Na-Salapuan: A Philippine Traditional Dance Rendered in a Contemporary Form

• In Event: Transmission, Adaptation and Transformation of Traditional Artistic Practices in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Contemporary Dance is a form that is slowly emerging in Philippine dance. It uses individual style and vocabulary of a choreographer and mover. Its themes and subjects often times are rooted in personal experiences, current issues, certain feelings, personal convictions, and narratives such as deconstructions, translations and adaptations of plays, ballets and poetry . However, it is rare that traditional dances are used as subjects in contemporary dance. Usage of traditional dances only go as far as motifs in movements and stance but not as its main subject. In the contemporary ballet Na-salapuan, choreographers Japhet Mari Cabling and Angella Betina Carlos used the Panay Bukidnon ritual of birthing, depicted though the movements of their social dance Binanog. Cabling and Carlos used this tradition, not only as its theme but as the subject of the ballet.
This paper argues that contemporary dance can be a vehicle in the transmission and enrichment of traditional dances and that these dances as subjects, can effect innovation in contemporary dance practice, composition and performance. This descriptive study inquires further the layers of transmission that the process of creation of Na-salapuan went through, from the choreographers’ field research with the natives of Panay Bukidnon, to the conceptualization of the narrative of the ballet, to the transmission of movement vocabulary to the dancers, and to its performance. The use of traditional dance as subjects in contemporary dance, is an alternative mode of composing dances that helps in understanding better, Philippine culture and identity.

Author

• Angela Baguilat, University of the Philippines