Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Paul Rae, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

On May 27th, 1958 a fledgling company comprised of young dancers, many still in their teens, came half way around the world from Manila to Brussels to perform at an international exposition with some of the world’s most famous dancers and performers. The standing ovation audiences at the Brussels International Exposition gave to the Bayanihan Philippines Dance Company, followed by their television appearance on the famed “Ed Sullivan Show,” gave this moment quasi-mythic status, representing an historic opening for Filipino dance on the global stage. Since that time, folk and tribal dance has circulated locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, and among Filipinos in the diaspora as a key touchstone for experiencing one’s culture and reflecting it to a wider audience. After briefly setting out a history of ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ dance, this paper will consider how dance within these categories has come to bring communities together as bayan. This Tagalog word, often translated as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ can also signify municipality, town, downtown, city, country, the land, the motherland, or citizenry. Thus bayan is created and continually reconstituted and realigned based on how one feels in relationship to the group, built on the set of allegiances one has to others who are connected to a particular place, whether it is geographically small (e.g. village) or large (e.g. the Filipino bayan in the global diaspora). Using examples drawn from communities of dancers and audiences responding to two highly problematic, constructed categories of dance—so-called “Muslim Royal Dance” and “Igorot Tribal Dance”—this paper will set out an original framework for emplacing the various relationships a dance form may have with respect to the expandable and overlapping categories of bayan as constituted by place, nation, the Filipino cultural imaginary, and as people.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

William Peterson is Senior Lecturer and former Director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, Will served as foundational academic staff in the Theatre Studies programme at the National University of Singapore from 1992-95 and has also taught at the University of Waikato and California State University San Bernardino. Author of Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (Wesleyan 2001), for the last decade his work has focused on community-based performance in the Philippines, much of it related to festivals where religious ritual, theatre, and dance come together in mass participation events. His Visiting Senior Fellowship at ARI follows on from a Visiting Fellowship at IIAS in Leiden, both of which have been devoted to completing the manuscript for Emplacing Happiness: Community, the Self and Performance in the Philippines. He will return to Monash in March where he supervises one of the world’s largest cohorts of PhD students from Asian countries pursuing research on Asian performance topics.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg