Hula's newest queen loves dance

By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor

After winning the Miss Aloha Hula title, Jennifer Oyama, center, rehearses hula kahiko on Friday with the rest of Halau Na Mamo 'O Pu'uanahulu. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

For the next four hours she dreamed hula, as she had done every night for months, only this time, the dream ended by coming true: She is Miss Aloha Hula 2003, the highest modern-day honor for a solo female hula dancer.

Oyama's triumph lasted roughly the amount of time it took to receive the award, pile into the car and head up the hill to Volcano after the competition, which went on until well past midnight.

Within two hours of arising, she was on the floor in a T-shirt, loose pants and Halau Na Mamo Pu'uanahulu's green-and-white printed pa'u skirt, stretching aching muscles. Kumu hula Sonny Ching's stern alaka'i, or seconds-in-command, put the dancers through a rigorous workout that had them sweating even in the chill air of the Kilaue'a Military Camp at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, where the halau always spends Merrie Monarch week, away from distractions of craft fairs, friends and family.

This, the hula pa, the sanctuary where all things serve hula, is exactly where the 1999 Kalani High School graduate wants to spend a part of every possible day, now and for the rest of her life. "It's the happiest place on earth," she said.

She is 'olapa — recognized as a skilled member of the troupe, a front-liner. But she doesn't aspire to be an alaka'i or kumu hula, though if it comes to her, she'll accept it.

"I just want to be able to dance my whole life. If I can do that, I'll be happy," she said over a breakfast of papaya and juice in the camp cafeteria. "I just love sharing the culture. I'm not too good at storytelling, but give me a hula to dance and I'll gladly tell you that story."

Although she has harbored the Miss Aloha Hula vision ever since she came to Merrie Monarch with a keiki hula group when she was 7 or 8 years old, Oyama is an unlikely choice for this honor, let alone the coveted Office of Hawaiian Affairs' Hawaiian Language Award, which she also captured in a tie with two others.

She is one-sixteenth Hawaiian on her mother's side. She didn't attend Kamehameha Schools or a Hawaiian-language immersion program. She's not a "legacy" — someone whose mother or older sisters have been Miss Aloha Hula (as was third runner-up Shelsey Ai). The extent of her Hawaiian is, in fact, "hula Hawaiian"; she, like many others, is carefully coached in the pronunciation and meaning of the chants and songs they perform, but she is not a fluent speaker. And in contrast to many contestants, whose coaching begins a year in advance or more, Oyama didn't begin preparation of her two dances in earnest until after New Year's.

Ching chose for her a kahiko (traditional) chant about Hi'iaka's encounter with the god who inhabits what we today call the Crouching Lion rock formation on O'ahu's North Shore. And he found the contemporary Hawaiian number "Ka Manu Kikaha Olu," about the song of a gliding bird, for her.

Then in February, Oyama suffered a knee injury and had to lay off dancing for almost a month. She almost missed the halau bonding trip, a hike out to Ka'ena Point, which figures in the Hi'iaka story. But she insisted on going, wearing Ching's knee brace, leaning on her mother and stopping to rest every half-mile or so of the five miles.

"She feels as a Miss Aloha Hula candidate, she has to be an example to the others," said her mother, Patricia Oyama.

Illness aside, the real barrier to Oyama's Miss Aloha Hula win was her chanting. "She's always been a strong dancer, but her voice was what we had to bring out," said alaka'i Lopaka Igarta-DeVera, who worked with her to bring her voice down deep into her throat, to attain the desired low, hollow sound. In the old style, he and Ching took her to the ocean to pit her voice against the waves.

Oyama, who works at a swimming-pool company with her mother and brother, found out only recently that Ching had meant to make her a Miss Aloha Hula candidate ever since she begged her mother to call him and enroll her in his school nine years ago.

And when the moment came, said Oyama, "I knew it was my stage. I knew I needed to own it. I just felt I was Hi'iaka, traveling through her land."