This ended a week ago, but with a total runtime a shade over fifteen hours, I’m not going to be done with it anytime soon. The Merrie Monarch Festival is a big three-day hula shindig that happens in Hilo, a sleepy big island town with not much to talk about the rest of the year barring another massive volcanic eruption. It’s this big worldwide event, drawing participants from as far away as California and…erm, Northern California.
When you talk about hula, of course, you must talk about the culture, preserving the culture, honoring the culture, respecting the culture. I say “must” because this is actually mandatory, which I quickly gleaned from everyone involved using it like a damn comma. You must also talk about ancestry, royalty, nature, mythology, and (if a men’s dance is coming up) battle; those are the Six Acceptable Subjects. Do not, under any circumstances, have an opinion about the costumes or movements, do not comment on anyone’s bodies (ESPECIALLY the men), and above all else, always take the mythology very, very seriously no matter how ridiculous it sounds to you. Basically forget that geology, meteorology, or plate tectonics exist and you’ll be fine.
There are two broad categories of hula. Day two is “traditional”, which has a whole lot of monotone chanting, old-fashioned costumes, and banging on percussion instruments. Only dress, accessories, instruments, and chants actually used by the ancient Hawaiians is permitted, leading to a sameness to the dances. Day three is “modern” (as in, around 1920), which employs guitars, singing, and colorful dresses (both men and women wear them, which I find a nice touch). Occasionally there’s some joke entrant who’s obviously there just to mess around and have a good time, which is a welcome break to the relentless grinding sameness of nearly all the dances. Think halfpipe snowboard, except really slow-paced and with a hundred times as much suffocating pretense. (Day one, Miss Aloha Hula, is a single women’s event combining traditional and modern.)
Indubitably tied to this Hawaiian artform is the Hawaiian language, which you are not supposed to call a dead language even though it’s not spoken at all internationally and has extremely limited usage, which is pretty much the freaking textbook definition of a dead language. No writing survives to the present day, either because it never existed or whatever did exist has decayed into unreadability (I don’t know which), meaning that each word has to be Romanized, which is most unfortunate because compared to the Hawaiian language, cotton candy is like rebar. So. Many. Syllables. needed to make a single sentence. Not that you’d ever know, of course, because one of the hallmarks of this festival is that nothing is ever translated. You’d think that because every performance has extensive chanting or singing, understanding what they’re saying would be pretty important, but nope, nothing. They could be talking about scraping barnacles off an outrigger or how disgusting poi tastes no matter what you add to it for all you know. The pervasive aura of mystery extends to the numerous judging terms which no one will ever, ever bother to explain, which is, frankly, really weird given that this is a competition. As someone who recently saw USA explain in exacting detail which Winter Olympics races were and were not decided by who crossed the finish line first, I have trouble accepting this.
But let’s not accuse these people of being hopelessly stuck in the past and being completely unable to understand what “inclusivity” is without a dictionary. Voila, I present to you… THE WEBSITE! I mean, seriously, we’re supposed to get excited over one website? It’s about thirty years too late for that to count as impressive. It’ll have to make do, however, because you sure as heck won’t catch this on social media, primarily because no phones are allowed at the festival. We live in an age where a big event without phones is like a house without a roof, but nope, no phones allowed, and they enforce this as zealously as a courtroom.
Another thing that is ubiquitous absolutely everywhere in the country and most of the world but completely absent here: children. Seriously, I looked through the crowd and the youngest person was like 23. Now, I understand that children can be loud and disruptive, and, more critically, can’t be trusted to stay interested for five hours of culture-saturated artistry, so it makes sense to limit their presence here. But geez, there are parents in Hawaii who will take a baby to a monster truck rally; the level of security required to keep all the shrieking little brats out must have been insane. (Maybe that’s why there are so many commercials.) That would also go some way toward explaining, incidentally, why nobody ever talks about or shows pictures of children. At all. As far as I can tell, each and every competitor here is childless. You see American Ninja Warrior or some track and field event, it seems they can’t go twenty minutes without plastering a cute little tyke on the screen, and their very existence isn’t even mentioned here.
This festival is one of those things that I feel some obligation to be interested in, but now I feel like I’ve seen and heard it all. When everything has to be about royalty and streams and flowers and warriors and lava every time, this…well, it looks like any other reasonably competent hula, which I’m never going out of my way to watch.
All that said…we’re talking a proud people who saw their entire way of life slowly ground to nothing. Losing one’s cultural identity is always hard. To this day we still have a sovereignty movement though that’s clearly never going anywhere (some of us kinda like having things like streets, electricity and plumbing, for one). I’m not in favor of the Merrie Monarch Festival’s hardline insularity, but I’m old enough to realize that what I want doesn’t matter here. This is an event made by dedicated followers of the culture for dedicated followers of the culture, and it’s a privilege for filthy outsiders like me just to get a taste once a year.
So yeah…I can spare fifteen hours.
I mean, I probably WON’T anymore, I’m just saying. 
) Today? Absolute non-starter. There’s zero chance I’d be able to sit respectfully and applaud on command for that long, and I guarantee you my mind would be constantly on when my next meal is and when I can go to the frigging RESTROOM. As for seeing the performers, is there any realistic chance that I’ll get to meet with and talk to them? That’s the only thing that could possibly make the in-person experience worth it for me. I went to a few football games in the past, and every time I completely failed to understand how gazing at teensy figures hundreds and hundreds of feet below me was an improvement over television.