Hawaiian Hula `Olapa

Monika Lilleike's performance analytic study on Hawaiian Hula `Olapa reveals how this genuine performing art practice shapes and transmits oral history via a distinct set of performative means of framing and stylization. The intermedial confluence of performance elements, sound, body and words instills an oscillating effect of multisensory experience which echoes a deep rooted sense concerned with place, distinct environmental features, and story line. The study appeals to discussions on intermediality, metaphoricity, and to an anthropology of the senses. It outlines practice as research and embodied knowledge as tools to conduct performance analysis.

Monika Lilleike (MFA, PhD, Kumu Hula) works as a performance artist, stage director and lecturer in the field of Asian and Pacific Performance and European Experimental Performance Art and Theory. Lilleike is the head of the traditionally run hula school Halau Hula Makahikina in Berlin. Her research interest ties into: conditions of oral tradition, practices and aesthetics concerning cultural performance practices from the Pacific and Asia, procedures of cross-cultural translation, the senses and embodiment, stylization and embodied knowledge, the development of practice as research understood as methodological tool of cultural studies and performance analysis.