Hula's centrality in Hawaiian culture began to wane in the early 1820s, when Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in the Hawaiian Islands and used English letters to create a form of written Hawaiian that was based on phonetic spellings of the local language. This written Hawaiian was developed primarily for the purpose of evangelism, and the first book that was translated was the Bible. With the help of some of Hawaii's native rulers, the practice of hula was all but banished to facilitate mass conversion to Christianity. By 1896, Hawaiian language instruction was also banned.

Hula's reemergence in Hawaiian culture in the early twentieth century mirrored the islands' shedding of the strict Christian morals of Hawaii's Protestant settlers, who had seen it as a profane, heathen practice. But instead of returning to its honored position, hula was repurposed as a mildly salacious form of entertainment best exemplified by the famous Kodak shows that titillated tourists (and were later popularized by Hollywood).

It was during these decades—which coincided with the continued decline of the islands' indigenous population—that traditional hula seemed in danger of disappearing altogether. The Hawaiian language had been all but forgotten, and the oral culture that had been passed down for centuries was fading as the few remaining kapuna, or native Hawaiian elders, died. It wasn't until the 1960s and the flowering of what is now referred to as the Hawaiian renaissance that the kind of hula I had come to Hawaii to study began once again to be practiced and celebrated on a wider scale.

The largest and best-known showcase for this resurgence has for decades been the Merrie Monarch Festival, named for King David Kalakaua, Hawaii's penultimate monarch and a noted patron of the arts. The festival was founded in 1964 on Hawaii, where it began as a sort of street fair cum talent show that was as much a showcase of Western, tourist-fed stereotypes as it was a pageant of Hawaii's native cultural history. (Nicknamed the Big Island, Hawaii is the largest, southernmost, and easternmost of the islands. Resort-rich Kailua-Kona, its best-known city, is on the west coast.) It wasn't until 1971, when local activist Dottie Thompson took control of the festival, that it began to evolve into a celebration of both traditional and modern hula. More than three decades later, Merrie Monarch has become something greater than that: a de facto celebration of a vibrant culture, one that came too close to being wiped out by the riches—and the ravages—of a tourism-dependent economy.

Nowhere is that economy more on display than in Honolulu, the most populous of Hawaii's cities. As I stepped out of the gym after the day's rehearsal had ended, I had the sensation that I was returning from a strange and mysterious world into one that was all too familiar. Honolulu ("Sheltered Bay" in Hawaiian) has long been the focal point of the state's tourism industry, but it also has a rich past, one the afternoon's events conjured up, even as I looked down a gentle hillside and across a traffic-choked highway at the twinkling lights of Waikiki. It was here, after all, that in 1795 the great tribal chief Kamehameha I drove the army of another island leader off the Pali Cliffs, concluding years of internecine war and uniting the islands' disparate tribes. Kamehameha made Waikiki his capital city until 1804, when he moved the base of his rule to what today is downtown Honolulu, and the city served as the seat of the monarchy until Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898. Today, it is possible to stay in Honolulu for weeks at a time without getting any sense of this history. Nowhere is this more true than in Waikiki, where I could grab a coffee at a Starbucks before doing some quick shopping at Prada or Gucci. If not for the vendors selling "authentic" Hawaiian shirts and the statue of the great surfer Duke Kahanamoku standing sentry over the Waikiki strip, you could be in Phoenix (albeit a Phoenix with a wonderful climate and that smells of flowers).