Gesture is a voiceless speech, a short-hand dramatic picture.
The Hawaiians were adepts in this sort of art. Hand and foot,
face and eye, and those convolutions of gray matter which are
linked to the organs of speech, all worked in such harmony
that, when the man spoke, he spoke not alone with his vocal
organs, but all over, from head to foot, every part adding
its emphasis to the utterance. Von Moltke could be reticent
in six languages; the Hawaiian found it impossible to be
reticent in one.
The hands of the hula dancer are ever going out in gesture,
her body swaying and pivoting itself in attitudes of
expression. Her whole physique is a living and moving picture
of feeling, sentiment, and passion. If the range of thought
is not always deep or high, it is not the fault of her art,
but the limitations of her original endowment, limitations of
hereditary environment, the universal limitations imposed on
the translation from spirit into matter.
The art of gesture was one of the most important branches
taught by the kumu. When the hula expert, the _olohe_, who
has entered the halau as a visitor, utters the prayer (p.
47), “O Laka, give grace to the feet of Pohaku, and to her
bracelets and anklets; give comeliness to the figure and
skirt of Luukia. To each one give gesture and voice. O Laka,
make beautiful the _lei_; inspire the dancers to stand before
the assembly,” his meaning was clear and unmistakable, and
showed his high valuation of this method of expression. We
are not, however, to suppose that the kumu-hula, whatever his
artistic attainments, followed any set of formulated
doctrines in his teaching. His science was implicit,
unformulated, still enfolded in the silence of
unconsciousness, wrapped like a babe in its mother’s womb. To
apply a scientific name to his method, it might be called
inductive, for he led his pupils along the plain road of
practical illustration, adding example to example, without
the confusing aid of preliminary rule or abstract
proposition, until his pupils had traveled over the whole
ground covered by his own experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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