Instructor from Kauai Teaches Graceful Art of Hula Dancing : Cultures: The class, which gathers at a Thousand Oaks studio, learns to express the island’s aloha spirit.

The sweetly lilting sounds of (tape-recorded) Hawaiian music floated on a gentle (air-conditioned) breeze that stirred the fronds of the (potted) palm trees.

As 20 hula dancers swayed their hips slowly from side to side, their teacher, Willie Pulawa, tried to explain a sweeping arm movement that illustrated a verse of the poignant hula he was choreographing.

“Pick out a person in the audience,” he said. “Let your aloha flow out to that person. Let that person know how much you love that special island.”

But the dancers’ audience was only a wall-length mirror, and the special island that they loved so much was thousands of miles away. Outside, the sun sank below a parking lot, not a glimmering beach. Still, although they were in a Thousand Oaks shopping center, their aloha spirit managed to shine.

“God, I love to watch them dance every week,” said a man from the bridge club across the driveway. Pulawa, a kumu hula (hula master) from the island of Kauai, came to teach a special series of classes to these students--women of all ages, sizes, skills and skin tones.

They call themselves hula sisters, and they all take lessons at the Hula Halauo Pua Mohala (Pua Mohala’s Hula Club), a Thousand Oaks studio that draws dancers from as far away as Ventura.

Pulawa guided them through the choreography of a 1940s song called “Nani Kauai,” or “Beautiful Kauai.”

The women, many of them wearing matching dark pink skirts, watched closely as Pulawa combined foot movements with the graceful hand and arm motions that told the hula’s story. Every movement has meaning and every gesture is intended.

Some had trouble making a flat-palm gesture that was supposed to symbolize the island of Kauai.

“Your fingers are always closed when you talk about the island,” Pulawa instructed them. “If you dance with your hands open, the meaning of your song goes straight through your fingers.”

The gestures are what make the hula so special, one of the hula sisters said later.

“It’s really elegant, it’s graceful. It’s really relaxing. It’s like a meditation,” said Deborah Locke, a professional harpist from Thousand Oaks. Locke had come to the studio in search of a dancer who could perform a slow hula for her upcoming wedding. But she was entranced by a class and decided to learn hula herself.

“Everything in nature has a hand movement,” she said. “You’re dancing about trade winds, you’re dancing about picking flowers, you’re dancing about a cool, cool pool, the stars, the sky, and the relationship of one to another.”

Pulawa, 38, is a large man with curly black hair and light-colored eyes, barefoot and dressed incongruously in a New York Yankees shirt.

He has been dancing hula since he was a child. Pulawa said he accompanied his mother, herself a professional hula dancer, to engagements. When he got old enough they simply dragged him on stage and gave him jobs to do.

On Kauai, Pulawa had his own hula club. But business virtually stopped in the aftermath of Hurricane Iniki last September, which caused an estimated $1.6 billion in damage, left a quarter of the island’s workers jobless and decimated the tourist trade.

Pulawa and his business partner, Ivan Ako, decided to bring their classes to the large Hawaiian communities along the West Coast. Since January, they have logged more than 20,000 miles from Canada to San Diego, armed with ukuleles and dozens of tapes of Hawaiian hulas, staying with friends and family along the way.

“We’re homeless hula teachers,” Ako joked.

Pulawa uses his classes to promote Kauai.

“I’m teaching Kauai chants and Kauai songs to let everyone know that Kauai is still alive, that it is still strong,” he said. Kauai, after all, is where the Hawaiian forms of hula originated.

The hula he teaches is a far cry from the dances of performers in coconut shell bras and fake grass skirts that most tourists see in Hawaii.

Pulawa instead teaches hulas from the two mainstreams of the tradition: ancient style, or hula kahiko , and contemporary, hula auana . Hula kahiko is accompanied only by chanting and percussion, while hula auana is more familiar to Westerners through its use of stringed instruments and lyrical songs.

“You don’t have girls in grass skirts doing wicky-wacky-woo stuff,” Ako said.

Kauai hulas are considered to be more mellow and lyrical than their counterparts from the big island of Hawaii, whose dances are inspired by the spirit of the volcano goddess Pele.

Pulawa, who prefers the kahiko style, began his lesson with a few Kauai chants. He accompanied the dancers by thumping a double gourd drum and sang in a rich baritone. His eerie, quavering tones echoed through the studio.

For these dancers, Pulawa provided a lesson in hula that most tourists never get.

“There’s no such thing as a hula appreciation course, so learning to dance it is the only way to understand it,” said Beverly Gwaltney of Somis, who has been taking hula lessons for 15 years.

Hula dancers have Hawaiian nicknames, usually given them by their teachers. Pulawa’s is “Kala’au’ala,” which means “the fragrance of the forest.” It refers to the sandalwood trees that proliferated on the islands until the trees were logged by traders.

Studio owner Pua Mohala, whose name means “a flower just beginning to bloom,” shows how the aloha spirit can touch anyone. She speaks Hawaiian, has taught hula for seven years, owns two condominiums on Maui--and is blond and fair-skinned. She is, in short, a haole . Her real name is San Nicol.

But Nicol, who is trim and graceful despite two back surgeries, is animated when she discusses her love for the hula and the culture it symbolizes.

“You don’t just dance hula, you live it,” she said. “It just becomes your philosophy. It’s our way of saying ‘thank you’ to a beautiful society.”

When Nicol speaks of an upcoming trip to Hawaii, she talks of going “home.” She and her husband, Keith, who works for television producer Aaron Spelling, will move there when he retires in two years.

Her students range from children to senior citizens. But unlike some hula teachers, Nicol’s classes are strictly for fun, not competition.

That is partly because she does not believe in putting her students through the intense stress of training for competition. But Nicol said she also is wary of competing.

“The fact my skin is slightly lighter, I don’t see the politics going in my favor,” she said.

But she said she has never let occasional prejudices hamper her enjoyment of the dance.

“I have to sit in the back of the bus. But I enjoy the ride, and the back of the bus is going to the same place as the front of the bus, and the view from the back of the bus is fabulous,” she said.

Meanwhile, Pulawa had worked most of the hula sisters into a sweat after three hours of practice.

“It’s cheaper than physical therapy and more fun,” said C.C. Ebert of Thousand Oaks, as she paused for a drink of water. Ebert, who wore a tropical skirt and a red flower in her hair, wasn’t joking about the therapy. She had stopped using a cane in April after injuring her leg in an accident that left her incapacitated for months.

“It’s excellent exercise,” she said.