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Student Turned Teacher
Celebrating 10 Years of Dancing with Kumu M\u0101lia<\/b><\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
By Sarah Hodges<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/i><\/p>\n This week, Still & Moving Center\u2019s beloved Doris Morisaki celebrates 10 years of dancing hula with Kumu M\u0101lia Helel\u0101. Her dedication in hula class has brought many joyful experiences, from evolving into a teacher herself to spontaneously gracing public stages with renowned Hawaiian musicians such as Na Leo and Ho\u2019okena!<\/span><\/p>\n Doris claims with a laugh, \u201cI love the limelight, but I had no singing, dancing, or movement lessons at all as a child. Finally, in my middle-aged years, I have a talent to share – hula! \u201d Now with 3,200 classes at Still & Moving under her belt, Doris has developed into a highly skilled mover, not to mention one of our most prolific students in class attendance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Though not a \u2018mover\u2019 <\/span>per se<\/span><\/i> in her younger years, when Doris graduated from the UH Manoa she took a 6-week hula class for the first time and loved it. Then she got engaged, moved to Israel, got married, had a child, and life went on. In the early 2000s, with her son in preschool, Doris ventured back into dancing again at the now-closed Honolulu Club, enjoying the fusion fitness practice called Nia, dancing alongside Ren\u00e9e Tillotson. Eventually, when Ren\u00e9e opened her own movement studio, Doris missed dancing with Ren\u00e9e, so she got a Still & Moving Center membership.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That membership opened Doris to one of the landmark event in Doris\u2019 life: meeting and dancing with Kumu M\u0101lia Helel\u0101, and falling head-over-heels in love with hula.<\/span><\/p>\n Doris serves as an example of just how far a person can go with gusto, dedication, and a go-for-it attitude. Within a few years, Doris was subbing for M\u0101lia\u2019s hula auwana classes whenever she left the island. In 2020 when the pandemic hit and Still & Moving moved all its classes online, we suddenly had a new population of interested hula students wanting to join us from Japan. With Kumu\u2019s blessing, Ren\u00e9e asked Doris to use her Japanese language skills to start her own hula class in Japanese without the slow-down of using a translator.<\/span><\/p>\n Whew! That was a big ask! Even though Doris is from a Japanese-American family, third generation, she didn\u2019t grow up speaking Japanese. She\u2019d taken Japanese classes over the years and practiced with native speakers. Her accent is perfect, but her vocabulary was limited – and in particular, her hula vocabulary. \u201cI felt OK about the teaching part,\u201d Doris says about her initial reaction to the proposed classes. \u201cBut teaching in Japanese \u2013 that was really a stretch!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n She hesitantly accepted the offer, thus beginning to \u201creally stretch herself,\u201d and truly grow as a hula dancer in surprising ways. She used her English\/Japanese dictionary a lot and especially listened with rapt attention to all of the Japanese hula words that M\u0101lia\u2019s translator Eriko Jones was using. Doris says, \u201cI also watch M\u0101lia like a hawk for precise angles and positions for every movement pattern,\u201d something she continues to do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m so grateful for teaching and for how much it\u2019s helped my hula,\u201d says Doris. \u201cYou can\u2019t teach unless you are really sure about the movements.\u201d She\u2019s found her own voice as a teacher and her own way of teaching hula that is non-traditional, gaining some inspiration from her Ballroom dancing and Nia dance experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Kumu M\u0101lia enthuses, \u201cDoris has distinguished herself as a rare person who combines warmth and humor with skill and expertise. She is a treasure!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Doris has even managed to use innovation to transform a \u2018limitation\u2019 she feels she has, and turn it into something beneficial for her students. \u201cWhen Kumu M\u0101lia teaches, she is doing so many things at the same time – dancing, translating Hawaiian, singing, playing ukulele, cueing the movements, all while teaching sometimes both online and in-person students at the same time. She makes it look so easy – and it’s not!\u201d Doris, discovering how difficult it was for her to emulate M\u0101lia’s example, could instead offer students something else, maybe from her own strengths as a keen observer and a diligent student. Since she didn\u2019t have an ukulele in hand, she decided she would focus on hand, wrist, and arm movements to warm up the class. With such important movements in hula, Doris knew there could never be too much time and attention spent on the details of these body parts. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n