Merrie Monarch Ho‘ike
Last night was the Exhibition night, the Ho‘ike, of the Merrie Monarch Hula Festival. It’s also the free night; no tickets required.
It’s always wonderful, and it seems like ALL of Hilo attends. People start lining up in the morning for the 6 p.m. event.
We got there in the afternoon, and found seats in section G, which is in the back, but not too far, near where the Royal Court sits.
My daughter, who’s 6 now, just loves watching hula. She was thrilled to see that the chanter, as the Royal Court was entering, was her Hawaiian language teacher from Kamehameha Schools, and waved shyly to him from her seat though there was no way he could have seen.
We just stayed for the first performance, because she needed to get home to bed. But that first performance! It was Halau O Kekuhi, and my daughter is in their keiki class. She loved seeing what the grownups, and the older keiki, did up on that stage.
“Will I get to dance on that stage?” she asked me. “If you stay with hula until you are that age, you might, yes,” I replied. “I WILL,” she told me fervently. She has said that many times before. She always wants to keep dancing hula, she tells me.
She is very focused about it. She’s only gone for a couple months, but she knows the songs and the dances and practices them at home of her own volition. I only realized she knows all that by heart when I saw her practicing them at home.
There is something about the Merrie Monarch. I twittered from there last night, and wrote about the beautiful scent of plumeria filling the stadium, and how my daughter has perfected, at her young age, the shriek-cheer while applauding.
I tweeted about the perfect tribute they had to three very important hula people who died recently. It represented Aunty Dottie Thompson’s white lauhala hat and Uncle George Na‘ope’s gold one. There was an oversized pair of sunglasses like the ones kumu hula Rae Fonseca always wore on his head, too.
And I noted the immense feeling of respect that fills that enormous stadium. Thousands of people with such aloha for the cultural history that is hula. I think that’s half the reason I go. To feel that.
