5, Six, Seven, Eight! Honoring Bolivian and Hawaiian Heritage by means of Dance

It’s a Sunday morning through the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. As I stroll alongside the National Mall, the sound of vigorous music fills the air—flutes and drums as a person sings in Spanish, whistles slicing by means of the rhythm. Ahead, a burst of colour catches my eye, and I see dancers adorned with feathered hats, girls in embroidered clothes with scarves draping down that bounce together with the music. A big group of dancers strikes in excellent unison, their palms sweeping right down to the earth and rising again towards the sky.

A crowd gathers rapidly; folks clap to the beat, smiling and swaying, and I discover myself doing the identical. The pleasure is infectious. I don’t but know what I’m witnessing or who these dancers are, however I’m clued by a Bolivian flag waving proudly above them.

Later, I realized that the dance is known as tinku, carried out by three Bolivian dance fraternities from the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia space. This area, it seems, is residence to one of many largest Bolivian American communities within the nation, with round thirty energetic dance fraternities, in line with Shauna Inofuentes.

The phrase tinku comes from the Quechua time period tinkuy, that means “to come together,” a becoming description of how these dances are taught and realized. Inofuentes, a presenter on the Festival and a caporales dancer with greater than thirty years of expertise, described the collaborative means these dances take form. Each people dance is led by guides often called guías, however as a result of the educational course of is peer-based and collective, they aren’t thought of academics within the conventional sense.

“I think that’s really reflective of Andean culture, Andean Indigenous culture,” she mentioned. “No one’s more important than the other, even though we have people who guide and whatnot. We dance the steps, and the ones who are learning go behind us and keep trying to imitate them until they get it. The teaching is very immersive and done without a lot of explaining, although we do slow things down and help each other out. But there’s this community feel and immersive experience we have while learning.”

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Editing: Por Tupsamphan

Once a dance set is realized, executing a efficiency is one other course of.

Imagine this: music blasts, a crowd has its eyes on you, and you’re a guia main twenty to thirty folks. How do you get the dancers’ consideration? You blow a whistle, and you then throw up hand indicators to point what the following step goes to be. A number of counts earlier than ending the step—often 4 to eight, relying on the guia’s fashion—you blow the whistle to sign the top of the transfer, then use a hand movement to indicate it’s time to transition to the following step. The steps themselves take about fifty seconds, so the dancers repeat that step till the chief alerts that they’re completed.

Inofuentes mentioned that probably the most significant outcomes of bringing collectively completely different dance teams was the sense of camaraderie that naturally developed.

“Everyone got to dance both the set that they already know from their own fraternity and learned steps from another fraternity,” she mentioned. “That promoted unity and community and very healthy friendship. I think it also helps with their dance growth because every group has a style, and when you get to learn someone else’s style, that just increases your dance capacity.”

Beyond connecting with others who share her heritage, Inofuentes believes that taking part within the dance teams is a strong strategy to keep rooted in Bolivian tradition.

“Through the dance, you learn about the costume; you learn about where it comes from,” she mentioned. “It’s a very vocal dance. We call out steps, and we have names for different parts of the parading troops, which are often in Quechua and Aymara. I think the learning is really so holistic.”

Across the Festival, that very same cultural satisfaction echoes by means of different dance performances. From the beat of Bolivian tinku music to the sway of Hawaiian hula, every group brings its personal language, historical past, and motion to life.

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Inside the National Museum of the American Indian, six ladies in purple clothes and yellow leis round their necks kneel on the ground, every holding a feathered gourd instrument of their proper hand and tracing hula hand actions with their left—bringing their hand to their mouth and lifting it towards the sky. Behind them, a lady in a yellow gown, topped with leaves, fantastically sings a music within the Hawaiian language. Her ethereal singing and the women’ dancing create a hypnotic rhythm, assuaging the stress of my hectic day engaged on the Mall.

One of the male dancers, Kāwika Keuma, sees hula as a profound technique of cultural connection. “I really like hula because, through the songs, you learn stories of the past,” he defined. “Not only that, it connects you to your heritage.”

Keuma is a scholar at Hālau I Ka Leo Ola O Nā Mamo (School of the Living Voice of the Descendants), a hula college on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi that teaches solely by means of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language. Founder Pelehonuamea “Pele” Harman, a kumu hula (hula trainer), defined how the group fosters deep cultural connection and advances language revitalization efforts.

“We are a hula hālau, which is a traditional Hawaiian hula school that seeks to perpetuate our traditional dances as well as perform new compositions, new choreography for contemporary Hawaiian pieces,” she mentioned. “We teach through the medium of language. So, all our instructions, our discussions about the compositions that we dance, are all done through the medium of language.”

Harman’s great-grandmother, the famend Hawaiian scholar, dancer, and educator Mary Kawena Pukui, stays a guiding affect in her life and work. Pukui’s legacy continues to form the creation of instructional supplies and cultural assets for Hawaiian immersion lecture rooms, together with these used at Hālau I Ka Leo Ola O Nā Mamo. For Harman, performing her great-grandmother’s unique compositions and hula songs which might be a part of her hula family tree are a strategy to maintain her teachings alive by means of motion, language, and music.

“My teachers, when they taught [hula] to us, told us to take care of it, because we’re just vessels through which this knowledge passes from one generation to the next,” she mentioned. “I try to remind myself, as well as our students, that these are things that have been preserved for us, so it’s our responsibility to take care of it.”

In addition to performing compositions to honor Pukui’s reminiscence, the hālau ready two extra hula units for the Festival.

“We created a set especially for the Fourth of July concert because we wanted to tell a story about our history as a people and our connection to the history of Americans,” Harman defined. “We were very intentional in crafting, using the dances and the chants of the songs that we chose to tell that story of our history.”

Keuma echoed this sentiment, describing it as unforgettable. “I think the Fourth of July performance was my favorite because we were able to showcase our lineage through the clothes that we’re wearing and through the songs that we’re dancing and singing,” he mentioned. “Performing on the Fourth of July in the capital of the United States is something I’ll never forget because we were able to showcase our songs and our dances on the day that marks America’s birthday.”

Although Keuma is accustomed to performing frequently in Hawaiʻi, stepping onto the stage in Washington, D.C., carried a higher sense of accountability. “Kumu Pele kept telling us that we need to set an example because we might be the first image of a Hawaiian that people will ever see.”

Harman expressed how deeply impressed she was by her college students’ dedication and enthusiasm all through the Festival, each on and off stage. “I’m glad that they understood also that we are ambassadors of our people, even offstage with how you interact with people,” Harman mentioned. “It really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our kids. Not many people in the world can say, ‘I performed at the Main Stage of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on a major holiday.’”

Inofuentes additionally mirrored that, though the tinku dancers are from the native space, they understood the respect and significance of acting on the National Mall.

“For the kids, it was so amazing,” she mentioned. “They’re from the suburbs of D.C., so they’re very familiar with the National Mall, the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol. They know how important and significant it is. For any American youth, that’s such an incredible historical marker and landscape, and then to get to present and share your art that you worked on so hard for so long. They were all so excited and so honored.”

Inofuentes additionally mirrored on the general expertise of being on the Festival, emphasizing that its true energy went far past efficiency—it was about creating an area the place tradition can thrive.

“One thing I learned about being at the Folklife Festival is just how wonderful people are, how wonderful human beings can be to each other,” she expressed. “It’s such magic to create these spaces of creativity, knowledge, sharing respect for each other, and respect for ourselves. It’s all about honoring every person, and I think that will help pull us through for future generations to have a better life.”

Sebastian Barajas is an intern within the Folklife Storytellers Workshop and a current artwork historical past graduate from The University of Texas at Austin.