, school events, private functions and the officers’ clubs at Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Air Force Base.

Fast-forward to 2005, the first year Kau­ahi coordinated the Na Hula Festival. "Tears came to my eyes when the Alama sisters’ halau performed," she said. "It brought back memories of my mother dancing. The styles were similar, the mele (songs) were similar. Auntie Leilani and Auntie Pua­nani are of the same era as my mother; if she were alive, she would be two years older than Auntie Leilani."

Over the years, several women who first performed at Na Hula as students have returned as kumu with their own halau — a tradition that began with the Alama sisters.

"Hula is the heartbeat and soul of Hawaii," Kau­ahi said. "Hula perpetuates Hawaiian history, language and music. It tells our stories, both past and present. The Na Hula Festival is a welcoming, relaxing, cas­ual event where you can enjoy a hula or two or stay the entire day. It’s a place to meet old friends and to make new ones — everyone bound by their love for the hula."

Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi is a Honolulu-based freelance writer whose travel features for the Star-Advertiser have won several Society of American Travel Writers awards.