About

What halau.ca is

halau.ca is a free, curated directory of hula hālau and Polynesian dance studios across Canada, organized by province and territory. If you want to learn hula or another Polynesian dance, the schools near you are usually scattered across Facebook pages, word of mouth and noisy search results. Until now there was no reliable, Canada-wide place to find them. halau.ca gathers them in one place, so you can browse by where you live and reach a school directly.

Who it's for

The directory is built first for seekers: people in Canada looking for hula or Polynesian dance classes, or for performers to hire. It also serves the schools themselves, often small studios with no marketing budget, by giving them visibility and a profile they can claim and keep up to date.

How the directory is put together

We research schools from public sources and list them province by province. We aim for a small, complete, human-kept list rather than another stale search result. Seed listings are compiled from publicly available information, so we ask you to confirm the details with the school before you visit. When a school claims its own listing, we verify the claim with the school directly, and from then on the profile is maintained by the school and reviewed by our team.

Adding or correcting a listing

Anyone can add a school that isn't listed yet, claim and update an existing profile, or flag a correction through our submission form. Every submission is reviewed by our curation team before it appears, usually within a few days. Nothing goes live until it has been reviewed. If a listing is out of date, or a school would like to be removed, the same form is the fastest way to reach us.

Who runs it

halau.ca is a project of AlohaFest Toronto, curated by AlohaFest volunteers. AlohaFest Toronto is the city's celebration of Polynesian culture, held every summer at Mel Lastman Square. A festival rooted in community felt like the right home for a directory meant to serve the whole community rather than any one school.

Our role

The schools and their kumu (teachers) are the cultural authority here. Hula and Polynesian dance are living, practised traditions, and the people who teach them are the ones to learn from. halau.ca doesn't run classes or speak for any school; it points seekers toward the schools and lets each one tell its own story.