You don't need to be in Hawaii to bring hula to life. For that matter, you don't even have to be Hawaiian.

Hula master Mahealani Uchiyama, who heads a dance company in Berkeley,
fell in love with hula when she moved to Hawaii to attend college. Chronicle photo by Mark Costantini

Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2004


Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire, would have to cross an ocean to behold this unlikely scene: two dozen hula dancers, chanting and swaying in her honor in a converted South San Francisco garage.

"O Kee-lau-ea!" they cried to the ethereal beat of Kawika Alfiche's gourd drum.

"It gets a little intense in here," he said.

Alfiche, a muscular man of 30 with a dark ponytail that hangs to his waist, is kumu, or teacher of the Aloha Pumehana O' Polynesia hula troupe or halau, which is performing at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival's opening weekend on June 12 and 13 at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. Two other companies, Mahealani Uchiyama's Berkeley-based KaUaTuahine Polynesian Dance Company, and 'Ote'a Api, of Fremont, led by kumu Anthony Waipa Manaois, will put on Tahitian dance programs on June 19-20 and June 26-27, respectively.

This year's festival lifetime achievement award -- renamed to honor the late dancer and musician Malonga Casquelourd, who was killed in a car accident just before last year's 25th anniversary festival -- is going to North Indian Kathak master and festival founder, Pandit Chitresh Das.

Aloha Pumehana has chosen as its theme Pele and her reputed fiery home, Kilauea Crater on the Big Island of Hawaii. One dance in particular, in the group's signature hula kahiko style, dramatizes Pele's wanderings from island to island, until she finds a satisfactory home on the southernmost island where Kilauea erupts to this day.

In the swoosh of the women's white cotton skirts and the sliding of bare feet on smooth floors, however, there is also a drama of a culture transplanted so far from home.

"It's not just the dance, but everything about the land, the language and how to be," Alfiche said. "Hula makes people better people."

There are dozens of halaus in the Bay Area striving to preserve the culture of the islands, and in the process, they have attracted many non- Hawaiians. Aloha Pumehana, for example, is 80 percent non-Hawaiian.

"People will say, 'You're Filipino American,' " said Kia'i Naurille, 42, one of the halau's senior members. "I ask them, 'Who else is helping to carry on the culture?' People from Hawaii thank us for doing this and that touches me."

Aliche himself, of Hawaiian, Filipino, Spanish and French descent, was born and raised in the Bay Area. But he has spent much of his life on the islands, where his family has roots, and believes those who live away from Hawaii feel its pull the most.

"I have a deeper appreciation of things Hawaiian," he said. "I cherish every day I get to spend at home." Home being Hawaii, he says.

That deep attachment took on new meaning in December, when Alfiche and a partner bought a nearly quarter-acre site in South San Francisco for use by the halau. On it was a small gray Victorian, a spacious grassy yard and a ramshackle garage. Seeing past the rotting garage roof and buckling walls, Alfiche saw a new dance studio and his vision was fulfilled with the help of the entire halau, which rolled up its sleeves and went to work, doing drywall and painting.

The scraggly yard, too, has been transformed. A water fountain bubbles into a tiered pool, and the adjoining yard is fringed with fledgling plantings of native Hawaiian flora that are carefully tended by the dancers. Surprisingly, the plants seem to thrive in the untropical climate. There are gnarly bulbs of Chinese taro, or kalo, in starter pots, as well as a profusion of lehua or scarlet bottle-brush blooms -- Pele's favorite flower -- and sheaths of white ginger.

"Plants are pretty smart," Alfiche said. "They know how to adjust to their surroundings."

Since the move, the kumu has created the Aloha Pumehana O' Polynesia Cultural Center, or APOP. With additional income from Kaleo Cafe, a Hawaiian- style coffee shop in the Sunset district he and some halau members own, Alfiche hopes to devote his full time to the center, which he hopes will spread the Hawaiian culture through hula classes, workshops and performance productions.

"We want to take it a step further," he said.

In Berkeley, Mahealani Uchiyama, whose KaUaTuahine Polynesian Dance Company appears during the festival's second weekend, is also spreading the spirit of hula.

A Washington, D.C., native, Uchiyama, 46, is a statuesque African American woman who first embraced hula when she moved to Hawaii as a college student. By the time she left the islands in the early 1980s, she had a bachelor's degree in dance ethnology and a master's degree in Pacific island studies from the University of Hawaii, and studied under hula master Joseph Kamoha'i Kaha'ulelio.

While at the university, she married her first husband, a Japanese American, and took on a new first name as well, Mahealani, which means, "the second night of the full moon."

Moving to California in 1982, Uchiyama taught hula and opened her award- winning Center for International Dance in Berkeley. Her group, KaUaTuahine, is well known in the Bay Area. Two years ago, it traveled to Tahiti to study and perform with one of Tahiti's premier dance ensembles, Orihere Maohi.

Uchiyama's skill is in both hula and Tahitian dance.

"I love them both very much," she said. "They both celebrate culture and community but they're also very distinct. Tahitian, because of the music style, movement and costume, is probably more accessible to people. They're able to enjoy it without understanding what the dance is about. Hula has the same kind of power but it's not necessarily as accessible."

Like Alfiche, Uchiyama acknowledges the power of hula kahiko, the indigenous hula style with vigorous movements and group chanting that is much in favor today, as opposed to the more languorous, melodious Western-styled hula auana.

"In kahiko, people are appreciative of the layers, the patina of the last 100 years, stripped away from hula," she said. "It leaves you with the pure essence of what the dance started out as. I have nothing against the modern style when it's done well. But there's just something very ethereal and connective about kahiko."

Uchiyama's involvement with the islands began early -- as a 13-year-old she picked up James Michener's "Hawaii'' -- and has never left her. For her, the historical dispossession of native Hawaiians resonates with her own life.

"Even then, I was intrigued by this whole concept of people being hijacked from their whole land," she said. "Being African American and having a Native American grandmother, I related to it a lot and wanted to learn more."
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