Hip-hop and … hula?
Published 11/20/08
vita.mn
By Tom Horgen
Coconut bras. Grass skirts. Smiling Hawaiian women.
That’s the Western version of hula dancing — which gets blown out of the water in “I Land,” a touring one-man play about its writer and star, Hawaiian native Keo Woolford, who exudes a hip-hop attitude as he searches for identity in a homeland transformed by decades of Western tourism.
His vehicle for self-discovery? Hula dancing. But growing up as a buff football player and wannabe hip-hop dancer, Woolford didn’t at first see hula as the “manly” thing to do in Honolulu. Luckily, his first hula teacher (or “hula god” as he puts it) told him different. “Hula came from the Hawaiian martial art called Lua, which is a bone-breaking martial art,” Woolford said by phone from Los Angeles. It was also spiritual, a sacred dance for Hawaiian royalty.
“I Land” comes to Minneapolis as part of Pangea World Theater’s Indigenous Voices series, playing at Intermedia Arts. Like American Indians on the mainland, Hawaii’s indigenous people were overcome by colonizers in the 1800s. Missionaries convinced Hawaii’s rulers to ban hula dancing, Woolford said. Seeing hula’s economic potential, U.S. businessmen “watered it down into that touristy thing,” he said.
Woolford, who boasts a tan chiseled physique perfect for bare-chested hula dancing, never set out to write a play about himself. But while he was acting in New York a few years ago, a theater colleague suggested the idea for “I Land.”
His path toward hula nirvana was too good a story not to tell. He’d been a troublemaker in his youth. He sang in a popular Hawaiian boy band in the late 1990s. He acted in London’s West End as the lead in “The King and I.” His journey is told in the form of a Hawaiian “talk story,” an oral tradition embellished with humor and exaggerated expressions.
Most everything that happens in “I Land” is true, Woolford said, even the most ridiculous stuff, i.e. the boy-band days. Woolford was a singer in Brownskin, a top-selling group in Hawaii that almost broke into the mainland with ‘N Sync’s manager.
In a DVD I previewed, sequences like this are funny and well-suited for Woolford’s physical acting. In fact he dances his way through most of the play, whether it be hula, hip-hop or boy band hysterics. All plot lines lead toward one goal — Woolford’s coming-of-age as a proud Hawaiian man. Near the climax he unleashes a stunning poem that sums up his anger at seeing his heritage washed away like sand on a beach. It’s directed toward Elvis, who mined Hawaii in film and song.
You’ll never look at hula the same way again.
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