Hawaiian production peppered with meaning

To Moses Goods, salt harvested from the waters of Hawaii is precious, a substance necessary to the survival of native Hawaiians and all of their traditions.

“Harvesting pa’akai — our word for salt — is something that used to be done, in the ancient days, on every island that had their own traditions,” says Goods, an artistic associate with the Honolulu Theatre for Youth originally from the island of Maui. “But fast forward to today, and there’s only one community left — Hanapēpē — that still has a tradition unbroken since the time they were taught to harvest pa’akai.”

“When you receive that pa’akai from them, it’s like gold,” he says. “You can’t buy it. They have to give it to you.”

The salt harvest is a sacred practice, says Goods, who along with seven others at HTY, devised The Pa’akai We Bring to shed light on the tradition and share its meaning with audiences around the world. For Goods, that felt especially important in the aftermath of the pandemic, when a resurgence of tourism to Hawaii inspired the development of the show.

“When Hawaii opened up their doors for tourists to come back in, it happened that the type of tourists who came were, for lack of a better word, disrespectful,” he says. “They came to our community, didn’t care for our community and hurt our community. And there I was, tasked with creating a show to tour to other communities, and I thought, if we’re going to someone else’s community, we are going to bring healing.”

At that point, he says, The Pa’akai We Bring wasn’t yet a show about salt, but in Hawaiian culture, the team realized, there was no healing without inclusion of the natural compound.

The ensemble’s direction was informed by Goods’ experience visiting a theatre festival near Hanapēpē. over several years. “Every time they invited me there, they gave me a bag of pa’akai, because the person who ran the festival is from one of the (26) families that still harvest the salt,” he says.

Goods told them about the idea for the show and asked if it might be possible to come participate in the salt harvest. “He said, ‘Yep. I’m going to put you to work,” he says, laughing.

The work of harvesting salt, called pū paʻakai, is physically taxing, with the harvesters preparing salt beds within the water. “Luckily there’s a lot of hands, but there’s a lot of heavy bucket carrying,” he says. “It’s quite a bit of work on the body, but on your mind, there’s no toll at all. It’s medicine. It’s healing. Because you know you’re there feeling the ancestors and contributing to something that’s going to bring healing to communities and people.”

“It was amazing, because we were connecting with the ancestors of that place going back probably thousands of years,” he says of pū paʻakai, which can also refer to the sharing of stories, history and food.

Using that experience as a starting point, Goods and the theatre company started to translate the experience to the stage. “We knew we couldn’t have a lot of salt on stage, so we had to find a way to represent it,” he says. They had a number of ideas — sheets of paper, bits of confetti — but they lacked the elegance of the spiritual practice of harvest. Eventually, visual artist Hanalei Marzan conceived of a set built around three pillars of cascading, interwoven fabric.

Against that backdrop, the barefoot cast — Jarren Amian, Alysia Kepaʻa, Annie Lokomaikaʻi Lipscomb and Kalā Müller — took to the stage Wednesday to run through the production’s opening number, each donning pieces of traditional regalia.

That song quickly traces through the concept of pū paʻakai, with the performers singing in a combination of Hawaii’s two official languages, English and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the traditional Indigenous language.

Throughout the show, intended for audiences eight years old and up, a number of traditional Hawaiian instruments are used, including the ipu heke, a dried-out gourd used as a drum, and the ‘ili’ili, lava rocks, or riverstones, that are clicked together. There’s also the ohe hano ihu, a nose flute made of bamboo, which is traditionally played in intimate settings with loved ones, says Emily Wright, the production’s stage manager.

“The air that comes out of our mouths isn’t completely pure, because we can tell lies and say dishonest things,” says Goods. “But you can’t lie with your nose.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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