Aloha, and welcome. My name is Leilani Kahale. I was born and raised on Oʻahu, I began dancing hula when I was five years old under my grandmother's kumu, and I have been teaching here in San Jose since 1988, first in my living room and since 1993 at the community center, where our hālau (that is the word for a hula school) now has about sixty haumana, students, from age five to age eighty-one.

This page is for the beginner: the person who has seen hula at a luau or on a vacation and thought "I would like to know what that means," and for the parents of a child who wants to try. I have put here what I would tell you on your first night. It is not a substitute for a teacher, and hula cannot be learned from a page, or from a videotape. It is learned from a person, in a room, with other people, over years. But you can read this and know what you are walking into, and I hope, why it matters.

The first thing to understand is that hula is not decoration for music. It is the other way around. Every hula is danced to a mele, a chant or a song, and the mele has words, and the words say something: about a place, a rain, a chief, a flower, a lover, a voyage. The dancer's job is to tell that story with her body so that a person who understands the words sees them, and a person who does not understand the words can nearly guess.

So in hula, the hands tell the story and the feet keep the time. The feet are the ground: they hold the rhythm, they move you gently from place to place, and they are, honestly, the harder thing to learn well, because they must be steady and low and soft for a whole song while the upper body stays quiet. The hands and arms and face carry the meaning. When my haumana ask why we spend the first month on feet alone, that is the answer. You cannot tell a story if you are falling over.

Before there was writing in Hawaiʻi, the mele and the hula carried the history, the genealogies, the names of the winds and rains of each district. They still do. When you learn a hula properly you learn the words, what they mean, who composed them and why, and where the place in the song is. Then you dance it. That order is not optional in my hālau.

Here are the three steps every beginner learns first. In all of them the knees are bent, the back is straight, the shoulders are still, and the weight is low. If your knees are straight, you are not doing hula; you are standing.

Everything in the first two months comes back to these. We do them in a line, facing the mirror, to the beat of my ipu (a gourd drum) and then to a song, again and again, until you can do them without thinking. Then we add the hands.

The hand motions are not a code where one gesture equals one word, but they are close to it, and many of them will be clear to you the first time you see them. Here are some of the ones you will learn first, and what they say. In all of them the fingers are together, soft, and never stiff; the wrists are loose; and the eyes follow the hands, always, because where the dancer looks, the audience looks.

Two more things about the hands. First, the face is part of them: you smile when the song is happy, you do not smile when it is not, and you never, ever look at your own hands to check them. Second, the same motion, done at a different height, at a different speed, with a different face, means a different thing. That is why hula is not a code. It is a language, and you learn it the way you learn a language: slowly, from someone who speaks it.

You will hear these two words the first night, so here they are in general terms.

Hula kahiko is the old style: the hula that was danced before Western instruments came to the islands. It is performed to chant, not song, and to percussion: the ipu heke (a double gourd drum), the pahu (a drum with a sharkskin head), and the instruments the dancers themselves hold and play, like ʻuliʻuli (feathered gourd rattles), puʻili (split bamboo rattles) and ʻiliʻili (smooth stones, two in each hand). The movements are stronger, lower, more planted. The chanter and drummer, the hoʻopaʻa, are as important as the dancers. Kahiko is danced in traditional dress, and it is not a performance in the entertainment sense; it is closer to what a hymn is in a church. I do not teach kahiko to beginners, and when I teach it at all it is to students who have been with me for years and who have asked, and it is taught with protocol.

Hula ʻauana is the modern style, which grew up after the 1800s with the guitar, the ʻukulele, the steel guitar and the bass, and with songs sung in harmony rather than chanted. It is the hula most people have seen: the flowing arms, the sway, the long dresses, the flowers. It is the hula we begin with, and it is not "hula lite." The songs have meanings, the composers have names, and the discipline of the feet is the same. The beautiful, graceful thing you see at a luau, when it is done right, is years of work.

A little history, because it matters. In the 1800s, after the missionaries came, hula was discouraged and at times forbidden in public, and it was kept alive quietly, in families and country districts. King Kalākaua, in the 1880s, brought it back into the open and honored it at his court, and for that he is called the Merrie Monarch, and the great hula festival held in Hilo every spring is named for him. Every kumu hula teaching today comes down a line of teachers from someone who kept it alive in that quiet time. We do not forget it.

• A pāʻū. This is the practice skirt: long, full, gathered at the waist on elastic, to the ankle, in a plain cotton. It lets me see your knees and hips are doing the right thing, and it lets you feel the skirt move, which you will need later. We have loaners for your first month; after that, we sew them together at a Saturday workshop, and it costs about eight dollars in fabric. Men wear long shorts or pants that let the knees bend.
• A plain T-shirt. Nothing that hides your shoulders. I need to see them not moving.
• Bare feet. Always. Shoes come off at the door of the hālau, and this is respect, not a dress code.
• Hair tied back. Off the face. The eyes are part of the dance.
• No jewelry. Rings catch on skirts and watches catch on other dancers.
• Water. You will sweat more than you think, mostly in the knees.
• A notebook. You will be given the words to every song we dance, and their meanings, and you will write them down and keep them.

Flowers, lei, costumes and the like come much later, for hōʻike (our recital), and we make most of them ourselves. Do not buy a grass skirt. We will talk about that in the last section.

All classes are at the community center, in the big room upstairs. The fall session runs September 7 through December 4, with hōʻike on Saturday, December 11, when every class dances for the families. Tuition is $30 a month per person, $50 for a family, and nobody who wants to dance is turned away for money; speak to me.

Also this fall: the hālau dances at the community center's harvest festival on Saturday, October 16, in the afternoon, and at a senior residence on November 20. The pāʻū sewing workshop is Saturday, September 25, after keiki class; bring four yards of cotton and I will bring the machines. Come and watch any class before you join; just take your shoes off at the door and sit quietly along the wall.

I am asked, more than you would think, to come to a party and "teach everyone a quick hula," and I am shown, more than I would like, pictures of people in plastic grass skirts and coconut shells swinging their hips as a joke. I would like to say this gently and clearly.

Hula is the living culture of a living people. It is not a costume. It is not a party game, and it is not a joke, and the grass skirt and the coconut bra are not hula; they are a souvenir-shop idea of it that has done real harm to how the world sees Hawaiians. When you learn hula, you are being trusted with something that was nearly lost and that families kept alive at some cost. You will be asked to learn the words in a language that is not yours, to learn where the places in the songs are, and to dance them as they were made, without adding "your own thing." Some students find that hard. It is the point.

Here is what I ask of every haumana, and of anyone reading this who dances hula anywhere:

• Learn the meaning of every song before you dance it. Never dance words you do not understand.
• Do not change a hula you have been taught, and do not teach it to others without your kumu's permission. It is not yours to give away yet.
• Honor the hālau's protocol: shoes off, no gum, no stepping over the instruments, a quiet room, and the pule (prayer) that begins and ends our class, which you may join in your own way.
• If you are not Hawaiian, dance anyway, and welcome: hula is taught to everyone who comes with a good heart, and my own hālau is Filipino, Mexican, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, haole and Hawaiian. But dance as a guest in someone's house, with your shoes off.
• When you see hula done for a joke, say something kind and true. That is how it changes.

Mahalo for reading all the way down. If you have questions, or would like to come and sit along the wall on a Tuesday, write to me. A family here on GeoCities wrote a lovely page about their trip to Maui and the Big Island, and if you are going, go with open eyes; it is a beautiful place, and it is somebody's home.

E komo mai. Come in.