Kalae Kaina: A Dance Journey into Self-Awareness & Empowerment

Kalae Kaina has been enchanting audiences and empowering women through the sensual and evocative art form of tribal fusion bellydance for over two decades. In dance, she found solace, healing, and artistic expression that transformed her life as she built a life immersed in the performing arts performing, teaching, and leading the Shakti Dance Movement troupe she founded. Today Kalae is transitioning onto another path into the visual arts that weaves together the cultural threads of her passions old and new. Returning to school and digging into her Hawaiian roots she’s allowing a fresh vision to guide her into the next stage of life.

EM: So you’re from Oahu, what part of the island did you grow up on?

KK: I grew up in Lanikai. My grandma moved there from the big island and it was very isolated at the
time. She was actually scared to live there because the houses were super far apart.

EM: Hard to imagine Lanikai like that now!

KK: My whole family has grown up there. Everybody grew up in grandma’s house.

EM: When you say everybody, how many people are you talking about?

KK: Well, my dad had seven and there was my grandma’s sister’s children. She hanai’d some of them,
too. My grandma’s house always had an open door policy, so whenever a family member was in need,
she always put everybody up. She shaped me a lot. She was super loving, just the typical Hawaiian
grandmother, always loving, but stern at the same time.

EM: How did your grandmother influence you?

KK: I was curious and I enjoyed hanging out with her. She’d always be like, come on, help me with this.
But it wasn’t like she would tell me things. It was just the way she lived. So just watching her, she was
such a hard worker. She always worked, but then in the afternoon, she sat down and had a glass of wine so she knew how to relax too. She worked at a boys’ home, like a correctional facility, I think they were called House Moms or something. She just kept track of them. In her later years, she and her friends started the Kupuna program in the local schools. They would get the schools to give them like an hour of class time, and they would teach the kids Hawaiian studies like language, and songs, and stuff like that.

EM: It sounds like the same care she gave to her family at home she gave everywhere in her life.

KK: Yeah, and there was kind of a renaissance for Hawaiian culture in the 80s when she started the
Kupuna program with friends. They felt that the kids were missing out on the culture and that
our culture would be lost if it wasn’t taught to the younger generation. So they really pushed for that
program.

When she was the Kupuna at our school, she would always run the mayday program, and that’s where
you have to make the leis for the mayday court that represent all the different islands. So I was always
her helper. We would go out to flat island and pick hinahina, which was for Nihau, and go out and pick all the flowers for the different islands. I’d always just be her little helper and help make leis for all the things that she did.

EM: What was your life like back then?

KK: My parents got divorced when I was seven, and my mom, I think, went through a depression so she
didn’t keep track of us kids. We were latchkey kids, so we could just roam the neighborhood with free will and didn’t have any rules or curfews, but we got into a lot of stuff. Music was a big thing for us in that time and space, and we were alternative kids. I would wear vintage dresses and tights and Doc Martens, and I had a shaved head. We went to tons of concerts and did lots of LSD, smoked lots of weed, and drank a lot.

EM: Sounds like a lot of experimentation and searching…

KK: Yeah, those were definitely formative years for me and I made really good friends that are still like
family today. Although we lost a lot of close friends because that lifestyle led to long term addictions. But, I started getting out of that cycle when I met these Hare Krishnas that were actually kind of brainwashing us.

EM: What?!

KK: They weren’t devotees that went to the temple here in Nuuanu. They were, like, outcast devotees,
and they had this plan to make their own group of devotees. So, when we met them, they pulled up in a
car and they’re like, “hey, guys, you know where to get any acid?” And we were like, “yeah.” We liked
them because they would pick us up after school and smoke fatties and have alcohol and stuff. We
would just listen to the guy talk, and he would talk about aliens and government conspiracies. Then
slowly he started filtering in things like, “you’re not this body you’re a spirit” and vegetarianism. Later he started preaching Krishna consciousness and he turned me and another one of our friends into full
devotees to him, basically.

EM: What attracted you to their lifestyle?

KK: I was excited about all these new ideas and felt all these euphoric feelings that you do when you’re
learning new stuff. I was excited by the realization that we’re not just this body, we’re spirit and soul and our body is constantly changing. I believe that the soul lives on once the body is done. They were really into farming and stuff and then not eating animals, but they were a cult. They would talk bad about the devotees at the temple and kept us separate because they didn’t want us influenced by them. They were older, in their forties, and they intentionally manipulated us trying to shape the way we thought about Krishna consciousness using psychedelics to change our mindset. Then one of my friends had a psychotic breakdown because of that experience. When he came to me and I heard his perspective I saw the flip side of the relationship whereas before I had blinders on and it scared the shit out of me. So I cut all ties with those people.

That was a hard transition for me and I had a traumatic response. I didn’t know how to integrate back into normal life, so I started going to the temple because I needed to make sense of what happened to me and meet normal devotees. I started meeting women there who had ideas of spiritualism and yoga but still loved to serve and weren’t fanatically religious, which is, they weren’t part of a cult. Basically, they were like me and I was able to normalize and start finding new things, like dance.

EM: I had assumed that you grew up dancing. Why did you choose to learn bellydancing?

KK: Because of the Hare Krishna influence I wanted to study classical Indian dance, but I couldn’t find it
here on the island. So my friend was like, “let’s try belly dance. It’s the closest thing we can get to India.” So we did, and I just friggin fell in love with it and that’s what started my dance journey.

EM: Who was your first teacher?

KK: Her name is Jean Yanagawa. She was a staple in the dance community here for many years, and
her teacher was a direct student of Jamila Salimpur, who was the first woman in America to codify belly
dance. So she came up with a vocabulary of movements, gave them all names, and then created a very
unique style, fusing different ethnic looks into one hodgepodge. Her group was called Balanat and they
did the Renaissance fairs performing super cool, folky, old school belly dance as opposed to the more
cabaret style.

EM: How did dancing make you feel?

KK: It helped me get back into my body after going through that traumatic experience of breaking from a cult and not knowing how to integrate back into my social life, because I isolated myself from all my
friends while I was in that group. Just doing movement helped me integrate back into my body and being aware of myself again. All of our feelings are in our body. So moving your body lets those feelings move through.

EM: You went on to build a large part of your life around the bellydance arts how did that evolve?

KK: So I danced with my teacher for a handful of years, maybe six years, and then my son Puna was
born in 2002, and it was shortly after that when my girlfriends were like, teach me how to belly dance. So we just met in my living room and we would dance around in a circle. Many of us were mothers of small kids back then. We have so many practice videos of us dancing in somebody’s garage or performance space and then kids running all through the space.

My group Shakti really started to form in 2004. People would ask me what I wanted to do with my life and I’d say, “I’m freaking doing it. I’m teaching dance, performing. We have our group.”
The Chinatown art scene was really taking off at that time, so we had lots of opportunities and lots of
friends doing stuff that would ask us to perform. It was a happening time for the arts in Honolulu.

EM: What did you discover about yourself and want to share with others through dance?

KK: So I’ve always felt like the stage is kind of a hotspot, like a power place. I feel like when I’m on stage, the rest of the world melts away. It’s like I don’t think about everything. I mean, people say that when they’re surfing out in the water, it’s a similar feeling. It’s like my mind is a clean palette and I just feel completely connected and in my body. I feel strong. So that has always been kind of a driving force, I guess, for me to be a performer. And it’s weird because I can’t speak well in front of people in a class setting or group with talking. I’m terrible at it, but I can get up and dance in front of people.

But I guess my hope is that the audience feels something and since art is interpretive, it could be a range of emotions. As a teacher, I have seen super shy, body-conscious girls come in and then just stick with it and become more confident, more in their body, more open and talkative. It’s definitely a
transformative art form because it’s moving your uterus and it is sensual. Originally, it was a women’s
dance, so it was passed on from the grandmothers to the mothers and to their daughters. Traditionally it’s a dance done in celebration and women shared it amongst each other.

EM: The style of dance that Shakti developed isn’t what many people may visualize when they think of bellydance. Where did your influences and dance style come from?

KK: So, during that time in San Francisco, a style was developing called American tribal style belly
dance, and it was using Jamila’s format but then kind of changing the costuming esthetic. And then they created a vocabulary of cues. For example, a hand movement meant, I’m going to do this combo, so the lead dancer will cue the rest of the group. So the dancers are kind of doing improv in the moment because they don’t know what combo is coming next.

So that style was coming out of San Francisco and then another offshoot called tribal fusion came out
really big after that. It incorporated lots of other elements, like goth music and was just an open playing
field for incorporating elements into the dance. Belly dance was the base, but the esthetic changed a lot. That’s when Rachel Bryce came out and once I saw her on YouTube, and I was like, “oh, my God I love that!”

EM: I can see the starstruck look in your eyes, lol.

KK: Yeah, she’s a friend of mine now and I’ve studied with her for many years. But, it was kind of a crazy time when she hit the scene and we definitely modeled after her. Whatever she was doing, we were influenced by it and would try our own version of it

EM: Why do you think you were so influenced by that particular style?

KK: Because it’s non-conventional, and I come from being a punk kid. Grunge music was our era and
didn’t conform to authority. So I wasn’t into pretty stuff like sparkly costumes and stuff. The costumes
were darker and more ethnic looking and stuff like that. I think a lot of people that gravitated towards the tribal fusion genre were like, goths, and we all kind of had similar backgrounds, with different interests and stuff.

EM: Are there a lot of different bellydance styles out there nowadays?

KK: There’s a lot. I mean, there’s Raqs Sharqi, which is like classical Egyptian belly dance. And then
there’s American cabaret, which is what you would typically see in an American restaurant. It’s just an
Americanized version of belly dance. There’s also folk dance forms and then what Jamila did was create her own school and many teachers now have continued to develop their own formats here besides Jamila. The new generation of teachers are creating their own formats and styles, so there’s a lot contemporary belly dance. It’s like fusing modern dance with the belly dance, which I love….

One of my teachers, Kami Liddle is a good example of this, she got her degree in modern dance, but she’s also an amazing belly dancer. So she puts a lot of modern dance moves in with her belly dance, and that makes it really fluid, fun, and beautiful to dance.

EM: What’s it like to be a part of a dance evolution where music and culture are blending and
incorporating elements from a new place and time.

KK: This is where the topic of cultural appropriation has hit our community really hard because we’re
taking stuff from different ethnic traditions. It’s a touchy subject.

EM: That must bring up a dilemma for you, especially as someone coming from a native population
whose home & culture is highly romanticized around the world.

KK: It’s so hard because I think during the Pandemic, the tribal fusion community took a huge hit with
cultural appropriation. We never really questioned what the heck are we doing so a lot of the big teachers had to come out and make statements about their intentions. Now people are way more culturally sensitive. And I can understand. When I see hula-fusion belly dance, it’s terrible. I cringe.

EM: What does it touch that makes you cringe?

KK: The intention of hula is to tell the story of the mele. So if you’re taking the mele out of the dance and you’re putting hula movements to techno music with a cheesy flower lei costume on, it’s offensive. I understand it when it’s flipped. Like, if I’m taking things from other cultures, I have to really think about
what I’m doing.

EM: So when this came up, how did it change your approach to dance?

KK: Well, it was during the Pandemic, and then I just kind of had an identity crisis. I ended up going back to school because I thought, I spent the last 20 years of my life studying this dance form as my full-time love and passion, which I truly love. But I felt like I really needed to learn my own culture. And I also feel like (not to be ageist or anything) but I do feel like I’m getting older. I don’t feel as comfortable on stage now as I did in my mid-twenties. So I kind of want to transition from performing arts to visual arts and still make statements, but through a different medium.

I think during the pandemic, because we were so isolated, it felt like everything got pulled out from under me as a performer and a teacher. All my classes had to transition to online. We didn’t have performance venues that were open, so my art form completely stopped and I was like, man, this kind of sucks. We did explore doing dance videos, like doing dances out in nature and then doing online shows and that served its place in time but I began to develop this drive to put my time and energy into something less ephemeral – where it’s gone in the moment. A dance piece lasts five minutes after you put so much work into building it and crafting it and choreography and rehearsals and costumes, and then just like that, it’s gone. So I was just wanting to learn the process. I feel like I’ve always been a creative, and the creative process is learning your technique, injecting yourself into the work, and then just doing the work. So I’m trying to learn other techniques to create instead of dance now.

EM: You’re also a mother of two sons. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve navigated mothering &
managing a marriage over the years while walking the artist’s path.

KK: My husband Alex was my best friend in 7th grade. We used to run around and do lots of drugs
together when we were kids and went to lots of concerts, so we have a lot of history together. It was
super amazing in the beginning and then we had a kid and it got rough when Puna was born. I think I
kind of went through my own identity crisis at that time and we actually separated for two years when
Puna was two. Thankfully we got back together and I got pregnant again. That’s when we decided we’re either going to do this and have La’a or we’re not going to do this. And it was just natural for us to be together again.

There’s definitely been some hard patches, but we always tried to understand the other person’s point of view and perspective. He’s always encouraged me and believed in me more than I believed in myself. He didn’t ever rag on me for how expensive traveling for dance events and stuff was because I kind of did that a lot. I’d go and do trainings or do festivals, and he was always super supportive of me.

EM: What helped you get through the rough patches?

KK: We try to talk. We have very different processing styles, so we’re trying to get better at
communicating. I’m learning how to love somebody unconditionally. He has his own rhythm, and I have
my own rhythm, and I can’t change him, I can only support him. Now that our kids are older, I feel like our love is in an amazing place.

As a mother, I felt like it was super easy to be nurturing in that way. I didn’t struggle with postpartum
depression. I was always into attachment parenting and yeah, it just felt natural. I didn’t really read all the mother books and all that kind of stuff. I just did what felt good. At the same time, I was organizing dance retreats and bringing in workshops, producing shows, choreographing and rehearsing and managing all this stuff, it’s like as an artist, especially self-promoting artists, you wear many hats. We didn’t have money. We were just getting by and doing it out of the passion for the art. Because my husband has been helping support the family I didn’t really feel the pressure on myself to make a lot of money. I just make enough to get by. I learned to live on less so that we have the time to do the things we love.

EM: I think it’s inspiring how you’re letting go of a huge part of your identity and transforming that creative energy from dance into new art forms. You’re also proving that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself and return to school at any age. Now you’re enrolled at UH Manoa to pursue a visual arts degree. Why did you decide to return to the formal education system?

KK: My grandma’s not here anymore so I need a link to my culture and I’m studying lauhala weaving
from a kumu that’s not in the school system. I could be doing other things like that but my sister inspired me to go back to school. She recently just finished her masters degree and I was like, God damn if she can do it… Before the pandemic, I was teaching four classes a week. I had a student group that I was coaching and creating dances for and performing with and then my professional group, and it was a full-time job. So, I had to let go of a lot of my dance activities to create space and room.

EM: Was that difficult to let go of?

KK: No, because I think I was burnt out and feeling resentment and stuff because the workload was
really high and the financial return was really low. So there was definitely an imbalance there. It was like
something had to change because I wasn’t happy. I mean, I loved everything I was doing, but I’m just a
one-man show and trying to raise a family and then this farm and our house… I couldn’t really, I guess,
take it to the level that other peers like Tao Dance Theater have, with a board of directors and grant
money.

EM: What do you want to achieve through school?

KK: I think because I’m naturally an entrepreneur, I make my own opportunities. I’m not exactly sure on
what I’m going to do career-wise, but I’m here to learn the process of art making & painting and then
learn my culture through doing Hawaiian studies classes with a broad exposure of different issues and
stuff. I want to incorporate my own cultural perspective into artwork. So yeah, we’ll see. I’m just here to
learn the craft and figure out what to do with it.

EM: Your creative endeavors are multifaceted and you have some special projects happening on your farm. Can you share more about what you have going on here on Kaulukanu Farm?

KK: Well, the farm is definitely part of our overall vision. We would love the farm to at least support the
mortgage and the bills and then be able to create art. My husband is an artist too and he does murals. We actually want to do murals together so that’s kind of one pipe dream we have, working together in
that capacity. The whole bottom of the farm is an orchard with avocado, mango, lychee, different fruit trees, lilikoi, and lots of turmeric. When we have a lot of fruits we load up the truck, take it down to the beach park, and sell it out of the back of the truck. We also have the fruit stand here on the farm, so when we have extra stuff, we put it out on the fruit stand and every day we put stuff out, it’s gone. We keep the prices really low just because we want to share what we have with the community. I make lilikoi jelly, dried bananas and powdered turmeric.

EM: Your dried turmeric is amazing! After trying it I never want to buy from the store again. But please share more about the monthly lei-making classes you host. These are really unique events and you put a lot of heart and soul into them!

KK: Well, I love doing the lei po’o class. It’s been a couple years that I’ve been doing it, and it’s just
growing and growing. Everybody seems to love it so much. Part of my vision for the farm is to get more
plants growing that I can use so I don’t have to go out and forage so much.

EM: Why do you think the lei po’o is so popular?

KK: People get excited when they come into the house and they see the table full of so many different
flowers and plants. I’ve had a few ladies tell me that I offer much more variety of materials than the
classes you can take in different community spaces. But I think it’s intimate. It’s a special kind of event
because it’s at my house, in the yard, and it’s a beautiful space set against the Ko’olaus. So people really enjoy the environment.

EM: What’s the significance for you in sharing your culture through the making of lei po’o?

KK: My intention is to teach people to repeat the process so that they can make lei po’o for loved ones
anytime because that’s really what it is. Being able to make leis and share your love and appreciation for your friends and family is what it’s all about. Not having to buy it and when you make a lei for somebody, it’s so much more appreciated. It’s a way to extend your aloha to people and the reaction is so much more heartfelt.

EM: Does it connect you with your grandmother?

KK: Totally, I know she’s happy I’m doing it.

EM: How do you want people to remember you at the end of your life?

KK: Well, I hope people remember that I am a loving, kind person and I am a hard worker, and I always
need to be working on some sort of creative project, whether it’s weaving or whatever I’m doing.

EM: That’s a beautiful place to close this because in your response to that question, you came full circle back to the same things you admired about your grandmother.

KK: Well, she was my lady!

EM: Mahalo for sharing Kalae!

To know more about Kalae’s extensive series of online dance classes check out her patreon page
For details about upcoming Lei Po’o classes with Kalae visit her website studiohiilei.com

by Erica McMillan