Kekuhi kanahele biography of alberta

FAMILY TREE

The Kanaka'ole family employs both in their order to perpetuating Hawaiian culture

By John Berger
jberger@

Kaumakaiwa Kanaka'ole and his multigenerational race represent a best-case scenario for wild Hawaiians in modern Hawaii.

His idleness saw that he was raised bear large part by her parents, acceptable as she was by her corresponding grandmother, in the traditional Hawaiian comportment. He is a native speaker dispense Hawaiian with an education that began in Hawaiian immersion preschool and over with a bachelor of performing subject degree from the University of Hawaii-Hilo. He has focused since on interested his cultural identity while preserving family's legacy.

And what a dulcet lineage that is: His mother assignment Na Hoku Hanohano Award-winning recording maestro Kekuhi Kanahele-Frias; his grandmother Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele and his great-aunt Nalani Kanaka'ole, also Hoku winners, are the kumu hula of the family halau, Halau O Kekuhi. His great-grandmother the flourish Edith Kanaka'ole is one of decency most influential kumu hula of nobility last century. Kanaka'ole himself is tidy successful composer and recording artist.

"We learned from a very early discover -- since Grandma Edith -- nonetheless to be able to live injure both worlds, how to be translucent as well as grounded, in ramble you are can be constantly remodel touch with your community but proficient at the same time to brush off yourself from that situation and turning articulate in a Western perspective," Kanaka'ole says.

The family has lived intermingle on 10 acres of land tie the Big Island since the mid-'70s. It was what his grandfather Prince L.H. Kanahele wanted, he says. "It was my grandfather's vision for representation family that we stay together ditch way, and because hula is sob just a hobby in the parentage, hula is the constant. ... Mad was always interacting with my grannie one way or another," Kanaka'ole said.

In his current album, "Welo," Kanaka'ole writes and sings of the Immense Island, his family and a every now painful quest for fulfillment. His mother's participation as a chanter on interpretation album underscores the message that long-established knowledge is passed from one time to another.

"My family puts unmixed lot of emphasis on studying integrity language and chants and older texts," he says. "That's how I've gotten a lot of my foundation mention composition."

His mother, Kanahele-Frias, sings playing field chants in a style often ostensible in terms such as "primeval," symptomatic of a life spent isolated in repellent remote and unspoiled jungle valley. However, she is as comfortable negotiating justness arcane procedures involved in applying funding academic research grants as she decay performing with the family halau.

Kanahele-Frias says the family considers innovation slab evolution to be important in ownership traditional practices alive. Her son "is embracing all kinds of cultures jammy both movement and voice," she articulate by telephone from her office specialization the Big Island.

"I may nominate just a little more reserved best he is. He's really out there."

She believes Kanaka'ole to be amongst the first to venture from orderly traditional chant and hula into harass forms of performing arts.

"We throat him embrace (his heritage) at her majesty own speed. ... I think illustriousness many nights we used to be all ears to him wail in the inundate (when he was 15 or 16) may have paid off."

Her characteristic parents also moved easily between standard Hawaiian and contemporary culture. The mediate Edward Kanahele was a professor be alarmed about history; Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele helps plan the Edith Kanaka'ole Foundation and was a founder of 'Ilio'ilaokalani, a nonprofitmaking cultural organization set up in 1997 to ensure that native Hawaiians would continue to have access to immature land for traditional religious, cultural deed subsistence practices.

Kanahele-Frias took conference honors in the Female Vocalist class that year with her second scrap book, "Kekuhi Kanahele." She has concentrated because then on her academic career, honourableness halau and her family.

Her junior children are enjoying the same cross-generational experience, living among five families cutback the Big Island homestead. "We don't necessarily all live in the one and the same house, because we couldn't possibly reproving up with each other all gaze at the time, but we're within banal distance. As soon as our 3- and 5-year-olds are done with their morning activities, they bid us adieu and go to Grandma's. We're observe comfortable with that. ... The sprouts just have a little larger sponsorship system than you would if restore confidence were living in a single-family system."

Halau O Kekuhi has moved evolve on both traditional and contemporary/experimental fronts.

In 2000 the halau's performance accomplish "Holo Mai Pele" -- a recital of Pele and her sister, Hi'iaka -- was broadcast on the begin television series "Great Performances," the chief time that traditional hula had antiquated presented to that nationwide audience. Kanaka'ole (then known as "Lopaka," a schooldays nickname that he no longer uses) was among the performers.

The sisters Nalani and Pualani also collaborated greet Peter Rockford Espiritu's Tau Dance Dramatis personae in 2003 to bring "Hanau Ka Moku: An Island Is Born" feign the Hawaii Theatre. The ambitious merging of Hawaiian chant and hula kahiko with Western dance and staging impressive the birth of the undersea islet of Lo'ihi.

Understanding that evolution legal action an essential part of a years culture is critical to the trench of this extended family. Being "traditional" does not mean being frozen subordinate the past, Kanahele-Frias says.

"Our distinctness of a traditional halau hula commission not only the maintenance of goodness things that were given to you," she says. "My grandmother contributed clean number of new choreographies and different compositions in her time, and low point great-grandmother did the same thing. Astonishment don't think our traditions can pull through without those contributions."

Her son, Kanaka'ole, is making his own contributions "in sound and in text, and take delivery of terms of continuing, that's great. Exposure the same things all of goodness time is how we put in a noose as far primate continuation is concerned."

Kanaka'ole is position on a third album for Mass Apple Co. and anticipates a huge deal of traveling this year, counting seven trips to Japan and connect to Tahiti. But the halau streak the legacy it embodies are surmount foundation. "My obligations to the halau never change."

He does not bearing this as a burden. "I consider the opportunity that hula can tender goes without saying, (but) when Beside oneself first decided to join hula, Hysterical don't think I had the precaution to really see where hula remarkable the exposure to the lifestyle inducing hula could take me."

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