31 Dec ‘Hula is my church’: how Patrick Makuakāne is reinvigorating Hawaii’s traditional dance

Victoria Namkung | The Guardian | Dec 31, 2023

Winner of the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2023 has forged his own style in San Francisco while often subverting stereotypes of hula itself

For Patrick Makuakāne, hula isn’t just a way to preserve his Native Hawaiian heritage. It’s also a way to create something new.

As the visionary leader of the San Francisco-based hula school and dance company Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu since 1985, Makuakāne has forged his own style of hula that blends traditional movements and chants with contemporary music, costumes and themes such as colonialism, sovereignty and gender fluidity – while often subverting stereotypes about hula itself.

Makuakāne’s hula mua (“hula that evolves”) has included performances such as Salva Mea, a collective dance set against progressive house music that depicts the devastation Christian missionaries caused in 19th-century Hawaii and long-form narrative pieces like Māhū, a collaboration with Hawaiian transgender guest artists that spotlights the respect given to third-gender people in ancient Hawaii society. He’s also created hula to Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

For this work as a kumu hula, or master hula teacher, the MacArthur Foundation named Makuakāne a 2023 fellow, often known as the “genius” award.

Makuakāne believes we need to reframe the conversation around tradition as being something immobile because “traditions morph and change depending on the environmental influence”. He sees himself as preserving the traditions of Hawaii’s culture as well as its innovations, something he believes is only possible in a place like San Francisco, which he calls “a good place to experiment”.

“If I was in LA or New York, or even Hawaii, I would not be getting this [MacArthur Foundation] award,” he said. “There’s something special about weird and wonderful San Francisco that allows me to really think about hula on another level.”

University of Michigan professor Amy Stillman, a historian of Pacific Islands performance traditions, agrees. “I really think a big part of why Patrick has achieved what he’s achieved is because he’s not in Hawaii,” said Stillman, a two-time Grammy award winner for best Hawaiian music album. “There’s a huge Hawaiian community up and down the whole west coast, so he has a community looking over his shoulder, but not breathing down his neck. He doesn’t have the tradition police reining him in.”

Stillman said she was always excited to see something new in the world of hula because it speaks to a fearlessness to experiment. “Patrick’s experiments, for me, are always aesthetically off the charts,” she said. “It’s not just the dancing, but the costuming, the staging, the lighting, the presentation – he’s really a holistic artist in that sense.”

In past decades, there was what Stillman described as a “freezing effect” in regards to hula. “Tradition was something to be mummified,” she said. “Patrick was part of the vanguard that believed that we didn’t have to be held to only what we have received.”

Although the dance and arts community in San Francisco has been aware of Makuakāne’s unique artistry for years, he was shocked to learn that the MacArthur Foundation was aware as well. But when it came time for Makuakāne to receive one of the biggest phone calls of his life, he was in the remote Nevada desert without cellular service for the Burning Man festival.

“A random text somehow snuck in that someone from the MacArthur Foundation was trying to reach me about an important time-sensitive matter,” said Makuakāne, who ended up trapped at the site for days since heavy rains had made the road out impassable. “I’m thinking, what the hell are they calling me for?”

So Makuakāne left his camp and hiked through thick mud to get to the rangers station where he could access wifi, but when he returned the foundation’s call, no one answered. It wasn’t until days later, once he got back home to San Francisco, that the 62-year-old learned the news.

Makuakāne, who will receive a no-strings-attached $800,000 grant, said he hopes to use some of the award to move back to Hawaii for a couple of months to collaborate with other cultural practitioners he admires.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Makuakāne describes his father as “pure Hawaiian” and his white mother as “pure Philadelphia”. He was first exposed to hula at age 10, during a one-week cultural exploration camp hosted by a local school. There, he learned Hawaii sports, games, singing and philosophy.

“It filled me up, but the one class I hated was hula,” Makuakāne said. “It was mostly because the instructor was a flamboyant gay man and it scared me. That was my own internalized homophobia.” Makuakāne would later come out as gay himself.

When Makuakāne got to high school, he joined the Hawaii club because he wanted to sing, but he didn’t want to dance hula. His renowned teacher, John Keola Lake, told him otherwise. “In this club, you dance hula and you sing, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,” he recalled Lake saying.

After two weeks, a teenaged Makuakāne was hooked. “Hula was the portal that opened the door for me to express myself as a Native Hawaiian man,” he said. “I knew from then on that this was going to be my life.”

Makuakāne later joined an all-male hula school owned by the Hawaii music icon Robert Cazimero, which was groundbreaking at the time because hula was still thought of as a domain for women. “I saw them dance and it was beyond imaginable what men could do with hula,” said Makuakāne. “It was incredibly athletic, graceful and artful.” He stayed with the group for about 10 years.

In 1985, love brought Makuakāne to San Francisco. He thought he’d last about a year in the city before going back to the islands, but he realized he could stay connected to his heritage and form a new community on the mainland through hula.

Since opening his own school more than 35 years ago, he’s taught hula to thousands of students from northern California who are connected to Hawaii in some way, while others have no real ties to the islands but they appreciate the multilayered art form. He’s quick to encourage anyone to come to class, even if they aren’t Hawaiian. “The hula schools in Hawaii are just as mixed as the hula schools here,” he said.

After beginning intensive traditional studies in 2000 with legendary hula teacher Mae Kamāmalu Klein in Hawaii, Makuakāne was named a kumu hula in 2003. “The easiest thing for people to understand is that I’m a hula teacher, but it’s way more than that because when I think of the relationship I have to my kumu, it is the most reverential relationship I have in my life. It outranks any other relationship that I have with anyone else.”

When the Maui wildfires broke out in early August, people grieved for the Native Hawaiian cultural losses in addition to the tragic deaths. “The reason for a lot of what’s happened in Hawaii is we’ve moved away from the sustainable way of living that was part of our culture,” said Makuakāne. “That’s because of western civilization, the tourism industry, making way for golf courses and diverting water from fish ponds. If anything, what I hope [the fire] does is provide us an opportunity to restart and think of ways we can make Lahaina the fertile place that it once was.”

For people grieving losses from the Maui fires or anything else for that matter, hula can be a healing practice, according to Makuakāne. “When you’re in community and you’re dancing and you’re responsible for one another, there’s a healing, loving aspect to that,” he said. “I consider hula my church because hula was always on Sundays. I tell people if they’re sad to come to hula and feel its healing energy.”

In addition to being a kumu hula at his school, Makuakāne serves as a spiritual and cultural adviser for the Native Hawaiian Religious Group at San Quentin state prison. “It was really one of the most uplifting and heart-rending and fulfilling experiences of my life teaching these guys and to see them coming to themselves and see them value this as a place of community,” he said.

“In hula, the wide spectrum of human emotions is covered. It’s really encompassing; I’m still learning, even 50 years into it. And I love it.”

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