Mā‘ulu‘ulu Dance – Tonga

• A seated chorus of poetic grace, structured unity, and ancestral invocation in rhythmic synchrony

Thinking Through Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)’s work, La Pensée Sauvage

Introduction

Mā‘ulu‘ulu is one of Tonga’s most refined and widely performed traditional dances. Typically executed seated or kneeling in rows, it features synchronized hand gestures, facial expressions, and light torso movement, all set to sung poetry and drumming. It is usually performed by large groups of women, though mixed and male versions exist, and it is showcased during important cultural events, royal ceremonies, village feasts, and religious festivals.

Through the lens of Claude Lévi-Strauss, especially in The Savage Mind, Mā‘ulu‘ulu becomes not only a performance but a mythic system of communal classification. It is a ritualized grid of human harmony, where motion, speech, and symmetry become structures that embody social values, cosmology, and ancestral resonance. It is kinship made visible, history made melodic, and society made rhythmic.

Mā‘ulu‘ulu as Bricolage: Assembling the Community into Structure

Lévi-Strauss saw mythic thought as a process of bricolage—working with available cultural materials to construct new symbolic wholes. Mā‘ulu‘ulu integrates:

• Oral poetry (often composed for the occasion) that narrates historical, spiritual, or moral themes,

• Gestures drawn from daily life—weaving, rowing, planting, greeting—stylized into choreographic grammar,

• Mat-seated rows, evoking the hierarchical spatial order of the Tongan kava circle or chiefly assemblies,

• The lali drum and clapping rhythms, which provide percussive guidance for breath, gesture, and unity.

These elements are not random—they are ritual fragments, reassembled into a symbolic map of Tongan order, through which the group performs its coherence and its relationship to land, lineage, and the divine.

Binary Oppositions: Individual ↔ Collective, Motion ↔ Stillness, Earth ↔ Sky

Mā‘ulu‘ulu encodes Tongan cosmology through ritualized oppositions, which it balances through structure:

Binary Opposition                                                       Symbolic Mediation     

Individual / Collective                              Dancers synchronize, effacing ego in choreographic unity   

Stillness / Movement                                Seated posture stabilizes, while hands animate inner life   

Earth / Sky                                                Movements radiate upward from the ground-bound position   

Past / Present                                            Ancient poetic forms are performed in contemporary contexts   

Elite / Commoner                                    The dance blurs rank through mass performance, but maintains order  

                                                                                        through placement and symmetry

For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a way to harmonize oppositions within structure, not resolve them logically. Mā‘ulu‘ulu allows tension between personal and communal identity, between movement and meditation, to be sublimated into aesthetic form.

The Body as Ritual Script: Choreographing the Group into Cosmos

The seated formation of Mā‘ulu‘ulu is not merely practical—it is symbolic architecture:

• Dancers are arranged in rows by age, role, or family, echoing the genealogical and social hierarchy of Tongan society.

• Hand gestures are codified—each has a corresponding poetic line, becoming a semiotic pairing of word and motion.

• Facial expressions must remain composed, joyful, and contained, affirming inner serenity and poise.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the human body is the ultimate site of mythic inscription. In Mā‘ulu‘ulu, each dancer becomes a glyph of social and metaphysical order, where the group functions as one expressive body, choreographed into cultural coherence.

Structure and Event: The Poem Becomes Ritual

Each Mā‘ulu‘ulu performance is composed around:

1. A new or traditional poem, often celebrating a person, event, or place.

2. Choreography set in direct relation to the poetic lines.

3. A musical frame involving singing and drumming that punctuates stanzas and transitions.

Even if the poem is contemporary—about a recent political event or natural disaster—it is ritualized into traditional form. For Lévi-Strauss, this is a key feature of myth: the event is not represented as history, but as timeless pattern. The poem is absorbed by the structure, and history becomes myth through formalized performance.

Cosmic Embodiment: Dance as Island Ecology

Mā‘ulu‘ulu is a dance of the land. Its gestures often invoke:

• The sea (hand undulations),

• The sky (palms extended upward),

• The taro field (repetitive, scooping motions),

• The canoe voyage (rowing imagery),

• The chiefly lineage (pointing and bowing gestures).

Lévi-Strauss saw myth as a tool to map humans within their ecological and cosmological frameworks. Mā‘ulu‘ulu does this choreographically—embodying the island’s cycles, marking the landscape in the body, and performing sustainability as sacred memory.

Sound and Choral Syntax: Singing the Structure

In Mā‘ulu‘ulu:

• Poetry is sung, often in tight choral harmonies,

• Accompaniment includes drums, handclaps, or even stomps,

• Each stanza is mirrored by a sequence of gestures.

Lévi-Strauss would see this as a musical-semantic system, where gesture and song function like mythic grammar: each phrase and motion is a clause in the poem of the people.

This makes the dance a living document, recited not by page but by body and breath, encoding values, lineage, and land.

Modernity and Mythic Continuity: From Villages to Nations

Today, Mā‘ulu‘ulu is:

• Performed in school competitions, church events, and national ceremonies,

• A key feature of the Langi (royal tomb) rituals and Coronation Day,

• Often used to honor dignitaries or express communal gratitude or grievance.

Though now filmed, globalized, and digitized, it retains its ritual architecture—row, rhythm, song, and synchronicity—through which the group dances its unity into being.

Lévi-Strauss would affirm this as mythic persistence through structure: the form survives transformation, and as long as its structure is legible, its meaning endures.

Conclusion

From a Lévi-Straussian perspective, Mā‘ulu‘ulu is a ritual machine of mythic coherence—a communal grammar of gesture, song, and symmetry that encodes Tongan cosmology, history, and ethical order.

It transforms sitting into sovereignty, motion into meaning, and the act of dancing into a re-enactment of the very principles that bind society to land, lineage, and heaven.

In its silence between verses, its smiles between gestures, and its rows of harmonized motion, Mā‘ulu‘ulu whispers the truth of myth: Structure is harmony. And harmony is sacred.