What is it like having a decolonized identity within a colonized art? How do you navigate that?
![]() |
Madarang performing in The Tales of Hoffmann with Hawai'i Opera Theatre. Courtesy of Renson Madarang |
As a Studio Musician for Disney for eight years, you enhanced the cultural experience for Disney customers by providing authentic and accurate musical contribution. Does that mean, if I’m walking around Disney’s Aulani Resort, I will hear your voice?
I had the opportunity to work on several different Disney projects with a Polynesian theme. They needed an authentic voice to give way to authentic music. We sang music from within our own culture, and the arrangements were a collaboration between Native Hawaiians. Essentially, Disney provided the money for us to collaborate and create music together, then kept the product. I’m happy that they used our voices in this way. So yes, you would have heard my voice all over the Aulani resort, or maybe if you had requested a wakeup call!Disney is a white institution, but this was a project led by People of Color. If you think about how there are only half a million of us—Native Hawaiian people worldwide—and out of that, how many people are actively identifying a Native Hawaiian? For a company like Disney to seek out members of our community meant something to me.
Of course, projects like this also represent the commodification of our culture to mainstream America. However, I will say that Disney movies like Moana or Lilo and Sitch typically are created with a great deal of collaboration with Native communities, at least in my experience. Many of us are simply hoping for visibility and it is refreshing to see good work being done, artists being treated with respect, and seeing Indigenous communities on the big screen—not as a caricature.
Where can folks go to see and support Native Hawaiians telling their own stories?
- ʻŌlelo Community Media, O‘ahu's Community Access TV Station. They broadcast a lot of TV shows and programming in the Hawaiian language, made by Hawaiian artists.
- ʻŌiwi TV, which produces top-quality documentaries, news and multimedia content from a uniquely Hawaiian perspective.
- Mana Maoli is a collective of educators, artists, musicians, cultural practitioners, community organizers, and families who share a common vision of, and action toward.
- There’s also ʻIolani Palace, which represents a time in Hawaiian history when King Kalākaua and his sister and successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani, walked the halls and ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom. From the website: "The Palace complex contains beautiful memories of grand balls and hula performances, as well as painful ones of Liliʻuokalani’s overthrow and imprisonment. Since the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy, the Palace has undergone many changes as it once served as the Capitol for almost 80 years and was later vacated and restored to its original grandeur in the 1970s." You can enjoy a virtual tour of the palace virtually.
If you decide to go to Hawaiʻi as a visitor, I encourage folks to do their due diligence and seek out arts and cultural attractions, such as Iolani Palace, or the Bishop Museum, and other Hawaiian-run or Hawaiian-owned establishments.
![]() |
Madarang performing St. John Passion by Bach with John Butt, conductor. Photo courtesy of Renson Madarang. |
You talked about the need for more Native Hawaiian visibility. What is your hope for your people?
Within the field of opera, I would love to see more representation of Native Hawaiians' story. I’ve heard of several composers who are interested in telling the story of how Hawaiʻi is an illegally occupied country—but this is a story that should be told by someone with a level of connectivity to these issues in order to make it more real, more human to an audience. I would like to see stories of Hawaiʻi represented in opera, and expressed through Hawaiian mediums. Or maybe, if the opera is doing a Hawaiian story, the director doesn’t necessarily have to be Native Hawaiian, but there are elements of Native Hawaiian culture that are a part of the production. It’s possible to create a truly collaborative experience.
Opera is the closest thing in Western art to what the Hawaiian arts are: we use our mele (chants, songs, or poems), our hula (dances), our oli (chants) to tell a story. These stories perpetuate certain norms in our culture. They carry our ancestral memories. I think opera has served as a similar vehicle for Italian culture, for German culture, and other Western cultures.
Yes, at times opera has been used to “other” those it deemed as different, or to uphold European worldviews and put down non-European worldviews. It has been enlisted as a tool in colonization and harm, but there’s so much more to opera than that.
![]() |
Renson Madarang backstage during a performance of Il trovatore ('15) with Hawai'i Opera Theatre. Courtesy of Renson Madarang. |
No comments:
Post a Comment