The mission of Wai Company is to educate, entertain, and inspire with music, dance, and theater through public classes, workshops, and performances. Wai Co. respects and embraces the world's rich cultural diversity and peoples and honors the natural environs as they meet their artistic endeavors.
Wai Co.'s movement vocabulary draws from Hula, Modern, Butoh, Yoga, Aerial Dance, and Physical Theater. They are available for hire in education, performance, choreography, and directing.
Founder and Artistic Director Wailana Simcock was born in the Philippines to a Pinay mother and a New Zealand father and was raised in O'ahu since age 5. He speaks fluent Tagalog and Hawaiian and is influenced by his own and of Hawaii's native cultural practices. The history of colonialism in the places he was born and raised in has impelled him to question the ideas of race, culture, and power.
Ironically, while growing up swimming and surfing in the warm ocean of Hawaii, he also became an awarded figure skater at age 12. At age 21, he embarked on his professional career as a modern dancer for cultural activist Pearl Ubungen of Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians, in San Francisco, CA in 1996. He later became Pearl's principal dancer and traveled all over the mainland US and to the Philippines. While in San Francisco, he danced with other innovative companies like Steamroller and Kunstoff. He studied with Joe Goode, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Stephen Pelton, Barbara Dilley (NY) and Aerial Dance with Terry Sendgraff. Upon his return to Hawai‘i in 2000, he joined with the remarkable Iona Dance Theater, Tau Dance Theater, Giingko Maraschino, and the aerial dance troupe Samadhi Hawaii. He has also performed with the groundbreaking productions of 'Ulalena (Maui) and Waikiki Nei (O'ahu).
Designing a unique multidisciplinary degree at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo titled “Culture and Performance in Contemporary Hawaii” (2006), Simcock merged Hawaiian language, culture, and ethos with western theater arts. He continues with this focus in his participation with N2 Dance program (Maika and ‘Ānela Woods) in the honorable Hawaiian immersion school Nāwahīokalani‘ōpu‘u (K-12) where he teaches western dance theater constructs in the Hawaiian language exclusively.
Wailana lived at Kalani Oceanside Retreat on and off from 2000 – 2012 where he became Kalani's Hawaii Culture and Performing Arts Director for 2 years. He is the founding Artistic Director of Kalani Performing Arts Festival 2000 – 2012. While at Kalani he taught classes in Aerial Dance, Modern Dance, and Yoga.
He has just recently moved to the island of O'ahu in December 2012. He plans to teach, perform, and carry on with wai co. here in Honolulu where he grew up.