Okinawan Dance

Okinawan Dance
UHM Music Department Room 118
September 20 – October 25, 2026  (6 sessions)
Sundays 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Cost = $75
Click here to register

Experience Okinawan culture through dance in this introductory class. Participants will learn selected dances from the Okinawan classical & folk traditions. No experience necessary & no performance required. Bring tabi or socks to class.

Instructor: Yukie Shiroma is an Okinawan-American sansei born in Hawai‘i and raised in San Francisco. She was a founding member, performer, and choreographer of the Asian American Dance Collective (now Asian American Dance Performances). In 1987 she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of Hawai‘i and was the founder of the Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts Dance Program where she served as director for twenty years. In 2006 she received the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and has been teaching Okinawan dance at UHM in the Department of Theatre and Dance since 2013. Artistic Director of mask dance theatre, Monkey Waterfall, she currently directs the Imaginary Homelands Project in collaboration with musicians Kenny Endo, Norman Kaneshiro, Derek Fujio, Brandon Ing, and Jesse Shiroma, challenging the definitions of tradition in the retelling of ancestral stories.