Stepping into the In-between

Photo by Patrick Makuakane
[ID: On a sunny day, Kaumakaiwa Kanaka’ole is wrapped in a cape of orange silk and wearing an ornate silver headpiece. Kaumakaiwa looks downwards and to her right. In the background, the lagoon, trees, and colonnade of the Palace of Fine Arts are visible.]

In his latest show, MAHU, San Francisco hula master Patrick Makuakane explores the Hawaiian concept of a fluid gender and an openness to the third self.

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**This article contains diacritics specific to the Hawaiian language – to maintain spellings and accents we’ve posted this article as a PDF to retain the text that is not supported on this WordPress website.

Na Lei Hulu presents MAHU
Oct 22-23, 2022
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco
naleihulu.org

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of In Dance.

Constance Hale is a California journalist who has been writing about Hawaiian culture for three decades. Her award-winning features on hula, slack-key guitar, the sovereignty movement, the Hawaiian language, Big Island cowboys, and Spam musubi have appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic Adventure, Afar, Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and Honolulu. She has written five books on language and literary style, including the best-selling Sin and Syntax. She has also written a book for children, ‘Iwalani‘s Tree. Hale, who was born in Hawai‘i, started dancing the hula at seven and has studied with Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakane for twenty-five years. Her biography of him, The Natives Are Restless, was published in 2016.