Lei Po'o

[0:06] I think a lot of people have this idea of, you know, the painted lips and the happy hula girl, without recognizing that hula is an ancient and sacred practice. Hula and Ori Tahiti are storytelling devices in order to tell stories of humanity through talking about the mountains, or the sea, or the flowers, or the sun. [0:35] We would use materials that represent what the dance is talking about, and these act as the poetry in which we pass down knowledge. This lei po'o represents the bringing together of all of the different parts of myself. So, I was born and raised in Southern California. [0:56] My blood is Filipino and Jewish. The cultures that I grew up in are Filipino American, Polynesian American, and non-white Southern Californian poverty. All of these different parts of myself have come together in one object to represent who I have been, who I am now, and who I hope to become. [1:29] The way that I made it was by doing what's called wili. Wili means to twist, and when you make a lei po'o, or a lei, you have to make it with intention, and you have to make it with aloha. You can't make a lei in bad mood. Every time you twist a strand, you weave into it your intentions, you weave into it your thoughts, you weave into it your mana; our energy, our life force, our spirit. [1:59] You weave into it your aloha; our shared existence with each other, with our earth. We have these golden strands of hau, or of tree bark. They come from the island of Hawai'i, but they were brought here to the UK so that we could use them as part of our dances, along with the kind of more natural-coloured ones, and raffia to weave everything together, and I wove into the lei po'o, coconut husks. [2:34] There's a lot of beautiful mythology around the coconut. It says that the first woman comes from the coconut. And we use all parts of the coconut to nourish ourselves, our body, our skin, our hair, and our hair is a big part of our culture. It's where we carry a lot of spiritual elements. [2:55] So I wanted this to interact with my hair as part of the object itself. They move together. I wanted it to have place on the head. Yeah, and I wanted it to pay homage to the sun. This is, I think, something that links across all of the islands that I'm part of. [3:17] I was really drawn to sit in time and space and weave something together with my own hands, and with each weave, acknowledge my presence and how I came to be, who came before me. My cultural heritage, you know, contains a multitude of places, spaces, times, and people. [3:40] I used to be...not ashamed of it, but I used to be confused by it. I didn't know who I was, and I never felt like I was enough of this or enough of that, or that I belonged here or I belonged there. But over the years, I've grown to understand that this is a superpower, that I have been given so many gifts. [4:04] I have so much knowledge given to me because so many people have... because they've had to move around the world. The stories that I was told as a child, that I received, that I learned from, that have shaped me into the human that I am, I have become inclined to want to share them, to share what comes with these cultures. [4:31] A mixed life is a beautiful life. A mixed community is a beautiful community, and I recognise within myself that the combination of all of these cultures makes me a more rounded, stronger person...[4:47] and I do think that that is something that...that's a lesson that we can take into our wider communities.