Posted on: Wednesday, March 30, 2005

MERRIE MONARCH 2005 ONLINE DIARY • DAY ONE
Halau put finishing touches on performances

By Wanda Adams
Assistant Features Editor

Tuesday, March 22, 2005.

HILO, Hawai'i — The theme song of this 42nd annual Merrie Monarch Festival may be an old Keola Beamer number: "...in the pouring Hilo rain." It's been wet and gray here, with only occasional breaks, since I arrived Sunday afternoon.

The rain here is a force: Sitting in my hotel room on Sunday, I heard a sound that at first I couldn't identify — a susurration that rose in volume and drew me to a window to see a wall of rain moving inland, falling so hard that the lagoon outside the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel was pockmarked with seawater splashing up to mingle with rainwater.

Friends who live here say the sound of Hilo is rain pounding on a corrugated tin roof. But right now, Tuesday midday, the sound of Hilo is the one I hear outside my hotel room window: Kaipo Frias' Hilo Community College Hawaiian Studies students chanting so strongly in a downstairs meeting room that I can hear them clearly though my balcony door on the third floor. They're among many non-competitive groups offering hula performances around town this week for the mere aloha of it.

Over at Edith Kanaka'ole Tennis Stadium, the stage is reserved in blocks of rehearsal time from morning to the middle of the night, as hula schools prepare for the three-day hula competition that begins Thursday night with the Miss Aloha Hula event.

Today, Keali'i Ceballos of Halau Keali'i O Nalani of Los Angeles, Calif., was putting the finishing touches on his kane and wahine performances. A challenge for halau is that many have only a few opportunities to perform with the musicians who will play for them. Halau Keali'i has all-star accompaniment: Hoku Award-winning Na Palapalai singing the standards "Kane'ohe" and "Na 'Ono O Ka 'Aina," with the added voice power of Kaumaka'iwa "Lopaka" Kanaka'ole. The young student and recording artist, son of Kekuhi Kanahele, adds a layer of the chant-like singing that characterizes the mele of his talented family. (His new CD, "Welo,' is just out, by the way.)

Other familiar voices you'll hear during the hula competition include Keali'i Reichel, Ho'okena and the Makaha Sons, if all goes according to schedule. Na Palapalai is practically the Merrie Monarch house band this year, accompanying a half-dozen performances.

Also rehearsing today are participants in Wednesday's free, non-competitive Ho'ike (hula performance) hosted by the Kanaka'ole 'ohana and Halau O Kekuhi, and featuring halau from as far away as Japan as well as homeboy Johnny Lum Ho's beloved Halau Ka Ua Kani Lehua.

All over town, the signs of Merrie Monarch are sprouting like toad stools on the soggy lawns: Volunteers are selling bright blue Merrie Monarch T-shirts and tote bags and a really cool new poster in the hotel lobbies. In the showroom of designer Sig Zane's downtown Hilo shop, the racks and shelves and lauhala baskets are piled high with clothes and accessories rushed into production for this Christmas-in-April event — by Friday, you'll be lucky to find anything left. At lunch yesterday at Cafe Pesto, I ran into designer Nake'u Awai, who'll have a booth at the official arts and crafts fair at the Civic center. I also ran into a high school friend, a guy I knew in Seattle and some Honolulu acquaintances — all the world is heading for Hilo, it seems. I fully expect to lose my parking space just outside the hotel door today; these are reserved for the vans and buses of visiting halau.

John Wray, producer of KITV's Merrie Monarch TV coverage, notes that it's interesting how various halau use their rehearsale time on the stage: Some approach it reverently, spending precious time praying, singing and chanting, before they begin to rehearse. Others choreograph their time tightly, with every minute taken up in active rehearsing — the men queuing up to get on stage even as the women leave it, for example. Last year's overall winners Na Lei O Kaholoku, drove over enmasse from their homes in Waikoloa across the island on Saturday, rehearsed once, and won't be back until Friday's group kahiko competition.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Big Island Candies — without those chocolate-dipped cookie omiyage my colleagues might not let me back in the newsroom next week!

Tomorrow's online journal: Craft fairs start and Ho'ike launches official dance events.