As a result of my work on
49 & 50 and my immersion into Hawaii and Hawaiian culture I recently learned about the Hula. It is really impressive - check it out...
Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, April 1866
At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula-hula - a dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated motion of limb and arm, hand, head, and body, and the exactest uniformity of movement and accuracy of "time." It was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through with an infinite variety of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their "time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs, and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stopped, whirled, squirmed, twisted, and undulated, as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in body by some exquisite piece of mechanism.
-Mark Twain
The dancing for this first video starts at about the 2'10" mark.
