It's a legitimate question. Hula, or at least the native art form that is as venerated in Hawaii as, say, baseball or jazz are on the mainland, receives little serious attention from anyone outside the fiftieth state. Indeed, for most of you, reading the preceding paragraphs probably felt a bit like trying to work your way through Middle English. What is Merrie Monarch? What do all those foreign-sounding words mean? (For the record, halau can roughly be defined as a hula troupe; kumu is the term for an honored and respected teacher; and 'auana and kahiko refer to modern and ancient dance styles, respectively.) And what, exactly, do Hawaiians mean when they talk of the spirit of hula? It was going to take some nights in an efficiency surrounded by squawking island birds, a morning on the rim of the country's largest active volcano, and a trip to the rainiest and least touristed of Hawaii's cities to find out.

Hula is a large part of what we think about when we think about Hawaii, as potent a symbol of the islands as its pristine beaches and the famed resorts of Waikiki. When I was given an assignment to cover Merrie Monarch, the world's most prestigious hula competition, the first image I conjured up was of a native girl coyly shimmying back and forth in her revealing grass skirt and coconut-shell bra. This mental snapshot came accompanied with its own sound track of lilting island melodies set to a plinking ukulele, and, along with flower leis, surfers, and a hazy understanding of the spirit of aloha, more or less comprised the whole of my notions of the Hawaiian Islands. These pop-culture tropes are not unique to me: Virtually everyone I talked to shared this vision of sweetly sexualized, pliant exotica, a vision that has been informed (and reinforced) by everyone from Elvis to the Brady Bunch.

It didn't take long after I began researching this story to learn how wrong my understanding of hula was, but it wasn't until I was in that gym on that mild spring day that I finally understood on a visceral level the connection Hawaiians have to hula, their history, and their land. Hula—or native Hawaiian dancing—began with the Polynesians who first inhabited the islands over a thousand years ago. From their inception, these intricate dances were accompanied by meles, or musical chants, and they occupied a role in Hawaiian culture similar to that of sacred fire circles in Native American traditions. Until the early nineteenth century, Hawaii was a non-literate society, and hula was the primary vehicle through which local history, rituals, religious practices, and social customs were transmitted from one generation to the next. There were hulas to celebrate and honor tribal chiefs, hulas that told of battles and wars, and hulas that instructed commoners on the taboos governing Hawaiian life. The smallest mistake in a hula performance was thought to bring about everything from a life of bad luck to death and family dishonor. (The goddess Laka, the estranged sister of the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele, was said to protect hula initiates as they learned the dance; that way, novices did not have to worry about making mistakes during their training.)