Preserving Living Traditions in Live Performances: A Traditional Music and Dance Troupe of the Kalanguya of the Northern Philippines (original) (raw)
Related papers
Springer, 2019
The essay is a general overview of the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances. The first part is an introduction and a presentation of the archival project with emphasis on the concept of cultural performance, concretized within performance studies paradigm using Philippine society and culture as context. The second part is a discussion of how data in the archive were documented and collected using focused ethnography as primary methodology. The method is argued to be the distinguishing mark of the project from other digital archives. Also, this section provides a detailed exposition about the significance of understanding local performance vocabularies and how these terms are translated into the archive through semantic framing. In the end, it is asserted that the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances functions not only as a repository of resource materials on the study of Philippine cultural performances but also as a performative cultural memory and a pedagogical tool.
Humanities Diliman, 2019
Cultural performance first appeared in the language of the academic community when Milton Singer published his book When Great Tradition Modernizes (1972), in which he proposed cultural performance as a unit of observation in an anthropological inquiry. Since then, cultural performance has become a useful tool to provide a frame for the understanding of the self, society, and culture. This essay reflects on the concept of cultural performance in a preliminary attempt to historicize and to contextualize it using Philippine culture as a starting point. The first part is a descriptive illustration of how the term evolved from being a social scientific concept to an important subject in the humanities, particularly in the fields of theatre and performance studies. Included in this section is a proposal based on reflections by anthropologists, folklorists and performance scholars for a model illustrating some identifiable markers that signify an activity as a cultural performance. The second part is a paradigmatic schematization of the specifics of how cultural performance may be understood in the context of the Philippines. Using the phenomena of panata, pagtitipon, and pagdiriwang, this paper argues that Philippine cultural performances are artistic communications in small groups performed publicly as a community gathering, even if the intentions of many performers are personal. The preliminary arguments found in this essay are based mostly on sporadic field notes in various locales in the archipelago.
The Intramuros Project: Performing Heritage, Performed Ethnography, and Documentary Performance
Asian Studies Journal, 2021
The documentary playscript The Intramuros Project is based on ethnographic materials (i.e. transcripts of interviews and storytelling) collected and annotated between March and September 2019 from different stakeholders of Intramuros or Old Manila. These include security guards, ice cream vendors, informal settlers, on-the-job-trainees, padyak drivers, kalesa drivers, and government workers. The documentary performance manuscript also drew from other existing documentary materials such as the Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, news reports about Intramuros, and other resources written about the walled city of Manila. The playscript was developed and workshopped using moment work, a devising technique introduced by the Tectonic Theater Project where devisors and dramaturgs are invited to think of potential staging devices on different scenes. Generally, the documentary piece is an attempt to problematize the concept of heritage using Intramuros as a starting point. In this paper, the playscript developed is explained through the dramaturgical notes. In the end, it is asserted that creative processes of devising and dramaturgy also contribute to cultural studies discourse.
The Kalanguya are an indigenous people group of the northern Philippines with a population of approximately 70,000. One of the authors (Arsenio) is a member of this ethnolinguistic group who manages a touring ensemble that incorporates traditional music and dance in performances for Kalanguya communities. Like recent efforts by UNESCO and other transnational cultural organizations, we advocate for strengthening local practices over preserving captured images and sound recordings. While there are important roles for archives and libraries, traditional performing arts are by definition dynamic, culture-making activities that problematize objectification and static forms of documentation.
Sintang Dalisay (Pure Love), a theatrical production based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a Filipino metrical romance written in 1901, deployed the igal, a dance tradition of the Sama-Bajau, a Muslim community in Southern Philippines, as its movement motif. The use of this motif dictated other production elements, specifically the kind of music to be used, the decision to relocate the play in a Muslim community, the design of set and costumes, and the change of character names to more local appellations. The production adopted a collaborative approach to theater-making, working with local dance masters and musicians to teach actors and to align the reconfiguration of the dance with community practice. The result of this collaborative effort, laudable in general to audiences, also met with resistance from several fronts. This paper assesses the reception of the work, and finds that the task of reconfiguring folk performance, must contend with issues of cultural and political representation
Documenting music and dance in the Philippines(1213)
Senri Ethnographical Reports, 2016
On. May 18, 2014, the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology held a one day symposium dedicated to discussion of the sound and film documentary work in the Philippines in 1966. This article is my contribution to the published proceedings, An Audio Visual Exploration of Philippine Music. The Historical Contribution of Robert Garfias, Ed by Yoshitaka Terada
Audiovisual Ethnography of Philippine Music: A Process-oriented Approach
Humanities Diliman, 2013
Audiovisual documentation has been an important part of ethnomusicological endeavors, but until recently it was treated primarily as a tool of preservation and/or documentation that supplements written ethnography, albeit there are a few notable exceptions.The proliferation of inexpensive video equipment has encouraged the unprecedented number of scholars and students in ethnomusicology to be involved in filmmaking, but its potential as a methodology has not been fully explored. As a small step to redefine the application of audiovisual media, Dr. Usopay Cadar, my teacher in Philippine music, and I produced two films: one on Maranao kolintang music and the other on Maranao culture in general, based on the audiovisual footage we collected in 2008. This short essay describes how the screenings of these films were organized in March 2013 for the diverse audiences in the Philippines, and what types of reactions and interactions transpired during the screenings.These screenings were organized both to obtain feedback about the content of the films from the caretakers and stakeholders of the documented tradition and to create a venue for interactions and collaborations to discuss the potential of audiovisual ethnography. Drawing from the analysis of the current project, I propose to regard film not as a fixed product but as a living and organic site that is open to commentaries and critiques, where changes can be made throughout the process. In this perspective, ‘filmmaking’ refers to the entire process of research, filming, editing and post-production activities.
Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (NYU Press), 2012
This is the introduction to my first book Puro Arte: On the Filipino Performing Body (NYU Press 2012), winner of the Cultural Studies Book Award, Asian American Studies Association, (2012). Puro Arte tracks the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. In Filipino, puro arte performs a more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In each chapter, I trace a range of corporeal icons in various performance spaces, which include early plays about the U.S.-Philippine War and Filipinos “displayed” in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Filipino patron in the U.S. taxi dance halls, theatrical performances about martial law, and the Filipino performers in the musical global phenomenon Miss Saigon. It is through these multiple and differentiated spaces of performance that I theorize the Filipino performing body as an “archival embodiment” of U.S.-Philippine imperial relations. While I engage with the racialization of Filipinos in the U.S. through the history of imperial relations between the U.S. and the Philippines, I equally emphasize Filipino racial formation in the U.S. as already formed in relation to the racialization of African Americans, other Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, and other subjects of the U.S. empire. I stage a conversation between colonial constructions of/and contemporary performance practices by Filipinos to argue for a consideration of performance not simply as site of uncritical visibility, resistance, or agency, but as a relationship constituted within colonial and neocolonial histories.
The Qualitative Report, 2017
Araquio, a verse play on the search of the holy cross, is an indigenous folk theatre in the town of Peñaranda, province of Nueva Ecija, Philippines that has survived for over a hundred years. This ethnographic-phenomenological study explores the holistic nature of the transmission and learning processes of araquio music and songs as a theatre-ritual. Its transmission as a social phenomenon is an avenue for music learning that may in fact overshadow its being a diminishing tradition. Using the framework of three modes of enculturation (Merriam, 1964) and interpretation of culture (Geertz, 1973), I investigate the music transmission and learning processes and sought to reveal how these processes were meaningful to the practitioners. Participants in this inquiry involve 21 adult practitioners, namely: 4 maestros (teachers of araquio), 3 female and 5 male personajes (characters of the verse play), and 9 musikeros (community musicians). An ethnographic method is employed using participant-observation and informal semi-structured interview script. Guiding questions have centered on how transmission and learning strategies, and meaning define these experiences. As a living oral tradition, intergenerational learning is found to be the product of transmission by enculturation occurring in the araquio and happens within genealogical generation. The practitioners, through the unspoken meaning of the tradition, have certain unspoken factors: unity of purpose, ancestral adhesion, unification of tribal strength, and shared experiences.
2014
Music has been a medium through which humans have expressed their relationship with nature. To further understand the relationships between ethnic music and nature, this study examines bangian as part of the pamaguan rice festival or traditional work songs in a Mangyan community in SitioAlangan in Oriental Mindoro, Philippines. Through thematic interpretation of the musical content and its social context and music theoretical analysis of the bangian, the study has unpacked how bangian ritualizes the community’s reality, how nature provides materials for performance of bangian, how bangian tells about everyday life and reinforces communal bonds, and how nature shapes the performance, execution, and notation of the work songs. Implications and contributions of the study to cultural preservation and identity construction are also highlighted.