Mrs. Louise L. Beamer

Mrs. Louise L. Beamer
Louise Beamer is the daughter-in-law of Helen Desha Beamer and has taught the hula for forty-nine years. She currently resides on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi.


I was born on January 22, 1907 in Honolulu and in 1923 at the age of sixteen I married into the Beamer family. My husband’s mother was Helen Desha Beamer and she lived in Hilo on the Big Island. Mother Beamer was a musician, a composer, a dancer, and she was my first kumu. She taught me everything. Mother Beamer always taught at her mothers home on Eighth Avenue in Kaimuki whenever she visited Honolulu. All the young ladies would come to learn and there would be thirty young women dancing in the living room. Now Mahi’s (Mahi Beamer) mother and I, the two daughters-in-law, would stand in the backline and that’s how I really got started.

Mother Beamer had her own way of teaching. She didn’t do too much dancing for you or with you. She got up and showed you the dance one time. She taught ‘auwana the same way, she would sit at the piano and play it one time. You were allowed to watch the motions and listen to the words once, and then you were expected to get up and do it all. The hula that we were taught was simple and subtle. The subtler the better. Our knees were always drawn up rather than outward when we would ‘uwehe and the dance always projected the words of the chant. I went through the process of learning the hula kapu but because of the kapus associated with the dance, I’ve chosen never to teach it.

Mama had a very beautiful way of teaching. She always told me, ‘You know Lou, you always have to be aware of how you are teaching. You always have to teach your students the way you would have wanted to be taught.’ What she meant was a teacher had to go down to the level of each student. I first began to teach at home in ‘Alewa Heights. We had a very long porch with a spectacular view of Pearl Harbor and that’s where I held my classes for five years.

Sometimes I would teach a student something and she would get it right away. But in the next class another student might not get it at all. I always remembered what she told me and I would go home and figure out another way to teach the lesson. Mother Beamer told me that there’s always a reason why the child understands and doesn’t understand, and it’s an excuse to brand the child as stupid.

To tell the truth I wasn’t too keen about the idea of teaching at the very beginning. I was nineteen-years-old and I didn’t have the confidence in myself to be a teacher but she believed in me and that’s how I started to teach. I took over her classes at Punahou School and in 1934 I opened my hālau in Waikiki next to the old Kodak building. In those days I used to work in hula from seven in the morning till seven at night. I would close my studio door and drive home and there was so much joy for me to open the door and come home to my children. I think the greatest sacrifice I had to make was the time I couldn’t spend with my family because of my work. There were mornings that I would feel a little low but when I got to that studio I would turn on the Victorola and I would forget everything outside. Whatever problems I might have had disappeared. Suddenly my whole life would be inside that studio. I just enjoyed it so.

Mother Beamer always told me that when you perform the hula you always want to portray your best side, the good side. The other side never. You just keep that to yourself. We weren’t even permitted to dance naughty hulas. I’m from the old school of training and it’s hard for me to understand the changes in the hula of today. Kumu hula has been my life’s work, as well as the work of my daughters and their daughters. It disturbs me when unqualified hula instructors identify themselves as kumu hula. The right to this identity must be earned.