How Dance Mentorship Laid the Groundwork for Matt Del Rosario’s Nonprofit Flow Kākou

Matt Del Rosario’s life is a testament to the impact great dance educators have on their students. If it wasn’t for his mentors, Del Rosario, born and raised in Hawaii, wouldn’t have had a professional performing career, nor would he have established his Hawaii-based dance nonprofit, Flow Kākou. It all started when high schooler Del Rosario, who was struggling with dyslexia and failing academically, met hula instructor Edward Collier. “He changed my mind about what I thought life was,” says Del Rosario. Through Collier’s school, Hālau O Nā Pua Kukui, Del Rosario went on to compete at the Merrie Monarch Festival, the highest level of competition in hula dance. “[He taught me] that men can move with grace.” 

When he entered college at the University of Hawai‘i, Del Rosario had no plans of pursuing dance. In fact, he was an education major. After again struggling academically, he returned to dance and registered for ballet 101. Instructor Paul Maley, a University of North Carolina School of the Arts alum, saw potential in Del Rosario and challenged him to take the class, and dance, seriously. A semester later, Maley facilitated an audition with UNCSA’s dean, and Del Rosario was accepted into the dance department on a partial scholarship. 

Del Rosario moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and studied at UNCSA for three years—but didn’t graduate. “My senior year, the school decided to cut my scholarship,” he says, leading him to frantically begin auditioning. He did 50 auditions before landing a three-year contract with modern-based Pilobolus, where he performed for the next eight years. Del Rosario danced under the directorship of co-founder Jonathan Wolken, who inspired him to found his own organization. 

Flow Kākou is Del Rosario’s dream to share the wisdom and skills he learned on the mainland with his hometown on Kauai. “There’s a lot of people in Hawaii who can’t leave and don’t have the privileges I had,” he says. “Can I bring the world to them? Can I bring these great people, who made me great, back to Hawaii to uplift my community?” So in 2017, at the age of 32, Del Rosario began offering dance classes, workshops, and performances with the mission to “instill and inspire self-awareness in every community member through dance and theater.”

Flow Kākou—stemming from “the balance of everything, light and dark, moving together,” Del Rosario says—is led by creativity, communication, and collaboration. Its programs include [PLAY], an artist-residency program for schools and businesses; Hula Noho, workshops for individuals with limited mobility and paralysis; ReCollect, a community educational experience to combat the mental health crisis; and Project Love, a collaborative multigenerational community-development program. 

Here, Del Rosario shares with Dance Teacher his teaching philosophy and vision for the future of Flow Kākou.

A lot of your work seems to focus on connection and partnering. Where did you learn the importance of partnering?

The man who shaped me, broke me open, his name was Jonathan Wolken. He was one of the original founders of Pilobolus—he passed away while I was in the company. He was the one who showed me this new way of connection. Literally, physical connection with humans. He was talking about more than just physical connection—he was talking about human connection. About relationships. Wolken told me what we practice in the studio is what we want to perform outside. I started to take the metaphor out of the physical practice and into a mental perspective on how to look at life.

Your website says, “We are not teaching art to create artists. We are using art to teach us about being human.” A lot of your work appears to focus on redefining what success looks like in dance. Where did that stem from? 

We’re all dancers. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to be onstage, but the movement aspect, how we move with grace through this life, will always be there. That’s why there’s so many people who just need to take class—they just need to move with their community—because that spirit of dance lives in them. Knowing that only 1 to 10 percent of the kids in dance class will be a professional, I still have to inspire the rest to become something better than they already are. If I can get you to be a better human, then that’s the goal. I help them develop an epic human character so that they can take on any of life’s challenges and utilize the metaphor and wisdom of dance to get through it. Dance is so much bigger than what this current generation understands it to be, and I’m hoping to break that open so that we can have more for our lives. 

We have a lot of broken, talented people out there, who, if their hearts were whole, would be creating so much magic for all of us. 

What is your vision for the future of Flow Kākou?

On Kauai, there are neighborhood centers and, while they offer programs, there’s just a lack of care or attention to how neighborhood programs could actually benefit a neighborhood. One of my goals is to turn these neighborhood centers into Flow Kākou movement centers. I want to be able to do programs for the homeless, for recovering drug addicts, and for incarcerated people. We’ll treat this center as our home, and we’ll protect our home. It’s a way to not just rehabilitate this section of forgotten people, but to also give them purpose. What could we create so these people have an opportunity to at least come back to society? I want to use movement and the arts to try and help our community actually come back together. 

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