AVONDALE — A bit of island life has come to town, with the official opening Saturday of Aloha Center Chicago that included a trial fitness class based on Tahitian Ori dance.
Participants attended the class in Center, located 3065 N. Rockwell in the basement of the Avondale Vintage Building, facing a makeshift mirrored wall lined with smooth aluminum wrap.
Executive director Lanialoha Lee said the center aims to preserve and perpetuate native Hawaiian culture in the Midwest. The first Hawaiians arrived in the Midwest in 1886, Lee said.
Lee teamed up with six other Chicago-based Polynesian and Hawaiian organizations to establish the center: Ke Ali`i Victoria Ka`iulani Hawaiian Civic Club Chicago, Kupa`a Pacific Island Resources, Ke Kula Kupa`a O Ka Pakipika (Kupa`a’s School of the Pacific Arts), Festival of Aloha Chicago, Pacific Soundz Productions and `Ohana Entertainment.
In the corner of the dance space, a green wooden box serves as an altar with dried ti leaves, sage, lei, a wood-turned koa bowl, a braid of blue cotton cloth. Inside the box is a bag of pink salt and a bucket of pink sand with bamboo sticks and a smoothed wooden shark's fin inscribed with Hōkūle`a, the historic Hawaiian double-hulled canoe that sailed the Pacific between Tahiti and Hawaii.
All of the items on the green box honor an ancestor of Lee. On the wall above the box is a poster of Lee's cousin, modelling for the Hawaii Tourism Authority, the state's official tourism office. She is photographed standing in chest-deep water, adorned with lei on her head and wrist.
Together with the altar on the floor, the poster and the green box create a sacred space and a commercial venture at the same time. But that is exactly what Lee has planned for the Midwest's first Hawaiian culture center.
The Ori Tahiti classes, as well as ukulele instruction, will not only teach participants dance and music but also educate them on culture and history, she said.
On Saturday, paricipants tried out dance classes, bought rock salt for a lomi salmon recipe, read about the ACC's partner organizations from display boards and played a rope-and-ball game called poi. Others tried playing a cigar box ukulele, or an ipu heke `ole, a single gourd drum.
Amid the controlled chaos that is the Avondale Vintage Market, where every item from typewriters, porcelein clowns, and antique postcards are sold, Lee's center somehow fits right in.
"We'll put screens all around this space, not to hide it, but to give the students some privacy when they learn Tahitian," Lee said.
The Hawaiian state flag hangs from the ceiling just outside the dance floor — a reminder that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency in Honolulu that advocates Native Hawaiian issues, has recognized the center's potential.
Lee said she feels the Hawaiian community in Chicago has been overlooked. She said a city-sponsored festival for Hawaiians and other Pacific islanders "is long overdue."
"We have survived since the first arrival in 1886," Lee said.
The center is "my grandma's dream," Lee said.
"None of my kupuna (ancestors) are left — my grandma, my grandpa, my mother, my father. But my grandma is smiling," Lee said.
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