Hawaiʻi, USA
Folk & Traditional Dances
1 dancesHula kahiko originated as a sacred practice honoring gods and chiefs and preserving genealogy and history in a culture without a written language — its movements and chants (mele) were literally how history and religious knowledge were recorded and transmitted. Missionaries suppressed hula in the 19th century as immoral, and its survival and later revival, the "Hawaiian Renaissance" of the 1970s, is treated by many Native Hawaiians as an act of cultural preservation and sovereignty.
Ritual & Ceremonial Dances
0 dancesNo ceremonial or ritual dances added here yet.
Every tradition on this map is a branch of something older than writing itself. The oldest paintings we have of humans doing anything at all — at Bhimbetka in India, in cave art in Borneo — already show people dancing. Long before anyone could write a reason down, dance was already binding communities together, marking the passage from childhood to adulthood, and reaching toward whatever each culture understood as sacred.
Read the full essay on the history and philosophy of dance →Upcoming events in Hawaiʻi, USA
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