Southeast Asia

Organized Panel Session

(4) - Filipinos and the Colonial Corporeality of Dance

It was only two decades into U.S. occupation that the work and life of Francisca Reyes-Tolentino (FRT) defined the nationalist period of Filipino dance history. FRT began collecting dances for her master’s thesis in 1921, and six years later she was enlisted by the University of the Philippines President Jorge Bocobo to travel and preserve native dances viewed as endangered amidst foreign imports. This preservation process, which took place from the late 1920s through the 1930s, resulted in a series of “bibles” for folk dancers, the inclusion of folk dance in curriculum, and the establishment of troupes.

While many have lauded the work of FRT, my paper rethinks her ideas about Philippine dance as a lens into the ways colonial values about sexuality, class, age, regional identity, racialized labor, and indigeneity were developed during the 1930s-1960s. Drawing from governmental reports and FRT’s work, I claim that the dancing, in fact, evidences the surprising colonial genealogies that formed the basis for what today we understand to be “Filipino.” Adding to the work of Filipino cultural scholars like Sarita See and Lucy Burns, that have interrogated visual, aural, and kinetic colonial representations, my paper calls for an intersectional reinterpretation of Filipino dance history and rethinking of the ways FRT’s work “Filipinized” the colonial body. While official narratives separate dance developments during and after U.S. empire, my paper will interrogate their interdependence in alienating colonized people from their own bodies and shaping Philippine dance and thereby the "national" identity in unexpected ways.

Speaker(s)

• JP

  J. Lorenzo Perillo

  University of Illinois at Chicago