Think Hawaiian hula is just shimmying hips and grass skirts? Think again. Seth Mnookin learns what hula really means

It's late March, four days before the opening night of the Merrie Monarch Festival, and Manu Boyd's and Karl Veto Baker and Michael Casupang's hula troupes are having a final run-through of the seven-minute routines they will perform in next week's competition. Dozens of women, ages 15 to 40, are at the ready, plaiting one another's hair into delicate braids and smoothing their outfits—high-necked, Victorian-inspired white blouses tucked into floral-patterned, bell-shaped skirts—in the hallway of a somewhat run-down high school gym in Manoa, a treelined Honolulu suburb. The women, whose heads, wrists, and ankles are encircled by bushy dark-green fern leis, are in toned-down versions of the costumes they'll wear this weekend. There's a regal sense to the day's proceedings, to be sure, but it's nothing compared with the pomp and ceremony of the festival, which will take place later this week in a shabby tennis stadium in Hilo, on the eastern coast of Hawaii's Big Island. Today's dress rehearsal, besides giving the dancers an opportunity to work through the nerves they'll feel once onstage before thousands of hula fans, is a chance for their friends and family to witness the end result of what has been, in many cases, years of sacrifice and dedication.

In the back of the gym, Robert and Roland Cazimero—local legends known, in their musical incarnation, as the Brothers Cazimero—are quietly going over their roles, preparing to accompany the dancers when they rehearse their 'auana performances; for the kahiko routines, the only instruments will be the kumus' echoing chants and the slap of their palms against the ipu hekes, traditional percussive gourds.

Watching these two halaus perform was, quite literally, like nothing I'd ever experienced. The reverent attention the dancers paid to their movements, the blanketing serenity that enveloped the gym, and the way the performers sang out their responses to their kumus' call in ringing Hawaiian combined to create an experience that was almost mystical. The dances themselves—deceptively simple, because the women move around the room with a level of synchronicity and grace that is remarkable—felt simultaneously foreign and utterly familiar. More than once I felt slightly embarrassed to be witnessing the physical manifestation of what was obviously an intensely personal, deeply spiritual experience.

Boyd, Baker, and Casupang are three of the first members of Robert Cazimero's halau that he graduated to kumu, and the fact that they've granted me permission to view this rehearsal is unusual, even unprecedented. While some halaus—including both of the ones here today—will occasionally raise money by touring in Japan, there are few opportunities for non-Hawaiians living outside the Far East to view traditional hula troupes practicing for one of their performances.

Not that my entry into this world has been easy. Despite the fact that I've come armed with introductions, Boyd, Baker, and Casupang all seem wary of my presence. Boyd, an expansive man with a manic energy, hurriedly shakes my hand before ducking around a corner with an over-the-shoulder explanation that he has to "do some things." When I approach Baker, he nods hello and then looks at me in silence for about 30 seconds. "You want to write about hula?" he asks finally. "What made you think you were interested in that?"