By Renée Tillotson

“Lightning Strikes” Part 2

“Sometimes I think of Still & Moving Center as a community field in which individuals can collectively harness their energies to send up a lightning rod and receive precious downloads from the universe to benefit the greater whole.”

      “Lightning Strikes, Part 1” July 2025, Life at the Center

I marvel at our amazing ability to draw down incredible, creative energy with the power of minds and hearts working together synergistically and improvisationally. This spring, history and contemporary dance collided to send a lightning bolt our way again as our Contemporary Dance teacher Jessica Eirado Enes prepared to perform at the 2025 Pan Pacific Festival. 

Before our first planning session at Still & Moving Center with Dustin Hara – our GM who had set up many of our dance teachers and their students to participate in the festival – I was pondering how we might consider Contemporary Dance to be “Pan Pacific”. Then when we met, Jessica shared her fabulous idea, which answered my question.

Ever since she first learned that the Hawaiian ukulele was an evolution of a musical instrument that Portuguese immigrants had brought to the islands, Jessica had wanted to create a dance around that curious fact. I knew that Jessica had been born and raised in Italy, but only on that planning day did I learn that she is half Portuguese herself. No wonder that piece of past tickled her curiosity!

The story of a Portuguese instrument traveling to Hawai’i to become the Hawaiian islands’ most famous musical instrument captivated Jessica’s imagination, as it did Dustin’s and mine. And we did not yet know any of the details.

Imagination, information, and collaboration seem key to creativity. Together, we strove to set up a lightning rod for creation.

Once Jessica gave us a glimpse of her inspiration, I wondered how we might learn some of the details of the ukulele’s story. Who brought it? What was the instrument that transformed into the ukulele? When did it happen? My wondering reminded me of someone I met on the plane during one of my many travels to and from the islands: Ki-Lin Reece, founder of the Pacific String Museum. I offered to look into his resources on the history of the ukulele. Sure enough, Ki-Lin pointed me to one of the pages of his website https://www.pacific-strings.org/, which is rich with musical references from Hawaii’s past. 

Within minutes, I discovered the amazing story of one Augusto Dias, a cabinetmaker from the island of Madeira off the Atlantic coast of Portugal. With his family, he emigrated from Madeira, bringing his stringed Portuguese instrument, the machete, on their eventful ship ride to Honolulu. While at sea, their ship began listing dangerously to one side. Augusto and his family made their way to the ship deck, playing the machete and singing a plea to Senhora do Monte (Our Lady of the Mount), Madeira’s patron saint. The sailors later reported that their ship then righted itself, able to complete their voyage to O’ahu!

According to the records, Augusto eventually set up a luthier shop in Honolulu to make his instruments, collaborated with King Kalakaua, played for the king at court while his daughter Christina danced to his music, and constructed one of – if not the – first of the world’s ukuleles!

With this historic insight, Jessica now had the rich creative soil for cultivating a new dance piece around the tale of two volcanic island cultures sharing their musical heritages to create a musical instrument unique to this place and time. Jessica recalled visiting her grandparents in the mountains of Portugal, with villagers joyously folk dancing together in the town square.  Meanwhile, we at Still & Moving worked to attract the set of movers who would dance this story into being. 

Jessica tapped her years of performance and choreographic experience to craft the new dance piece, improvising along the way with her dancers, drawing out their lively, individual expressiveness through dance and even song. 

By the time the dance reached the Pan Pacific Festival at Ala Moana’s CenterStage in June 2025, lightning had struck! A colorful group of both contemporary and hula dancers, with origins in Europe, Africa, Australia, Hawaii, China and Vietnam, joined Italian/Portuguese Jessica to perform the debut of her brand-new piece: “Madeira”, suggesting the many peoples and their cultures that converge to create the multi-faceted Hawaii we know today.

I loved watching our contemporary dancers come frolicking, folk dance style, out onto the stage to traditional Portuguese dance music. One of our dancers – Genevieve Dunn – stunned all of us in the audience when she opened up full-throated a capella singing in Portuguese (?). 

Meanwhile Jessica rocked on the waves of the “sea”, marking the journey from the island of Madeira to the islands of Hawaii by the Portuguese machete. Then, to recognize the migration and evolution of the instrument, our Still & Moving hula dancers moved to the sound of a Hawaiian ukulele. 

The festival organizers raved over Jessica’s contemporary, cross-cultural creation, as did the audience. “Rays from how many quarters of the heavens” had converged to create this piece! And we have only just begun to tell the full version of this historical tale through dance. 

The process of creation largely remains a mystery to me. I do know, however, that the art of improvisation and play helps to unlock creativity, hence the PlayLabs we’ve been hosting from the Academy of Mindful Movement, Jessica’s Healthy Life Tip for this month, and the video delightful fav you can watch below. And I see laughter and joy opening doors to new expressivity at Still & Moving Center – in big and little ways – all the time. Gratitude to all those creative souls here on earth and all those rays in the heavens that conjoin to bring these beautiful creative offerings into the world.

As always, we love hearing from YOU, so kindy send your Lightning Strikes experiences of creativity to renee@stillandmovingcenter.com.

Resting in stillness and moving in Joy with you,

Renée