Performing Filipino Identity through Colonial Epistemologies: Shifting while Dancing and Switching while Musicking

• In Event: Filipino Identities in Motion: The Public, Folk, and Popular in Performance

Abstract

Scholars in the performing arts of Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, often point out the unity of dance, music, and theater in traditional, pre-modern performance genres. One example is the komedya of the Lowland Philippines. If older performance genres combined dance, music, and theatre—how did the present-day categories of dance, music, and theater as separate and separable entities come about? This paper examines the effect and affect of colonial epistemologies on two media, music and dance. Spanish Catholicism isolated music from dance, because music was useful for religious conversion and necessary for Catholic ritual, while dance was not. Later, colonial American public education presented music as art and high culture, while dance was relegated to physical education and recreation. These separated categories constitute a colonized epistemology that in the modern nation state is naturalised as embodied in such institutions as the University of the Philippines and the Order of National Artist Awards. In terms of identity, it examines how the separation of each “art” generated an alternative aesthetic that enabled Filipino entrée into the international arts community. Finally it observes that—despite the appropriation and assimilation of elements from colonial epistemologies—an apparent Filipino ethos continues to combine disaggregated media within a single performance event. Such an ethos recalls an earlier logic of practice and implicates a current project of national cultural identity—both of which have wider implications for Southeast Asia.

Author

• Ricardo D. Trimillos, University of Hawai’i at Manoa