Hula: The Body as Living Prayer

Hiʻiaka dances.

She dances on the cliffs above the caldera while her sister Pele watches — or Pele asks her to dance, or Laka, the forest goddess who is the patron of hula, teaches her the movements on the forest floor while the lehua blossoms fall around them. The origin stories are multiple because the art is too large for one founding moment. What is consistent is that the first hula was a divine act, performed between divine beings, for purposes that were simultaneously worship and communication and presence.

The hands tell one story. In kahiko hula — the ancient style, performed with percussion and chant rather than guitar — the hands are the primary vocabulary. Each gesture has a precise meaning: the movement of the hands like rain falling describes rain. The hands sweeping outward like ocean waves describe the ocean. The hands turning inward and curving describe a fish hook, a wave crest, a mountain, a cloud formation. Each gesture is not a symbol for these things — it is a translation of them into the body’s language. To watch a dancer perform is to watch the natural world being spoken with human hands.

The feet hold the form. The steady rhythm of the steps — the same rhythm carried in the ipu gourd drum and the pahu sharkskin drum — is the earth’s rhythm, the heartbeat of the island. The dancer does not float; she is rooted. The earth is in her feet and the sky is in her hands and she is the medium between them, the living meeting point of the two forces that Tāne separated in the Māori tradition and that in the Hawaiian tradition remain in constant conversation.

Laka’s altar is in the forest. Before a company of dancers begins their season of performance, they build the altar — an arrangement of green plants and sacred items — and they ask Laka’s permission and blessing. The hula that follows is Laka’s hula, performed under her authority. Without the altar and the asking, the dance is just movement. With them, it is prayer.

The missionaries who arrived in Hawaii in the 1820s saw the hula and understood it — correctly — as the physical embodiment of a religious system incompatible with Christianity. They worked to suppress it. Queen Kapiʻolani’s 1894 request for the revival of hula marked the beginning of the tradition’s return, though the knowledge that was lost during the suppression period has never been fully recovered.

What did survive, and what the revival movements of the twentieth century worked to restore, is the philosophical principle at hula’s center: the body is a medium, not a display. The dancer who performs a hula is not showing you something. She is doing something — she is performing the act of translation between the divine world and the human world, making the invisible visible in the most complete medium available, which is the living body in motion.

The hands that describe rain are the rain, briefly. The feet that beat the rhythm of the earth are the earth, briefly. The dancer is the meeting point of everything that is being named, the place where the names are called back into being as presence rather than language.

When the performance ends and the altar is dismantled and the dancers leave the forest floor, what they leave behind is not absence. It is the reverberation of what the body spoke — the after-presence of a prayer that was made in the most complete form available to any human being.