Ladies Home Journal
Life Stories/Passions
April 2003

Photo by Eric Millette

Hula Hoopla
Steve Dougherty

Her hips sway to the rhythms of the sea and wind, her hands flutter like birds in flight, and her arms trace the arc of the sun and stars. A 45-year old of African-American lineage, Mahealani Uchiyama doesn't just practice the ancient Hawaiian art of hula; as unlikely as her background suggests, the sinewy, dreadlocked 6-footer is a kumu hula - an award-winning dance master and teacher. And we're not talking about shimmying in coconut-shell bras or Don Ho and "Tiny Bubbles". Real hula isn't just sweet 'ukulele music about little grass shacks," Uchiyama says. "Sometimes it's ballads, sometimes it's fierce, with drums and chanting. But it always has a sence of the sacred.

Born Ricalda Coffey, the daughter of a nurse and a police officer, Uchiyama was raised in a gritty Washington, D.C. neighborhood, where her mother introduced her to ballet at the age of 2. While she loved her plies and arabesques, "as I got older, I became aware that there weren't any black ballerinas," Uchiyama says.

After reading James Michener's Hawaii at 13, she took hula classes at a storefront in Bethesda, Maryland, and instantly knew that her tutu and tiptoe days were behing her. "Hula, which is used to impart ancient Hawaiian history and myths, appeals to me because you tell stories with your hands," she says. Having gone to a segregated grade school and still smarting from racial discrimination, she also saw Hawai'i as a haven of ethnic diversity. "To me, it was a place where the things espoused by the civil rights movement were actually working, she says. "And with hula, I felt more accepted than I did when I took ballet."

Uchiyama enrolled at the University of Hawai'i in 1976, where she met and married a Japanese-American fellow student and rechristened herself Mahealani, a Hawaiian word meaning "the second night of the full moon." After receiving her master's degree in Pacific Islands Studies, she moved to Oakland, California, and apprenticed with a local hula master. In 1987, Uchiyama's ensemble became the first mainlanders to win a prize in a Hawaiian competition.

Ten years ago, Uchiyama opened her own school in Berkeley, where she teaches more than 100 students, most of the female - Asians and Hispanics, teenagers to septuagenarians, doctors to homemakers. Uchiyama, (whose son Hoku, 21, from her first marriage, attends an arts college in Southern California), has no doubts that hula will always feel like home. "It engages me completely," she says, "mind, body and spirit."