Halla Huhm

Halla Pai Huhm was born in Pusan, Korea in 1922 and moved to Japan around age five, where she trained under the dancer Pai Ku-ja. That formative education exposed her to Korean, Japanese, and modern performance practices during a period of profound political upheaval in East Asia. She returned to Korea to continue her dance studies before immigrating to Hawaiʻi in 1949 with her husband, John Huhm, a Korean American U.S. Army serviceman.

In 1950, Huhm began teaching in Honolulu, establishing the studio that became the foundation of her public legacy. Teaching children and adults in a community where staged dance carried complicated associations with gender, class, colonial memory, and cultural respectability, she shaped a repertory that reflected her own cross-cultural formation. Her 1954 appearance in Honolulu Community Theatre's *The Teahouse of the August Moon* demonstrated her range across community theatre and concert performance.

Starting in 1959, Huhm taught Korean dance at the University of Hawaiʻi while maintaining professional ties to Korea. She made repeated visits to study with specialists in court, Buddhist, shamanic, folk, and percussion traditions, then invited those artists to Hawaiʻi to expand what her students encountered. A 1960 performance in Alan Hovhaness's contemporary music work *Wind Drum* is remembered for her spontaneous use of Korean dance motifs within a new artistic setting, suggesting an approach to tradition that allowed for adaptation rather than fixed sequences.

Huhm's teaching linked bodily technique to lived cultural participation. Studio recitals, festivals, weddings, community programs, and university courses made Korean dance visible within Hawaiʻi while offering Korean immigrants and their descendants a practical route back into inherited culture. She died in January 1994. Mary Jo Freshley, her long-time student and certified teacher in the Pai tradition, assumed direction of the studio and helped establish the Halla Huhm Foundation. Huhm's photographs, films, programs, correspondence, and ephemera became the Halla Huhm Dance Collection at the University of Hawaiʻi Center for Korean Studies, documenting activity from her 1949 arrival through her death and beyond. Filmmaker Billie Lee later used that archive and several generations of students to examine how cultural memory is carried in bodies as well as records in the documentary *Moving Home*.