let it die

I heard one lady from a minority tribe down under in NZ told a Hawaiian presenter to let the art of hula dancing die peacefully rather than having people who do not belong to the culture, and who do not understand the heart of the art, perform it for the sake of entertaining foreigners and tourists at hotels. She said that performing an art outside of its original context will not revitalize the culture but rather it is short of turning the art into something like a dead piece of stone on a shelf in a museum. That comment made me wonder, is that what we are doing with our culture? In our effort to preserve our dances by performing them at school and other festivities, are we actually uprooting these dances from their meaningful place in our culture and history?

Much of the Kalanguya (and probably other Igorots) dances are performed in a specific occasion, for a particular purpose. Much of their meanings are associated with our animistic religions except probably for our wedding dances. The displacement of animism by Christianity has inevitably resulted into the gradual demise of these cultural forms that at this point in our time, no one is really very knowledgeable about those dances, chants and rituals, their meanings and their significance anymore. But well-meaning individuals and groups are trying at least to let the younger generation look back and explore the arts of their ancestors by mimicking these art forms particulary dances and some ritual ceremonies during special accasions or school activities.

What is better, to let our parents' or grandparents' cultural forms be buried into oblivion or to 'rechoreograph' and recontextualize them so that even if the meanings and significance of these art forms are changed, we still have the original form learned by the gifted few and is made available to the wider public? Yes, we have lost most of their meaning as originally understood by our ancestors but I think teaching the form to the people of here and now is worth doing. I find nothing wrong with museums. They hold a lot of priceless history and stories of the bygone era. It does defeat the idea of ethnic revitalization but I guess there are just some things in our culture that we can never bring back to life unless we put them in a new setting, sort of replanting a potted plant into another type of soil in the hope that the plant will bloom.

(Rechoreography: I borrowed this term from Mr. GS, the person who originally coined it to mean performing art forms out of their original context for the purpose of preservation. He is an American ethnolinguist working in the PI. The said term was first used during his presentation at the Language Revitalization and Multilingual Education Conference in Bangkok.)