A Language With No Words

Hula kahiko and hula 'auana aren't "old style" and "new style." They're a record, a survival story, and a language still spoken with the hands.

Most visitors see hula once, at a luau, dressed up for tourism, and walk away thinking they've seen "hula." What they've almost always seen is one branch of a much older, much larger tree — and missed the story of how that tree nearly got cut down entirely.

Two Forms, One Tradition

Hawaiian hula is generally understood to fall into two broad categories: hula kahiko and hula 'auana. Kahiko means ancient. 'Auana means to wander, or drift. Neither is a lesser form of the other — they're different registers of the same language, and most serious hālau (hula schools) train dancers in both.

Hula kahiko is the older style, generally understood as hula performed and passed down before Western contact reshaped the islands. It's accompanied not by melody but by oli — chant — layered over percussion instruments like the ipu heke, a double gourd drum, along with rhythm sticks and other traditional instruments. There's no guitar, no ukulele. The voice and the drum carry everything.

Hula 'auana developed later, shaped by 19th-century Western contact — missionary influence on modesty and dress, and the introduction of string instruments like the guitar and, eventually, the ukulele. Movements became more flowing, costuming shifted from kapa and ti-leaf skirts toward dresses and pants, and the songs themselves started telling more contemporary stories.

What the Hands Are Actually Doing

Before Hawaiians had a written language, hula was one of the primary ways history got recorded and passed on — genealogies, war stories, love stories, honors paid to chiefs and gods. Every gesture had meaning. This wasn't decoration; it was the text itself, carried in the body instead of on a page.

In hula kahiko, that text tends to be dense and ceremonial — the dance is doing serious documentary work, and it was historically performed in front of chiefs and at sacred occasions to honor the gods. Traditionally, standing dances split the labor: the 'ōlapa are the dancers who carry the movement, while the ho'opa'a chant the mele and provide the percussion — two distinct, trained roles working together to tell one story. In hula 'auana, the storytelling loosens up: hands and arms still carry the narrative, but the lower body often just keeps time, and the subject matter can be as contemporary as a love song written last year.

Where the Story Begins

Hula's own origin is told through legend rather than record. One tradition credits the goddess Laka as the first to dance hula and honors her as its patron. Another tells of Hiʻiaka, dancing on the shore to calm and celebrate her fiery older sister Pele, the volcano goddess. Both stories are still invoked today — hālau often build an altar to Laka in their practice space, a living link between the dance and its divine origin story.

The Ban That Almost Ended It

Hula's survival isn't a given — it was nearly lost. Following her conversion to Christianity, Queen Kaʻahumanu — regent of the Hawaiian Kingdom — issued an edict in 1830 banning public hula performances, which missionaries had condemned as immoral. Enforcement weakened considerably after her death in 1832, and the ban was widely ignored in practice even though it was never formally lifted for several more decades.

The tradition didn't disappear. It survived privately, in homes and among practitioners who kept teaching it quietly, the same way many suppressed cultural practices around the world have survived — by going underground rather than going extinct.

The revival didn't last. After Kalākaua's death in 1891, and the American-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in January 1893, hula lost its royal patronage and public support once again — a second wave of suppression tied directly to the loss of Hawaiian sovereignty itself. It would take until the 1960s and 70s, and the broader Hawaiian Renaissance, for hula to fully re-emerge as a source of public pride rather than something practiced quietly at the margins.

Today's public celebration of hula has a specific birthday of its own. The Merrie Monarch Festival began in Hilo in 1964, originally built around lighter fare — a King Kalākaua beard-lookalike contest, a barbershop quartet contest, a Holokū Ball — as a bid to boost the Big Island's economy after a tsunami and a sugar industry downturn. It wasn't until 1971 that organizers Dottie Thompson and George Naʻope introduced an actual hula competition, opening it to women's hālau first and admitting men's hālau starting in 1976. That competition is what the festival is known for today, and it remains the most prestigious hula competition in the world.

Why the Distinction Is Worth Knowing

Calling hula "just a dance" — or worse, treating it purely as luau entertainment — erases the fact that it functioned as literature, religion, and historical record for a people who had no written language to fall back on. Kahiko carries the weight of that original function. 'Auana carries what happened to Hawaiian culture next: contact, suppression, adaptation, survival, and eventually, reclamation.

Watching both side by side, at something like Merrie Monarch, isn't watching "old vs. new." It's watching the full arc of a culture that refused to let a language be silenced — even when, for over fifty years, it legally wasn't allowed to be spoken out loud.

Sources consulted include HISTORY (Kelli Y. Nakamura, Kapiʻolani Community College), National Geographic, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library research guides, the Kaʻimi Naʻauao O Hawaiʻi Nei Institute, Smithsonian Magazine, the official Merrie Monarch Festival history page, and multiple cross-referenced accounts of the 1830 suppression period, the 1893 overthrow, and the Kalākaua-era revival. Dates and details are corroborated across sources; where phrasing like "widely cited" or "widely credited" appears above, it reflects consistent but not universally footnoted historical claims.