A wonderful way to feel the energy of Hawaii, gently tone your body, strengthen your core, and enjoy dancing to  beautiful Hawaiian music. No experience necessary. Men, Women age 15 years and older welcome!   

Mondays

6 - 7 pm 

Tuesdays 

11 am - 12 noon 

Saturdays

8:30 - 9:30 AM 

   

  Wednesdays    

6 - 7 PM     

 Hawaiian Hula Show featuring Classical Hula

61st Annual Chicago POWWOW
Busse Woods Forest Preserve

Sunday September 14th
11:00 AM

*************
Sunday September 21st
12 noon - 4 pm


The performances are also a farewell to the Hula Mound since we are selling the house.  While the event is free, we'll ask for contributions to bring kumu hula from Hawaii to keep our cultural connections strong.  Register here to save your spot at this delightful taste of the
Hawaiian Aloha Spirit!

The women in Lori Murphy's Tahitian Workshop had a blast last month!  We are following it up with an 8 week series of classes called an Introduction to Tahitian. 

Click here to register!
No experience necessary.
Begins September 3, 2014
Wednesday nights from 7 - 8 pm
September 3, 10, 17, 24 and October 8, 15, 22, 29

Congratulations to
Kumu Hula Michael Pili Pang,

Mu'olualani

and

 for the opening of their new home

Ka'opu'ulani Hale

908 Punahou Street
Honolulu, Hawaii

June Kaililani Tanoue

Kumu Hula

Taupouri Tangaro, PhD and Kumu Hula

Taupouri Tangaro:  Like many Oʻahu infants, I was born at Kapiʻolani [Hospital].  I was reared in Koʻolaupoko from infancy to 11 years of age.  My father, John Frias, is from Waiāhole Valley; my mother, Loisa Tangarō, is from Kaʻalaea.   The ahupuaʻa of Waikāne, Waiāhole, Kaʻalaea, Waiheʻe, Kahaluʻu, and ʻĀhuimanu are most familiar to me. At age 11 (1974) we moved to the ahupuaʻa of Waiākea, Hilo.  My tight valleys of Koʻolaupoko were exchanged for the panorama of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, with a little glow of fire over Kīlauea.  The regular storms of Koʻolaupoko were exchanged for earthquakes, sulfur blast, tidal waves and endless rain! My island in the ocean went from being Mokoliʻi (Chinamanʻs Hat), Kāneʻohe to Mokuola (Coconut Island), Hilo.

Kekuhi and I became acquainted in college, late 1980s, albeit I danced for her mother since 1982.  She and I became immediately best friends.  We realized that our old-soul characteristics liked each other.  We worked on many cultural projects together through Hālau O Kekuhi and through the University systems.  She was a lecturer at Hawaiʻi Community College, where her mother and father, Pualani and Edward Kanahele, served as professors. I worked at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Hawaiian Studies Department where I served as lecturer.  We married in 1995 and have 5 children. Today the eldest is in her early 30s and my youngest daughter is 11 years old.

Taupouri Tangaro:  My philosophy of hula is evolving continuously.  I firstly believe that hula is a dance that allows the spirit to connect beyond the human person dancing the hula...it connects to all life and has no limitation to see him/herself in every kind of environment around the world.  I believe that we need more dancers in this world of ours...I believe dance allows the spirit to truly live, and when the spirit lives the human is happy; and when the human is happy, the world becomes happy.  

Well-being requires first that we ask the deepest questions of ourselves. It requires that we journey toward the oldest mysteries of who we are.   It requires that we see and celebrate our selves in all life, the animate, the inanimate (although I believe everything is animate), the natural AND the fabricated, the local and the foreign.  Hula is only the door into a greater universe of understanding our core contribution to this universe.  If we contribute happily to this Uli, to this Universe, to this World Soul, we will know Happiness. Happiness is essential to wellbeing.  There are only really two emotions: Happiness and Fear.  Wellbeing flourishes in happiness; disease feeds, if not stems from a life of fear, for fear feeds stress...need we say anymore?

JKT: I read in Hana Hou Magazine that you direct a  program in Hula Studies at Hawaii Community College in Hilo.  How is the program doing? The article also talked about the ritual regalia of hula.  I loved what you said about the importance of rituals in hula - how they hone the body's relationship with the outside world.  Can you say more about that?

TT:  It was Dr. Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele who initiated the hula program here at Hawaiʻi Community College.  She informs me that it was the first ʻAha Hula o Hālaulani Hula Conference in Hilo ((2001) that helped her conceive this idea.  Post-conference she realized that although the choreography of hula is healthy worldwide, the spiritual foundations of hula needed to be strengthened.  The hula program was born out of this reality.  I was hired to give life to the unprecedented.  

Yes, hula has been taught as classes in academia for a number of decades prior to this, but not as a full fledged Associate in Applied Science and Associate in Arts 2-year college degrees.  What I did establish was a hālau foundation to teach the hula degree, doing so for greater than ten years.  This hālau I call UNUKUPUKUKUPU (Shrine of Ferns [Rooted in Fresh Lava]). Here we learn the hula ʻālaʻapapa, ʻōlapa, and ʻauana as foundational.  In the last semester the teach a special repertoire in chemical alignment to the cohort. Chants and protocol are largely emphasized in our program.  "Special Repertoire" has included the hula pahu, kiʻi, mānai, palaoa, lupe and others.  

After 10 years of teaching UNUKUPUKUPU I realized that the major emergence was the rise of personal and professional leadership experiences.  My dancers leave critically aware of their strength and weaknesses as a professional, as a parent, as a person.  Much attention is placed on the quality of life and of living, doing so through hula.  Once the spirit is engaged, we asked of ourselves all kinds of questions...many of the questions are not easy, as they require the dancer to look into the darkest part of our unlived selves.  

As for the ʻaʻahu, we have fun creating and innovating beyond the norm.  Yes, we do use traditional wear, but we are not contained by it.  Part of UNUKUPUKUPU is innovating from an informed foundation.  Here is an example of my latest creation I call TAGA that will soon enter into the UNUKUPUKUPU experience.

This corded ritual wear is a bit avant-garde, but it originates from traditional and very esoteric cord skirts of ancient Hawaiʻi.  The use of the cord aligns with one of our Hilo myths related to Kana, the demigod born a cord and considered worthless by his parents, who threw the cord in a pig pen.  The grandmother Uli (which means World Soul), saw Kanaʻs worth and cared for him.  His body grew into a long cord that was metaphoric of our long ʻiewe (birth cord) that connects us to every one of our mothers and grandmothers all the way back to World Soul herself, Uli!  So this is an example where to wear what I create requires the wearer to think beyond fashion, to think in the deepest/highest zones of knowing who we are in this universe.  This TAGA exhibit will be at HawCC for the entire 2014-2015 academic year.  

TT:  Hawaiʻi is plural geography in Oceania.  Samoa and Tahiti have their Hawaiʻi, as do the Aotearoa. Hawaiʻi has to do with the breath (hā) of water (wai).  This is spirit. Hawaiʻi is the space where the spirit goes after the body dies.  Aotearoa has defined this process very clearly.  We in this modern and highly technical age have separated spirit from space...this dichotomy is not Oceanic.  Space and Spirit are one... So Hawaiʻi is not just a geography; Hawaiʻi is also a condition of knowing our spirit. We donʻt have to physically die to experience Hawaiʻi, our spirit.

How do we use hula to access this spiritual condition? Well, choreography,  no matter how beautiful and ancient, can't do it alone.  We need to talk about what weʻre dancing.  We need to get beyond just the historical facts transmitted through hula...we need to enter a dialogue relating to the spirit. 

We need to understand that when we dance the ancient dances, we are not just keeping alive cultural and historical facts, but we allow all the ancestors who created the hula to live again through our bodies.  Once we can open up our mind, body and spirit to the reality that in our body are our ancestors, as well as our descendants, then hula is beyond an inventory of historical happenings.  Hula is now a door through which historical time does not exist.  We enter back into the cycle of living.  When I dance at times I know for a fact that my ancestors and my descendants are dancing with me....this is a powerful reality!!!!