Catalina Museum looks at a different island tradition
Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman is the guest curator of the exhibition and a professor of American culture and music at the University of Michigan.
`SKIRTING ISSUES: HULA MOVES STATESIDE'
When: Saturday through autumn. 10a.m.-5p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays
Where: Catalina Museum for Art & History, 217Metropole Ave., Avalon
Tickets: $18 general, $25 for older adults, $12 for Catalina Island residents, free for children 15 or younger
Tickets and more info: catalinamuseum.org
While hula is typically associated with a vacation getaway to the Hawaiian islands, Southern Californians can take the much shorter trip over to Santa Catalina Island to discover more about the culturally rich dance.
The Catalina Museum for Art & History is taking a deeper look at hula in its new exhibition, “Skirting Issues: Hula Moves Stateside,” which opens March 18. The exhibition explores Hawaiian dance using mainly historical photographs, with postcards and other ephemera to document the history of the island dance.
“It's an entire cultural system of practices around the creation of teaching and transmitting and preserving of skills in dance choreography and vocal performance,” said Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, guest curator of the exhibition and a professor of American culture and music at the
University of Michigan. “People think it's dance, but there's this whole system of protocols around how it's taught and preserved.”
Hula is a rhythmic dance defined by movement of the hips and hand gestures accompanied by chants and drumming that are meant to tell a story.
It has been a part of Hawaiian culture for hundreds of years and has been used as a way of passing knowledge from generation to generation.
Among the items on display at the exhibition are historic black and white photographs dating back as far as the 1880s showing hula dancers on the islands, as well as sheet music published at the turn of the 20th century that was meant to show the significance of the dance before it became a familiar site for tourists visiting the islands.
The exhibition also touches on the more stereotypical images of hula, with postcards showing dancers under palm trees and performing for tourists.
“This exhibit was a rare opportunity to be able to address, head on, the kinds of stereotypes that have become associated with hula by people who — all they see are pretty smiling dancers that continue this idea that putting on a hula skirt is a recreational act,” she said. “There's a really important question here about, where is the line between respect and disrespect?”
But Stillman was also quick to point out that this exhibition isn't a lecture, it's a discussion.
“The interesting thing about this exhibit is that we are not telling people what is respectful and disrespectful, we're juxtaposing images and artifacts in a way that encourages people to ask themselves where is that line for them. Where would they draw that line?” she said.