Leigh-Anne

Leanne Durant is backstage with the other dancers in her halau, or hula school.

After nine months of practice and preparation, they're about to take the stage and perform their rendition of the three windstorms of Hina.

Leigh-Anne has been dancing hula for almost as long as she can remember.

As a girl growing up in Honolulu, she learned to dance a version of hula called hula awana.

It's an instrumental style of hula that became popular after the Hawaiian language was banned in the islands.

All over the islands, young Hawaiians were reviving hula kahiko and bringing back those traditional dances and chants.

One day not long after she started studying hula kahiko, Leanne remembers overhearing her kumu, or teacher, Mapuana de Silva, talking about entering the Mary Monarch Festival.

The first time Leigh-Anne went to marry Monarch, it was 1981.

She was in her 20s and having the time of her life, preparing for the festival with her hula sisters.

Her halau didn't win that year.

Not to mention the hours each week spent practicing the dances they were going to perform.

They'd start rehearsing their dances in September and work on them all the way through to the competition in the spring.

But for Leigh-Anne and the other dancers in Halau, Mohalla, Ilima, the point of all this hard work wasn't just to win.

Although, in her first five years with the group, they did win.

Three times.

And then came 1986 and the three windstorms of Hina.

Leigh-Anne was a really experienced dancer at this point, and she was a mentor to some of the newer Hula sisters.

But when she got into the studio to start practicing this one... Something was just weird.

Leanne hoped that with time, she'd get more comfortable with the routine, and the feeling would fade.

But it didn't.