Posted on: Friday, April 16, 2004
TV hula producer captures essence of forest
By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor
Every year while the kumu hula research and the dancers rehearse, TV producer David Kalama makes his own preparations for the Merrie Monarch Festival hula competition.
This year, like a Hawaiian of old readying for a special ceremony, he sought the proper permissions and he went into the rain forest — specifically, the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on the Big Island's Hamakua Coast. There, he and his crew gathered film clips as their ancestors might have selected greenery or harvested feathers, editing hours of taping into nearly 20 short segments under the title "Mo'olelo Hakalau: The Hakalau Story."
They'll be shown tonight and tomorrow, framing TV coverage of the hula competition as flowers in a lei haku nestle in a bed of palapalai fern.
Kalama is an independent contractor hired by KITV Channel 4 to produce the station's three nights of coverage of the prestigious hula contest. In addition to doing features on each of the Miss Aloha Hula candidates, seen last night, he also sets a theme each year and tells a cultural story within the few precious minutes he's allotted between performances.
He created a groundbreaking all-in-Hawaiian series of vignettes for the program the year the first Hawaiian language immersion students graduated from high school. He did another on the Hawaiian moon calendar and the way it governed hunting and fishing activities in traditional times.
This year, he had had in mind something related to the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, but then he heard a presentation on forest birds by wildlife biologist Jack Jeffrey.
"I thought, that's it, this is the year we're going to do it — the forest. I have a list in my head of the elements I want to cover — the ocean is one, the forest was another. It just happens to have been the Year of the Hawaiian Rainforest; I didn't know that until I got started but that just convinced me even more," Kalama said.
He received permission to film in the forest — rare access because the area is off-limits except to biologists and volunteers.
"We started filming last September, and now it's become a monster," said Kalama, who originally planned to do eight pieces but now has 17.
"The forest is the domain of Laka, the goddess of hula, and it was a sacred place to the Hawaiians," explained Kalama. And it was restricted — "not everybody could go into the forest and pick whatever they wanted. Hawaiians were very well aware of its importance as a watershed and it was the source of medicinal plants, feathers for the capes the ali'i wore, trees for the tiki images."
Kalama's finely honed series manages to tell a lot in just one minute here, 90 seconds there. Viewers learn that the 33,000-acre preserve was created in 1985 from former Shipman Ranch lands, after a mapping project showed that the remaining bird habitat didn't match up with existing national parks and preservers.
We meet the preserve's caretakers, including horticulturist Baron Horiuchi, biologist Jeffrey and manager Richard Wass, who offer insight into the process of re-establishing healthy natural cycles in a forest whose history was interrupted by 100 years of ranching.
Much attention is paid to the former pasture lands, where more than a quarter of a million tree seedlings have been planted and where, in a hundred years or so, the forest is expected to flourish again.
