Esther Candari spent her summer touring across Europe, dancing and teaching about the Hawaiian culture to thousands of folk festival attendees as part of a larger festival organization. Candari, an art major from Kaneohe, was the only BYU-Hawaii student in her dance team of four, but one of the members, James Ahuna, is a former Kaneohe branch president of Candari’s. The group’s three-week adventure took the members from Germany to Portugal and everywhere in between, Candari shared. Almost every day, she and her three compatriots taught basic hula and Hawaiian songs to locals at festival-sponsored workshops before dancing in front of 100-700 people on stage. They also performed in parades with an excess of 20,000 spectators, meaning they danced for a population bigger than all of Laie, Kahuku, Hau‘ula, and Ka‘a‘awa combined, according to Google demographics. When describing the festivals, Candari said, “Everyone would share their music, their dances, and their food. It was like no borders existed.” Cristina Collazos, a BYU grad from California, was a performing member in Candari’s troupe and said, “I really think that music and dance really speaks to people’s hearts and breaks down any language barrier. It’s truly beautiful.” Candari said the festivals would go on until 11 p.m., only to be followed by all of the performers gathering together for food and dance parties. “We didn’t usually get back until 2 or 3 in the morning, but we didn’t usually have to go anywhere until noon the next day, so it was fine,” Candari recalled. The organization that hosted this melting pot of culture was the International Council of Organizations of Folklore Festivals and Folk Arts, or CIOFF for short. Candari explained the organization’s members cover all the attending CIOFF members’ room and board, transportation, give them a local tour guide, and provide a small amount of spending money each day. The only cost to the dancers is their airfare and the costumes they bring with them. Though sharing her heritage with European locals was her primary objective, Candari said her favorite aspect of the tour was getting to interact with all the other performers from around the world. “In Holland, we got really close to the mariachi band,” Candari explained. “It was really cool because somebody would start playing music, one of us would start playing ukulele, and everybody else would just join in. We would have Croatians, Mexicans, Bulgarians, and they would all bring their instruments over and we would have these massive jam sessions all the time.” Another group Candari’s band of Hawaiian/American representatives grew close to was the Russian group from Kamchatka, who Candari described as “Russian Eskimos.” She said, “They looked Korean, spoke Russian, but dressed like Native Americans. It was really confusing.” “We could really only communicate with them using Google translate,” Candari said. A humorous misunderstanding happened when the two groups were trying to trade contact information. “One of the guys came up to Cristina and I, and said, ‘After dinner, you, me, undress.’ What he was trying to say was, ‘after dinner, can we trade addresses?” Sam Alva, one of the members of Candari’s crew, shared his favorite memory from the trip: “The human connection you felt with people from all over the world was amazing. An example being when this really awesome Portuguese teenager came over excitedly after our performance to say how much he liked the Hawaiian group. “I ended up talking with him for most of the rest of the show and we became instant friends. I had to run to perform in the finale and left in a hurry but regretted that I hadn’t left any contact info or anything. Much to my joy, our friend, Luis, found us again at our last show and we made sure to become Facebook friends and take a picture before I left, which he even made his profile picture,” said Alva. “This is just one of many similar interactions we had with new friends from all over the world. There was this sense of treasuring the time we had together. When that connection is made, it is one of the best feelings in the world.” Alva is a recent music and dance theatre BYU graduate from Texas, and has worked with James Ahuna in his “Living Legends” touring group. Candari said she and her team generally had one or two days per week when they weren’t dancing or running workshops where they could go sight-seeing and play tourist. She said her favorite place she visited was the Portuguese town of Porto. “It was my favorite because it was super picturesque. It looked like something out of a movie,” Candari explained. “Everywhere you turned was a gorgeous view. It wasn’t where you walk down the main street and that’s all that’s pretty; here you can walk down the side streets and it’s still pretty. Everything was just gorgeous.” Another town Candari highlighted was Barcelos, Portugal, which built a stage overtop a flowing river for the jubilee’s arrival.
Writer: Alex Maldonado
