A Merrie Monarch notebook
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Staff Writer
HILO, Hawai'i — A hula-loving reporter at the Merrie Monarch Festival hula competition is as happy and confused as a kid in a Baskin and Robbins store: Which rehearsals can I afford to miss so I can go check out the cool hula stuff at the craft fairs? Which performances will be the "oh wow" ones and which will leave me scratching my head? Who will I meet and talk to and — hey! isn't that Sig Zane over there?
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Here's a download from the last few days:
Men of Halau Ke Kia'i A 'O Hula were among Merrie Monarch Festival competitors last night in a program of kahiko, or ancient hula. Their dance depicted Hi'iaka's journey at the behest of her sister Pele. The Big Island festival ends tonight with modern hula and the awards ceremony.
—Ran into Wailana Mizumoto in the airport, known to all in Halau I Ka Wekiu as "Auntie Giggles." She was juggling carseats and diapers and one really cute kid as she traveled alone with granddaughter Hi'ipoi Chong, whose mommy, Hokulani Chong, is a front-of-the-line dancer with Karl Veto Baker and Michael Casupang's Honolulu-based halau. She said Hoku danced, very pregnant, in a Feb. 9 fundraiser for Wekiu and was told backstage by someone wise that she would have her baby next day, even though the little one wasn't due until Feb. 22. Hi'ipoi made her appearance Feb. 10. Hoku looked great in rehearsal the other day, as did her hula sisters, fine-turning their kahiko number, Mele Kahili, which involves some complex choreography, kneeling hula and a vigorous hip workout.
—The Merrie Monarch T-shirt this year is purple and features the standard design of a screen-printed lei, pikake this time. Miss Aloha Hula Jennifer Oyama's mother, Caroline Oyama, said she saw the shirt at an event at the Bishop Museum earlier this year, where Chinky Mahoe's halau was selling it as a fundraiser and had one of those moments of presentiment: Jenn's favorite color is purple and her favorite flower is pua pikake. "I thought, maybe this is her year." And it was.
—Got a tour of the KITV broadcast trailers the other morning from Merrie Monarch broadcast director John Wray and was reminded of nothing so much as a tour I once took of a submarine. Editing bays, a concert-quality sound mixing operation, a multi-screen production booth that mimics the one back at KITV's headquarters in all but size — all of these are squeezed into a pair of spaces that would fit in my hotel room at the Naniloa. (And this is not a big room.) There's one guy charged with doing nothing but listening to all the sound feeds (boom mikes aimed at the chanters, the musicians' speakers, the mikes of the various TV announcers and commentators and the Edith Kanaka'ole Stadium's P.A. system) and blending them into a smooth, properly balanced sound. Another guy tends to the color in a process that's called in TV-talk "painting" — making sure, with help from Wray in his headphones, that the colors you see on TV are true to the ones we see in the stadium.
—If you are among those who enjoy watching the men of Chinky Mahoe's Halau Hula O Kawaili'ula, you will not be disappointed. Both the numbers allow ample opportunity for the testesterone to flow: One is a food song full of boyish joie de vivre as the men fish for their supper, another is full of bravado as Kamapua'a, the pig god, once again gets in hot lava with the goddess Pele.
—Always at Merrie Monarch we amateurs try to handicap the race, and always we fail miserably. Every year, it seems, there are performances that to our eyes look like out-and-out winners that don't get the nod. This is to be expected; what excites the crowd may not please the trained eye. For quite a few folks sitting where I was near the stage, both dances of young Cialyn Kukona-Pacheco, a Baldwin High Senior from Maui who dances with Ke'ala Kukona's Kano'eau Dance Academy, were unforgettable.Wearing white and a luminous smile and looking extraordinarily young, Cialyn got an assist from the earth-shaking chanting of Charles Ka'upu on "Hanohano Wailua Nui a Ho'ano," her kahiko number, and showed a strong chanting voice herself. For her modern-style finale, "Ka Wahine Lewa I Ke Kai" ("The Woman Dancing in the Sea"), she worked the stage with strength and poise, crouching deeply, tiptoeing lightly and eliciting frequent outbreaks of applause and approving outcries.
—Lovers of tradition who were looking forward to Gabrielle Yamashita's performance of "Hi'ilawe" during the 'auana section got instead an intriguing and daring (and probably dooming) departure from all things customary. Yamashita wore a green satin bra and grass skirt with a beautifullly woven belt in browns and greens and sported truly immense hair vegetation. The song began with a ka'i and ended with a ho'i that was beautifully rendered by singers, including an amazingly daring hula dancer in his own right, Kaumakaiwa Lopaka Kakanaka'ole (yes, those Kanaka'oles); it was so full of wooo-wooos and throbbing drums that you expected Martin Denny bird calls any minute. Altogether, it seemed to me a sort of throwing down of a guantlet, in a very dainty way, reclaiming even tiki culture for Hawaiians, saying, "This is ours, too, and we can do it better." And she did.
