Hula Instruments:
Made in North Kohala Punctuate the Dance
Published in the Hawaii Island Journal, April
16, 2004
by Karen Valentine
The beautiful, rich perfection of the hula
is made more complete with sound. The lyrical chants of the Hawaiian
language carry the story line of the dance, as hands and feet tell
the tale in a language of their own. The first sound heard, however,
heralding the entrance of the dancers, is the heart-thumping beat
of the big pahu drum on which the kumu hula sets the tempo. The
dancers often accompany themselves with hand-held instruments –
the ‘uli
‘uli, a rattle made of
small gourds with seeds or beads inside and a feather bedecked handle,
covering the dancer’s hand; the pu‘ili, a pair of bamboo sticks, shredded at the ends to make a rustling,
staccato noise when hit against each other; and the ipu,
simply a gourd with the small end cut off to create a reverberation
chamber inside.
Many of these instruments are made by North
Kohala craftsman Ika Vea. A long and sometimes rocky path led the
enterprising native of Tonga to become a manufacturer of Hawaiian
hula implements.
Perhaps the strongest motivation came when
the sugar company, where he worked in the lab, closed and Ika Vea
lost his job. With a wife and six kids to support, he rejected getting
another job with a company that might close. Instead, he chose the
entrepreneurial route and went looking for something else to do.
“I wanted to stay in Kohala,”
he says. The grandfatherly Tongan smiles as he tells how he started
“looking for something hardly anyone was making. I learned
about a hula supply company in Honolulu and decided to start looking
into making hula instruments.” It’s a field that was
quite open, with little competition on the Big Island, home of the
Merrie Monarch Festival and the Kupuna Hula Festival, two annual
events that draw thousands of hula dancers to this island from all
over the world.
A variety of other jobs had brought him
to Hawai‘i, beginning in 1960, when he helped build the Polynesian
Cultural Center on O‘ahu, working as an electrician and attending
school at night. It was there he met his wife, Pualani Pule, from
North Kohala. The couple married and moved to Lima, Ohio, where
he worked for the telephone company. The trek back to the Big Island
led them first through California (“The pace was just too
crazy”) and then to the sugar company in his wife’s
home district.
Today, Ika Vea is owner of Vea Polynesian
Gifts in Kapa‘au – a little off the beaten path for
drive-by traffic – but thanks to his website, hulainstruments.com,
he finds customers from Japan and the mainland, too. The tiny shop
is stacked, floor to ceiling, with big and little pahu drums, the
double-gourd ipu
heke in many shapes, single-gourd
ipu, colorful feather-bedecked ‘uli
‘uli, bamboo pu‘ili,
nose flutes and crafted gift items. Vea sits at a table, stringing
cord through a rawhide drum top as his two granddaughters play and
his wife, Puanani, supervises the counter.
Self-taught in the techniques of making
the percussion instruments, he did plenty of research to learn how
the traditional-style drums and rattles are put together. It seems
others in the business were reluctant to teach him.
“I visited [a hula supply company]
in Maui,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “I was
watching the workers making things and the owner walked in and saw
me. He took me out to lunch and I never came back. But in one half
hour, I learned plenty!”
Vea came back to the Big Island and studied
relics on display at Hulihe‘e Palace. “I also searched
around for broken items that I could take apart and see how they
were made.”
Unlike native Hawaiian artisans of days
past, he gets a little help from electric tools to carve the scalloped,
cut-out designs at the base of the drums, to hollow out the coconut
or kamani wood trunks, and even to split the bamboo for the pu‘ili.
“Hawaiians would drill a hole about half way down and split
the bamboo from there to the ends. It took me four years to perfect
a way of doing it with an electric saw,” Vea says.
Another modern-day improvement is the type
of cord used to string the drum top, stretching it tightly over
the top of the drum. “Kumu hula like the traditional coconut
sennet cord, but entertainers like nylon. It holds tighter and doesn’t
break,” he says. So he makes them both ways. Most of the tops
are made of cowhide or buffalo hide. Buffalo hide holds its tension
better, he says, as the weather changes. “With cowhide, in
colder weather, the sound is lower, and it’s higher in warm
weather. With buffalo, it doesn’t change so much.”
The ultimate, however, is sharkskin, when
he can get it. It also holds the sound well and adds another $200
to the price of the $350 to $700 pahu drums (depending on size).
“Fishermen don’t always cut
the skin the right way,” however, he says. “The belly
skin is the best, so it’s no good if they slice the fish down
the belly.”
Even though Vea is of retirement age, he
is happy he has a craft at which he can work as long as he wants.
“A lot of the guys I worked with at the sugar company, who
retired and didn’t work again, are gone now. I don’t
want to sit around, watching TV and waiting to die,” he says.
Ika Vea’s techniques for making hula
instruments, the ones he’s developed and perfected over many
years, will be passed along to his daughter, Ione Chittenden, of
Hilo. “She’s already bought a building and a saw. If
anyone can do it, she can. She can drive a cement truck, and now
she works for a tour company. She’s worked hard and bought
her own house, too,” he says, proudly.
Vea instruments should be around for a
long time to come.
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