A hō’ike in Virginia celebrates Hawaiian life

The hula dancers gathered behind the stage, their blouses white, skirts purple and feet bare. For months, they had prepared for this performance.

On the other side of the closed curtain at John R. Lewis High School in Springfield, Va., sat a crowd of at least 300 in the auditorium, all of them waiting for a trip, if only in sound and fleeting sight, to a place 4,500 miles away.

“PRESENTING: Legacy. Lineage. Lokahi,” read the program, concluding with the Hawaiian word for “unity.”

The tag line was a nod to the decade-long journey that had led to Halau Nohona Hawai’i’s annual ho’ike (meaning “to show”), an elaborate display of hula, chants and music.

Kaimana Chee performed his first hula at age 6 and has devoted much of his life since to preserving and promoting the culture of his native Hawaii. Chee, 46, is a kumu hula, or master instructor, and has taught the art form from Idaho to Japan.

“Hula, while it is used for entertainment,” Chee said, “there’s a sacred aspect to it.”

Chee is the co-founder of Halau Nohona Hawai’i’, based in Silver Spring, Md., and the event celebrated its 10-year anniversary. His father, Sadrian, was among a group that traveled from Hawaii to perform.

In American entertainment, hula is often reduced to “coconut bras and grass skirts,” Kaimana Chee said, but the dances have long been an essential form of storytelling and history-keeping for a people who went without a written language until the 1800s.

The performance of Ka Pilina was among the ho’ike’s highlights. It is a contemporary song (“mele,” in Hawaiian), ostensibly about the musicality of three birds and the forests where they reside, but its meaning is deeper than an English translation might suggest, Kaimana Chee said. It is, as he explained to his students, a composition “of relationships and family and fitting together.”

In the same way, each swoop of an arm, sway of a hip, pointed toe or faraway look had its own purpose, too.

Mallorie Haunani Flores Fiero is one of the performers of the Ka Pilina. She walked us through what the movements represent.

Fiero grew up in Southern California, born to Filipino parents who had emigrated to Hawaii and embraced its culture, a decision that shaped much of her childhood. Hula is among her first memories, when her mother started to teach her at age 4.

In 2016, she took a job with the Food and Drug Administration and moved to Maryland. At times, Fiero, 35, felt adrift, joining the Maryland group in search of the community she’d left behind.

“It was the first time in a long time where I felt like home,” Fiero said, hopeful that she and the other performers could offer that same sense, if only briefly, with the audience on Saturday. “To share in our community and … this Aloha spirit of love and coming together.”

More from the Post

Lahaina survivors come together to grieve months after Maui fires

Searching for Maura

Feeding the American dream with their Asian heritage

The latest from The Washington Post

Credits

Editing by Tara McCarty and Yu Vongkiatkajorn. Video by Sam Mallon for The Washington Post. Video editing by Whitney Leaming. Video producing by Jessica Koscielniak. Copy editing by Paola Ruano. Design editing by Christian Font.