Viray, Bryan Levina, and Shanny Rann. “Troubling the Training: A Reflexive Dialogue on Decolonizing Performance Pedagogies in the Philippines and Malaysia.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1-2, 2022, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv5n1-2a113
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and Elders of our respective nations and the continuation of the cultural, spiritual, and educational practices of Indigenous peoples.
The impetus for this article came about during one of our many rounds of weekly Zoom discussions that began as a reading group on decolonizing methodologies in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that brought us together as two dancer-scholars based in Australia and Canada. Since then, our conversation has evolved from careful readings of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (2012) and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor” (2012) to probing our lived experience as scholars educated in both our home countries and abroad in the field of dance studies. We decided to retain the dialogue format here as a way to decolonize academic writing and to assert our (subaltern) voices. We first met in Norway, where we were both pursuing the Choreomundus International MA in Dance Knowledge, Practice, and Heritage between 2013 and 2015. In a way, co-writing this article brought us back together as we now continue our academic journeys in Australia and Canada. By situating our personal journeys within the social and political contexts of our home countries and of the countries in which we have been educated, we hope that this dialogue offers an intimate consideration of what non-Indigenous and postcolonial scholars can contribute to the conversation around decolonizing performance pedagogies.
Bryan (B): Since 2016, Indigenous children, teachers, and Lumad elders of the Bakwit School have been taking refuge at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Diliman) in Quezon City, where I teach as an assistant professor. Bakwit refers to people who need to leave their ancestral lands because of the militarization occurring there, particularly in Mindanao (Sy). It connotes a condition of powerlessness and humanitarian need (Yambao, et al. 264). In a 2015 article, Mary Ann Manahan, Jerik Cruz, and Danilo Carranza explain that land grabbing in the Philippines “primarily refers to large-scale land acquisitions […] typically accomplished through illegitimate means and […] involves exploitation of land-associated resources such as water, minerals, [and] forests” (3). Among the known victims of land grabbing and the exploitation of resources, especially in Mindanao, are the Lumad,[1] the collective of Indigenous peoples (who themselves coined the term) who belong neither to the Bangsa Moro nor to the lowland Christian communities. The Lumad, which means “born of the earth” in the Cebuano language, consists of the Ata, Bagobo, Banuaon, Blaan, Bukidnon or Talaandig, Higaonon, Mamanwa, Mandaya, Mangguangan, Manobo, Mansaka, Subanen, Tagakaolo, Tiboli, Teduray, and Ubo peoples (Sy; Yambao, et al. 8). Land sovereignty struggles continue for the Lumad despite a number of “pro-poor” land laws having been enacted following the Marcos dictatorship. “Many landless and land-dependent rural poor communities face the spectre of forcible evictions, dispossession, displacement, and hunger as consequences of systematic land grabbing by landlords and local and foreign corporations and investors” (Manahan, et al. 4). This can be attributed to the unfinished agrarian reform program in the 1950s that was ineffectively and inefficiently implemented by the Philippine government (4).
To express their land sovereignty, a group of Dumagat from Antipolo, the capital city of the province of Rizal, performed “On Potok” during Hugpungan 2016, a culminating performance of all students at the Bakwit School. They uttered: “The land is threatened, the land that Makijapat created.” The song “On Potok,” translated as “The Land,” is a song of prayer to the god Makijapat, asking why the Dumagat’s lands (and other natural resources) are to be taken away from them (Salamat). Father Oliver Castor wrote the song in 1985 and revised it in 1989 as a unifying song to defend the Sierra Madre. The Lumad, who have inherited intergenerational conditions of displacement (Yambao, et al.), continue to sing, dance, and perform together, praying for people’s solidarity to save the environment and protect their ancestral lands from the oppressors. My experience of working with the Lumad as the coordinator and dramaturge of Hugpungan 2016 prompted me to think about their performance pedagogies in contrast to the way that I was taught at university and to what I am now teaching to my students. It reminded me of Tuck and Yang’s decolonizing call not only to listen, but also to be “accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” (Tuck and Yang 35).
Shanny (S): There is no reconciliation without truth—it is a necessary but not easy place to begin our conversation on decolonizing pedagogies. On 27 May 2021, Canadians woke up to news of the horrific discovery of unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in the province of British Columbia. From 1863 to as recently as 1998, more than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were forcefully removed from their families and placed in residential schools. In her TEDx talk, “Know Who You Are, Know Where You Come From,” Debra Sparrow, a Musqueam weaver, artist, and knowledge keeper, shares how the roots of the First Nations “are planted very firmly in the soil that [their] ancestors are buried [in] and with that is the knowledge of who [they] are as First Nations.” According to Sparrow, the First Nations were learning and thriving before Europeans arrived, but their education was “overlooked and misunderstood by the first ships that arrived in 1791 when Captain Vancouver landed [t]here.” Rather than acknowledging their way of learning, the colonizers put First Nations children into residential schools to “kill the Indian in the child.” Sparrow asked: “We all have knowledge and where is it written that we all have to learn one way? […] How do we define education today in the world we live in, after everything we have been through, not only as First Nations people, but all people throughout the world?”
B & S: Land as “more than a site upon which humans make history or as a location that accumulates history” (Goeman in Tuck and Yang 30) is at the core of settler colonialism. Violence against the land is violence against bodies. How can pedagogies of performance undo the “profound epistemic, ontological, [and] cosmological violence” (Tuck and Yang 5) brought upon by the forceful rupture of Indigenous relationships to land and the blatant erasure of the Indigenous body? What have we learned from the resilience of the Bakwit schools in the Philippines and abolition of the residential schools in Canada? How do we mobilize the intergenerational knowledge that resides in the bodies of the Lumad and First Nations as a way of situating performance pedagogies within Indigenous sovereignty? How can we unlearn the traces of colonialism in our bodies, especially when “the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices” (Smith 2)?
B: By “unlearning the traces of colonialism”, are you suggesting that there is a precolonial body? Resil Mojares talks about remembering the past through the body, emphasizing the importance of a historically minded ethnography of dance. A native of Cebu, he questions the impact of Spanish colonialism on the Bisayan[2] body (Mojares, Isabelo’s Archive 65–75). This is where the history of colonialism[3] in the Philippines comes into the picture. Before Spanish colonization, the early Bisaya had an Indigenous conception of the body as a medium of art, magic, and power (Mojares, Isabelo’s Archive 69). Tattooing (Pintados), the filing and blackening of teeth, the boring and distending of earlobes, and keeping hair thick and lustrous with various lotions or oils from plants and tree barks[4] are, among other practices, manifestations of body care, hygiene, and beauty, as well as signs of wealth and social status (Mojares, Isabelo’s Archive 69). However, this attention to the body and its display, and to performative acts associated with it, were immodest, sinful, or barbaric for the Spaniards; hence, they were a justification for the colonial project—specifically Christianization, which regulated and controlled the natives’ bodies. As Mojares observes, “colonialism was written on our bodies.” He continues: “The eradication of such practices may have been taken over time as a cosmetic improvement but the suppression of such practices must have meant, too, the displacement or loss of meanings that the body once had and displayed” (Isabelo’s Archive 69).
S: While Malaysia came under British rule much later than the Philippines came under Spanish rule, religion “was not considered as necessary to the civilizing process as it was in the Philippines” (Alatas 7). In Malaysia, the Bisaya Sabah are Muslim while the Bisaya Sarawak are Christian, like those in the Philippines. Religions introduced through contact with the colonizers changed the Bisaya; in Sabah for example, they retain part of their identities by “mix[ing] the teachings of Islam and beliefs of animism in their daily life” (Lukin 156). If decolonization demands “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang 21), the undoing of colonial vestiges calls for a return to the Indigenous body. However, Mojares is not speaking of “returning the body to what it was once in a distant past” (Isabelo’s Archive 74)—whether it is “the filing and blackening of teeth” or “the boring and distending of earlobes.” Decolonization means returning agency to those whose bodies have been written on in the first place. It is an act of undoing, by those in power, that does not exoticize or reinscribe as “Other,” but rather honors the wisdom and truth that manifest in the Indigenous body.
B: I agree that relations of power are implied when talking about issues of exoticization. Even the way in which non-Indigenous communities regard the notion of “Indigenous” becomes very political and problematic, and, sometimes, Indigenous communities’ assertion of their indigeneity can become beneficial for them. In Patrick Alcedo’s ethnographic account, “How Black is Black” (2014), the Ati’s participation for the first time in Aklan’s Ati-Atihan festival complicates our understanding of “Indigenous” as “authentic” and “exotic.” There is a claim, Alcedo writes, that the Ati are the “Filipinos’ putative ancestors, a group that embodies the country’s precolonial past—a lifeworld of purity that is inhabited in festivals that honour them” (Alcedo 37). In other words, there is already a predetermined prejudice that to be Indigenous, one has to be isolated from colonial influences and from modernity. And this was true in the “Tribal” and Balik Ati (“Return to Ati”) categories of the Ati-Atihan festival competition, where organizing committees expected the Ati to be racially pure, and that they should therefore cover their entire bodies with soot. Alcedo assisted the Ati and they became the first Indigenous group to participate in the entire history of the festival. Their participation entailed their appearance in public as official members of the competition, as well as their representation in the festival that claims to honor them. Alcedo argues that the Ati’s performance of “authentic” bodies during the Ati-Atihan is a form of “strategic essentializing” (Alcedo 40). This occurs when “marginalized communities choose to essentialize themselves in moments when they need to set themselves apart from others in order to unite for political reasons” (Spivak in Alcedo 40). This essentialism, Alcedo explains, consolidated the Ati’s power as they performed their indigeneity in the space and time created by the Ati-Atihan festival (40). The Ati’s strategic essentialism in their performance of indigeneity speaks strongly of their paradoxical situation: despite the belief in their central role in the formation of Filipino identity, they are still marginalized and disadvantaged (37). The Ati did not win the grand prize and instead received a consolation prize, because “according to the Aklanon judges, Puro Ati’s costumes were not indigenous enough and the Atis not dark enough” (54).
The incorporation of the Spanish colonial ethos in the body can also be observed through Catholic ritual dances and performances. A video recording documents a Sayaw ng Bati (“Dance of Greeting”) that I choreographed in 2011 (Viray, “Sayaw ng Pagbati”), where two male and female dancer couples performed at a kubol called Galilea:
Elsewhere, I have argued that the bati movement reveals a dancerly attitude[5] in its conduct, owing to its conflation of the past narrative of Spanish colonization with its present enactment of the dance ritual on Easter Sunday (Viray, “Greeting the Virgin Mary” 83–112). “Conduct” as a particular attitude in dancing relates to the book of conduct that was published, imposed, and religiously followed by the natives during the period of colonization (Mojares, Waiting for Mariang Makiling 173). As the dancers dance before and in honor of the Virgin Mary, “their body orientation and movement qualities merge with residue of the Spanish colonial project of urbanidad, discipline, and containment” (Viray, “Greeting the Virgin Mary” 104). As Mojares explains, “when the Spaniards proceeded to carry out what was called the reduccion, what they ‘reduced’ was not just islands and villages but bodies and souls” (Isabelo’s Archive 69); he goes on to argue that “colonialism was about the production of docile, decorous and useful bodies […] the body was taught what to speak, how to speak, and when to speak” (Isabelo’s Archive 71).
S: Perhaps, through dance, the body remembers a knowledge that was once there—buried underneath the “conduct” that was imposed by hegemonic power, and “reduced,” in Mojares’ words. How might we call on this embodied way of knowing, subjugated but never forgotten? Can a decolonizing performance training efface the Spanish traces from the bati bodies as an invocation of the precolonial body? How do we negotiate the intergenerational strategies for masterful “conduct” and the implicated body techniques that have over time produced conformity?
B: To erase the Spanish influences from postcolonial bodies is impossible, as cultural traditions “inherited” from Spain are, for the most part, viewed more positively and celebrated more widely (Santos 23).[6] This view has been maintained by the upper-class members of society who still have control in the country. The tension lies not in the pursuit of returning to the precolonial body, but rather in the perpetuation of unquestioned and unchallenged legacies of political subjugation by foreign colonizers for centuries, and now by Filipino political elites.
B & S: Marginalization of Indigenous peoples has also meant depreciating their wisdom or ways of knowing, hence reducing the knowledge that their bodies can bring. Given the colonial trajectories of the Philippines and Malaysia, this is tied up with the decolonial desire not to look for cultural symbols free from colonial influence, or to invoke the precolonial body, but to empower the marginalized as they reconnect to their own specific histories, and break the categories imposed upon them. As non-Indigenous, Southeast Asian scholars who have been educated in our home countries and abroad, we encounter a similar yet different fate of post-/neo-colonialism. Reflecting upon the historicities of our own bodily training is crucial for adopting decolonial performance pedagogies to recover and rediscover whatever knowledge that has been lost.
B: Body training is one way to tackle performance pedagogy but I am not really comfortable calling it “training,” because that word for me is associated more with “formal” kinds of body training, like ballet, or even modern dance. Streets, town plazas, and a kubol called Galilea are the three places in my hometown on the island of Marinduque where I remember myself rehearsing, or showing off my talents, and also watching and observing other performers too. I wanted to become a performer. But this was almost fifteen years ago when I was still finishing high school and choosing what degree to take in college. Before entering university, I was not aware of theater as a degree, or even the word “performance.” What I remember were palabas (shows) at the town plaza, usually initiated by several colleges during fiestas, or by school on its foundation day. The participating students (in costume, sometimes with props) would roam around the town, dancing and performing along the streets before the viewing townspeople. Also, the Catholic Church’s activities, such as Lenten rituals, were alternative palabas for me. One particular space that I enjoyed performing in was a makeshift Galilea on Easter Sunday.
S: I too am an islander! Founded as a colonial project in 1786, Penang was the first British settlement in Southeast Asia owing to its strategic location on the Malacca Straits. Under the British, Penang grew into a bustling port that attracted traders from all over the world. As a child, I was exposed to dances from different cultures. “Dance education is not available in the primary or secondary school curriculum in Malaysia” (Gonzales 297), so I took ballet lessons outside school and I became an active member of my school’s dance club. As a student-led organization, we did not have a dance instructor, so we would often choreograph our own dances, improvising based on what we had seen on public television. Aside from traditional Malay, Chinese, and Indian dances, we loved imitating Michael Jackson’s dance moves.
B: When I entered UP Diliman in the metropolis of Manila, I had dreamt of becoming an actor but was deterred by the characters of the classic Western plays. I did not see myself performing Romeo, for example. So, I struggled to find my path because I also wanted to make sense and make use of my experience and knowledge of the palabas, fiestas, and rituals from my island.
S: After high school, I too relocated from the island to Kuala Lumpur, the mainland capital of Malaysia, for a year and a half of pre-university before moving to Canada to obtain a liberal arts degree. I was thrilled to be accepted into the dance program at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia—it was my first dance audition after all. I had no plans of becoming a professional dancer but just wanted dance to be part of my tertiary education. At university, I was no longer improvising with my peers, but learning ballet, modern dance techniques, and contact improvisation in the “formal” way from instructors who were established working artists. Even with years of ballet training, I recall it as a steep learning curve.
Upon graduation from Simon Fraser University, I returned to Malaysia and enrolled at the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage (ASWARA). It was a conscious choice on my part to rediscover a way of dancing outside the Western movement vocabulary. Previously known as the National Arts Academy (ASK), ASWARA was founded in 1990 “as the nation’s first institution of higher learning, providing full-time training focused solely on the arts […] that would reflect Malaysia’s cultural heritage and identity” (Gonzales 289). The mandate of the dance department is to “train the body to be responsive to the various styles of dance in Malaysia, but with a world and global perspective” (Gonzales 290). While embodying the narrative of multiculturalism, I became increasingly aware of how the colonial strategy of racial segregation (Malay, Chinese, Indian and others) still undergirds the contemporary identity of what it means to be Malaysian. My one-year training at ASWARA would eventually lead me to study dance anthropology for my postgraduate degrees in Canada and Europe, which altogether shaped my awareness of how colonialism finds its way into bodies through movement practices. Europe was what brought us together through the MA Choreomundus[7] program; we had to go halfway around the globe to meet each other!
B: After acquiring a graduate education, we each returned to where we came from and reflected on the issues that resulted from our training and education.
S: A region known for its diversity, assimilative nature, and openness to foreign influences long before the arrival of Europeans, Southeast Asia has always capitalized on its strategic geographical location between India and China as a maritime trade route. According to Syed Hussein Alatas, European colonization between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries brought the free exchange of trades and cultures between Southeast Asian societies to a standstill and changed the face of the region forever. He attributes the “relatively static nature of Southeast Asian societies […] to colonial domination,” which “isolated these countries from each other and to a great extent from the Western world as a whole” (Alatas 20).
B: I wonder how isolation and inactivity attributable to colonialism affected the teaching and learning situations of cultural performance in the region? In Decolonizing Methodologies (2012), Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that isolation and fragmentation are offshoots of imperialism and colonialism (26–29). Imperialism is more than a set of economic, political, and military phenomena; it is also a complex ideology that has widespread cultural, intellectual, and technical expressions (MacKenzie in Smith 23). One form of colonial expression is science, which has produced concepts related to systematization, classification, compartmentalization, and specialization. Examples of these are hierarchies of race, typologies of different societies, and by extension hierarchies of knowledge (such as written or printed traditions versus oral traditions) and typologies of knowledge (such as Indigenous versus scientific knowledge, privileging academic disciplines). Moreover, classification systems have manifested in the domination of imperial powers over Indigenous societies, with “settlers” and the “colonized” mutually constructed through colonialism and imperialism. Consequently, decolonizing performance pedagogies in the region must also entail acknowledging the various consequences of colonialism for different colonized bodies.
S: In the field of the performing arts, academic degrees in theater, dance, and music are offered independently in universities, because “academic knowledges are organized around the idea of disciplines and fields of knowledge” (Smith 68). While each discipline carries its own institutional history and is undergoing processes of indigenizing disciplinary knowledge, the challenge of integration remains. Academic programs are offshoots of systematic fragmentation, which, according to Smith, is the consequence of imperialism (29).
B: Systematic fragmentation has penetrated the performing arts too: theater schools are expected to produce stage performers, actors, directors, and designers; aspiring dancers or choreographers attend dance schools; and music conservatories offer programs for students of voice, conducting, and the playing of musical instruments. In other words, academic disciplines have set boundaries. This is why learning and training in the arts tends to be fragmented, specialized, and segmented. What has been missing in the typical classroom set up, I argue, is a teaching–learning situation where performance knowledge is still situated in a broader, holistic, and integrated framework.[8]
S: I studied dance at ASWARA but I had many opportunities to interact and collaborate with students from other departments such as theater, film, and music. Apart from ballet and contemporary dance, the dance curriculum included Malay classical and folk dances as well as the traditional dances of other ethnic groups among the Chinese, Indians, and local Indigenous tribes. Dance experts were carefully sourced from cities and remote villages across Malaysia to teach and have their work recorded and documented at ASWARA. Students were also sent out on a four-week placement to live with adoptive families in villages where dances were still actively practiced, such as the Sumayau dance of the Lotud Dusun tribe in Tuaran, the Angalang Pailang of the Muruts in Keningau, the dance of the Malay Cocos in Tawau, as well as the Tari Inai in Kelantan (Gonzales 292). The curriculum at ASWARA, in my opinion, comes close to not only integrating different disciplines of the performing arts, but also combining traditional and modern pedagogies, prioritizing the lived experiences of dance experts, regardless of their credentials on paper.
B: One of the pioneering works that sprang from the early Filipino anticolonial spirit in 1946 was Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP), or Filipino psychology,[9] developed and promoted by Filipino psychologist Virgilio G. Enriquez. Enriquez writes: “Sikolohiyang Pilipino is anchored on Filipino thought and experience as understood from a Filipino perspective” (Enriquez in Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino 50). Enriquez’s SP is somewhat similar to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986), insofar as the core idea of SP is indigenization from within, which means “looking for the indigenous psychology from within the culture itself and not just clothing a foreign body with a local dress” (Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino 51).
Although SP has had an “indigenous crisis” for almost three decades of its existence (Bernado in Clemente 2), its methods of theorizing and contemplating Filipino practices and experiences can still be revisited in relation to Philippine performance making. The project of decolonizing performance pedagogies can be explored by considering the goals of SP research: “to develop psychology based on experiences, ideas, and orientation of both elite and non-elite Filipinos, using methods of investigation that are culturally appropriate and culturally sensitive” (Clemente 6).
Some studies in Philippine theater history have included the social sciences (such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology) in the study of drama and theater (Chua 108). Amador (1957), Cortez (1963), Lapeña-Bonifacio (1958), Lukban (1962), and Reyes-Guidote (1967) have also inquired about Filipino identity, addressing concerns that are closely related to issues of colonial education. These studies indicate the significant shift in the focus of theater research from the supremacy of the text or script to the analysis of staging (pagsasaentablado), which has also given attention to theater groups and organizations. This requires Filipino researchers to anchor their analyses on the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of theater making (kultura ng dulaan, or “culture of theatre”). It is not surprising that, in the 1980s and 1990s, Filipino concepts peculiar to Philippine theater experience, like dalumat (framework) and panata (vow), were central to research. Trends in Philippine theater research from 1948 to 2007, as observed by Chua (namely, from theater as text to theater staging, theater as a social product, and the framework and culture of theater), have demonstrated preliminary progress, at least, in decolonizing the field.
Encounters between university practitioners and communities with local performance knowledges should also be encouraged, as a way to help erase the line (or hyphen) between being an academic and being a practitioner. This is something that UP Diliman’s Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts is hoping to address, following the revision of its MA (Theatre Arts) into an MA in Theatre Arts (Studies/Practice) program in 2017.[10] Moreover, the need for a “sustained and substantial pedagogical programme [in the Philippines] that teaches the rudiments of researching, writing, and interpreting theatrical events” (Serquiña Jr. 198) will hopefully be addressed through the theater department’s PhD in Performance Studies.[11]
In this brief dialogue, we have explored the ways in which local forms of knowledge have been overwritten by colonial ways of knowing, while also revisiting and reflecting on our own journeys as learners, teachers, and artists. We are convinced that “decolonizing is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation” (Smith xii).
How do we listen better to the Lumad, First Nations, and Indigenous people? The question of what we can teach about performing arts has to be weighed against how such knowledge is transmitted. Integration as a decolonial method is not only about synthesizing elements of performance, but is a conscious shift towards a pedagogy that empowers the Indigenous, minorities, and the marginalized, and interweaves their clamor for land, social justice, and equity into the process of recreating cultural performances. Decolonizing performance pedagogies also implies the need to write situated histories of theater, dance, or movement traditions, and for performances that expand cultural connections and respond to contemporary socio-political events (Santos 27; Serquiña Jr. 197).
Our conversation does not end here; we leave it open as an invitation to revisit the vibrant exchanges that existed between performance genres prior to their segregation in academia. By tracing the histories of colonization through our personal journeys in higher education, we ask: what does a decolonized performance pedagogy look like? While we navigate the field of the performing arts as researchers, practitioners, and educators, we do not underestimate our shared accountability for pedagogical matters, in particular the systemic inequities in knowledge production within institutions of higher learning. Troubling the training also invites us to trouble our own power, to trouble our own authority, and to trouble the status quo—that is, the colonial legacies of systemic inequality and injustice. These legacies may not seem inherent in performance, or in performance pedagogies, yet, as our dialogue has revealed, they reside in colonized bodies. Therefore, recuperating and activating the knowledge within these bodies may eventually free us from colonial subjugation.
Acknowledgements
Some of the ideas discussed in the dialogue were presented at the 43rd Annual Conference of Ugnayang Pang-Aghamtao, Inc. (UGAT), on the theme of “Anthropologies of (De)Colonization and Beyond,” 7–11 December 2021. A second iteration was presented at the virtual conference/un-conference, “Decolonizing tertiary dance education: Time to act,” hosted by Stockholm University of the Arts and Makarere University on 7–8 April 2022. A third iteration was shared as part of the Dance Studies Association Graduate Zoom Workshop with the Peer Writing Exchange Partners, Sumana Mandala and Josef Bartos, on 23 April 2022. A recording of our dialogue was presented at the 1st International Performing Arts Graduate Conference at Sultan Idris Education University (UPSI) on 19 August 2022, followed by a live performance dialogue at the Choreomundus International Dance Festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France, on 31 August 2022. The authors are greatly indebted to the editors of this issue and to the reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
[1] Yambao, et al. (2022) offers a history of the Lumad in the Philippines and their placemaking despite centuries of displacement. The essay highlights some of the ways in which the Lumad make life, place, and memory in the schools and community centers that they have established at three sites in Mindanao and Manila.
[2] Bisaya refers to the people or inhabitants of the Visayas islands of the Philippines.
[3] For further discussion of the colonization of the Philippines, see Agoncillo (1990), Cristobal (2008), Schirmer and Shalom (1987), and Scott (1994).
[4] For a comprehensive discussion of head hair’s significance in the lifestyle of the precolonial eastern Bisaya, see Amascual (2019).
[5] Drawing on Karoblis’s (2007) discussion of bodily attitudes, Viray (“Greeting the Virgin Mary”) elaborates on the “dancerly attitude”—the quality of movement, orientation of the dancer’s body, gestures, sounds, verbal articulations, and other performative elements—in exploring how devotion to the Virgin Mary has influenced the choreography and composition of the bati (greeting) movement.
[6] Discussing the term “Philippine dance,” Santos (2019) asserts that, “on the one hand, [the term] seems to promote an inclusivity for all dance traditions in the country, [but,] on the other hand […] it also easily accommodates the construction of a singular (and linear) narrative in the desire for clarity as to what ‘Philippine dance’ is” (21).
[7] The program investigates dance and other movement systems (ritual practices, martial arts, games, and physical theater) as intangible cultural heritage within the broader contexts of ethnochoreology, the anthropology of dance, dance studies, and heritage studies. See the website: https://choreomundus.org.
[8] Ramon Santos (2019) claims that “the most significant characteristic of Asian expressive traditions is their variation in scope, in terms of the contribution of different elements to produce a unified whole, with its own aesthetic and hermeneutic focus. This can involve sound, poetry, movement and dance, theatre styles, as well as communities, time, nature, and the environment.”
[9] It is also worth mentioning other approaches to decolonizing history, such as the Pantayo perspective of Zeus Salazar (2000), and the contributions of the Institute of Philippine Culture and the Ateneo de Manila University Press in the production of Filipino postcolonial knowledge, as discussed in Veric (2019).
[10] Students of the MA in Theatre Arts program are expected to: understand the self and Philippine society and culture through theater, cultural performance, and live events; conceptualize and design live performance events; reflect on the role of theater and performance in world histories; and produce theoretically informed research and creative projects in theater and performance. The curriculum of the MA Theatre Arts (Theatre Studies) is designed for scholars, researchers, teachers, and critics of Philippine theater. On the other hand, the curriculum of the MA Theatre Arts (Theatre Practice) is designed for performance practitioners who wish to support their skills through the study of performance theories. See the website: https://www.dscta.kal.upd.edu.ph/master-of-arts-theatre-arts.
[11] The first PhD in Performance Studies program in the Philippines is designed for students to familiarize themselves with the epistemic and methodological traditions of Euro-American, Asian, and Philippine theater, oral studies, rhetoric, and performance scholarship, as well as to identify specific trajectories for their individual research projects. See the website: https://www.dscta.kal.upd.edu.ph/phd-performance-studies.
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