What The Hell Is That Noise?

Tahitian Dance involves some great costuming.

For the past few years I have been dancing hula. No, not with hula hoops, I mean real Hawaiian Hula. When I turned my most recent decade, I took on two challenges: one was being able to lap swim (see September 13, 2011) and the other was to learn to dance hula.  Fortunately, there is a hula halau in the area I live in. A halau is essentially a school where hula is taught, along with Hawaiian culture.

I went into this challenge thinking I would learn a few dances and that would be it. Little did I know that my first class would turn into years of classes, several local performances, and one on-stage performance with a Hawaiian bigwig steel guitar legend, Keola Beamer.

To show you just how naive, ignorant, clueless...you supply the adjective, I was going in to my first hula class, when the Kumu (teacher) stated we were learning the “Beamer” style of hula, I was thinking: smooth, classy, you know - like a “BMW B’mer”. What an idiot.  No, the Beamer style is named after its founder, Helen Desha Beamer.  Yes, the Beamer style is very smooth, but there is more to it than just that.

Along with taking a dance class, the first in my life, I was also thrust into learning the Hawaiian language. While some songs have English lyrics, many do not and all the ancient hulas, or Kahiko, have Hawaiian lyrics. I have found that my mouth struggles with this language. I find myself wishing for a consonant here and there to break up the sometimes three or more vowels strung together.

Although dancing hula is a continuing education in both dance and language, another type of dance often lures hula dancers. Tahitian hula. Now, what I have noticed in watching live or YouTube Tahitian dancers is that these women are thin, young, and look really fit. Check out this YouTube video for an amazing performance:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKFR1IMIio&feature=related


Seeing this, I am thinking: Hey, if I learn Tahitian maybe I could lose some weight and keep fit too. Great idea in the head, and probably still a good idea in practice. But, as I have discovered, perhaps I should rethink learning Tahitian in a class setting.

A hula friend, who is also a great Tahitian dancer, showed me one simple basic step to get started. The ami, which is the hip circle. I’ve got the Hawaiian hula ami down pretty good, but the Tahitian ami is much, much, much faster. I have found that when the hips start really going my upper body starts to compensate. This has not been an issue for me with my slower Hawaiian amis (at least not in the past year or so). To help you be aware of what your upper body is doing, it is helpful to practice amis in front of a mirror.  

Wearing my pau skirt (these skirts are very full, not terribly flattering, but are the essential Hawaiian hula dress) I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, which is very large, and started the slow hip circle, then started speeding it up. Holding down my shoulders with my hands (picture the kid song,”head-shoulders-knees and toes”), I kept this up for about 30 seconds. This 30 seconds went okay, but how the heck was I going to keep this up during an entire dance was another question.

I took a break, watched another YouTube video of a basic Tahitian ami, demonstrated by a young thing with hardly any hips or fat on her body, and went back to my mirror.

This time proved a bit more successful. I was doing my ami faster and faster, fascinated by how much my stomach roll could follow my hips. While circling my hips, I began hearing a weird noise coming from...me. What was making that noise? Was it my skirt, my joints?  I started up again, listening closely. At low speed, no noise. As my speed got faster, the noise was more distinct.  

I took off my pau skirt, and tried again just wearing my underwear. Maybe the skirt was too full? It was while I was gyrating away, doing my best to do a fast Tahitian ami that I saw what was making the noise. My thighs were slapping together! Seriously, slapping in rhythm to the movement. Fascinating! Not cool fascinating, more like morbidly fascinating. The death of body tone. All that hula dancing and my thighs are still slapping away at each other.  

I am not through with trying to learn Tahitian hula, but I will not be attending any classes in an inside studio where my thigh slapping can be heard. I think learning this style of hula outside, on a beach, with loud crashing surf is the best scenario for me and my thighs. Hmm, actually that scenario is probably best for about everything I like to do.