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Honolulu & O’ahu : Performing arts

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  • This one-time movie theater has been wonderfully renovated, and now offers a full and varied season of everything from hula hālau fundraisers to visiting dance companies.

  • In this famous art form, hula dancers are accompanied by percussive instruments made from natural materials and the intonations of one or more chanters. Ancient hula began, it is believed, as a male preserve and as religious ritual.

  • When the practice of hula was revived during the reign of the Merrie Monarch, King David Kalākaua, a new dance style took center stage. Known as hula ’auana (modern hula), it is accompanied by instruments like the ’ukulele, guitar, standing bass, and singing voices. It is more flowing in style than hula kahiko , and dancers generally wear western clothes.

  • A hollowed-out gourd that, in skilled hands, is used to keep the beat in hula.

  • The campus theater includes a 600-seat main theater and a smaller Earle Ernst Lab Theater. The season includes plays and musicals, and Kabuki and Noh Japanese theater.

  • Pairs of sticks of varying length that are struck against each other during dancing.

  • The focus of this 100-seat experimental theater is new work from around the Pacific.

  • This lovely cocktail lounge is home to jazz of the kind you can both sing and dance to. No cover; pricey drinks.

  • During February’s Chinese New Year celebrations, the Lion Dance is performed all over Hawai’i. Acrobatic dancers don a lion costume and perform a dance to a steady – and very loud – drum beat designed to ward off evil and spread good fortune. Spectators fill red and gold envelopes with dollar bills and feed them to the lion to ensure future prosperity.

  • Illusionist John Hirokawa weaves elements of Polynesian culture and “prestidigitational” puzzlement. (An understudy performs on Sun & Mon nights.)

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