UC Riverside

This Indigenous-driven and decolonial research, titled “Figuring Dárawatan, Dancing With the Tumándok,” looks at how Indigenous expressive culture is shared by an Indigenous community and how folk dance companies learn Indigenous expressive culture primarily for the nurturance and propagation of Filipino culture through Philippine Folk Dance performance, but also for teaching, for entertainment, and for advocacy work. Focusing on the Panay Bukidnons, a Visayan Indigenous community, and their participation in a local government-sponsored festival; Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group (ROFG), a state-sponsored Filipino folk dance company, engaging with the Indigenous research archive of its founder and a celebrated National Artist, Ramon Arevalo; and Parangal Dance Company, a volunteer-run, US-based diasporic folk dance group conducting immersive research with a Mindanao-based Indigenous community, I ask how national and diasporic Filipino folk dance companies research and learn Indigenous “folk” dances for audiences in the Philippines and the U.S. In particular, I look at how Panay Bukidnons, Parangal, and ROFG negotiate presumptive questions of indigeneity, cultural appropriation, and representation in and through this process. How do Panay Bukidnons, in particular, experience dárawatan, or the circulation of Indigenous expressive culture? How do Parangal and ROFG engage with their respective dárawatan? I forward dárawatan as a decolonial praxis of sighting, citing, and site-ing of and by the tumándok. This multisited and multilingual research pursuit includes dance ethnography, Indigenous storytelling, and archival research as methods focusing on the experiences of my interlocutors with their respective non-Indigenous and Indigenous collaborators just prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. I contend that it is vital to illuminate the way that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups experience the sharing of Indigenous performance practices to shed light on and beyond the pressing questions of indigeneity, authenticity, and relationality among Filipino dancing bodies. By foregrounding Filipino Indigenous peoples’ voices, their participation, and their ‘presence’ through dárawatan, we can better understand the role of indigeneity in the sharing and learning of Philippine folk dance in the homeland and the diaspora.