Ramon Obusan, Philippine Folkdance and Me: From the perspective of a Japanese Dancer

RAMON OBUSAN, PHILIPPINE FOLKDANCE, AND ME

From the Perspective of a Japanese Dancer

KANAMI NAMIKI

Ramon Obusan, Philippine Folkdance, and Me

From the Perspective of a Japanese Dancer

by Kanami Namiki

Copyright © 2014

Kanami Namiki and Anvil Publishing, Inc.

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Ramon Obusan’s photo on the front cover by Hermes Singson

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Version 1.0.1

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1

Haponesang Malandi

Chapter 2

Philippine Folkdance and History Reconsidered

Chapter 3

Ramon Obusan and His Folkloric Group

Chapter 4

Close to the Original

Chapter 5

The Legacy of Ramon Obusan, National Artist for Dance

Appendices: Dance Repertoire

Glossary of Ramon Obusan’s Dances

Notes

Bibliography

Photo Credits

About the Author

ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD

THE KANAMI NAMIKI I FIRST ENCOUNTERED WAS THE STAR OF A show I attended in Singapore during my first year as professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Ambassador Jesus Yabes of the Philippine Embassy had invited me to a performance of Philippine folk dances by students from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) in June 2002. It seemed a bit odd to me that Japanese dancers should be performing Filipino dances to mark Independence Day, but they were surprisingly able and I found Kanami’s rendition of the Maranaw singkil dance particularly memorable. For a Japanese dancer to capture, to the satisfaction of the audience, the movements and expressions of a Maranaw princess was quite an unusual feat. I knew from my observations of nihonjin during my two years in Kyoto and Tokyo as a visiting professor that they generally spoke, moved, and behaved differently from the typical Filipino. Kanami’s effortless rendition of Philippine dances must have entailed a lot of study and practice, I thought. How she managed to do it was not a question I asked at that time.

Two years later, in mid-2004, I got to meet Kanami Namiki, the scholar. She was introduced to me by her mentor at TUFS, Professor Michiko Yamashita. Kanami impressed me from the very beginning by her command of Filipino. She had completed her Philippine Studies degree at TUFS with flying colors and had already spent a few semesters studying anthropology and culture at the University of the Philippines. I recognized immediately that her linguistic and multidisciplinary skills perfectly suited the profile of graduate students that the Southeast Asian Studies Program at NUS sought to recruit. She applied to do a Master’s degree in my program and was admitted with a full scholarship for two years.

When Kanami arrived in Singapore in January 2005 to commence her studies, the Southeast Asian Studies Program was still feeling the aftershocks of having hosted a major symposium two months earlier. Eight distinguished senior scholars from six nations in Southeast Asia had gathered in NUS to share with their much younger counterparts the highlights of their careers as researchers and mentors in the region’s top universities. What lessons did they impart to the young Southeast Asianists in the forum? What bearing did this event have on Kanami’s student experience in NUS?

To begin with, the Vietnamese historian Dao Hung told us about his involvement as a soldier in the wars against the French and the Americans. Vietnamese scholarship cannot be understood apart from those wars and the politics of the current Vietnamese state. For Filipino historian Zeus Salazar, the emphasis was on mastering local languages and developing scholarship for domestic consumption. He warned us against being mere compradors of Western learning. The octogenarian scholar from Malaysia, Syed Hussein Alatas, dwelt on the close relationship between state and academe in Southeast Asia; we operate within this realization and also try to shape the kind of state we want. The maritime historian, Adrian Lapian, likened a model of scholarship to a ship, built on land, but launched in the sea. Will the ship float? Is it navigable? A theory may originate in Vienna or Paris, but can you navigate it in the waters of Indonesia? Lapian stressed the importance of domesticating theory, if not generating them locally. These ideas resonated with those of the other senior scholars—Taufik Abdullah, Charnvit Kaset-siri, and Uthai Dulyakasem—who had their own stories to share about doing meaningful research in Southeast Asia.

Kanami arrived at a time of promise and optimism sparked by the 2004 workshop. Our graduate students, most of whom had been deeply involved in the event, were eager to build upon the lessons imparted by the older generation. As head of the program at that time, I gave them my full support, sensing that this was an opportune time for Southeast Asian Studies to anchor itself in work done in and for the region itself. Despite the denigration and dismantling of Southeast Asian and other area-based fields of study in the United States and elsewhere, this field had the potential to thrive in Singapore.

In 2005 and 2006, Kanami was an active member of a community of young scholars that included Filipinos Nikki Briones and Trina Tinio, Malaysians Soon Chuan Yean and Leong Karyen, Singaporeans Muhammad Arafat and Mohamed Effendy, and Davisakd Puaksom from Thailand—all veterans of the workshop. Kanami’s choice of Ramon Obusan, a pioneering scholar of Philippine dance, as well as a dancer and activist himself, as the focus of her research perfectly suited the atmosphere in the program at that time. For Obusan also hailed from the era of decolonization and nation-building. He could very well have joined Alatas and Salazar in sharing his experience of dance research, their re-staging for the benefit of the entire community, and his connivance with the state in the cultural realm. Obusan was declared National Artist for Dance in 2006.

The engaging portrait of Obusan that Kanami’s research drew is the outcome of a long process of learning the master’s language, immersing herself in his world, experiencing the hardship and satisfaction of becoming Filipino enough to be accepted into Obusan’s family. There was, moreover, the additional challenge of dealing with the legacy of the Japanese occupation of the country. Kanami shows how history is filled with irony, for the war years were also the time when the Japanese military administration promoted de-Americanization and the search for Oriental roots, which encouraged Filipino cultural practitioners to turn inward and rediscover their true selves.

The work that Kanami poured into her thesis also bore fruit: a panoramic history of Philippine folk dance from the American colonial period, through the Commonwealth, Japanese occupation, post-independence, and Marcos years. The story culminates in the national recognition given to the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group (ROFG) by the Cory Aquino government. Kanami’s depiction of contrasting representations of Philippine culture by the ROFG and the Bayanihan National Folkdance Company clearly demonstrates her skill in combining historical research and ethnographic thick description. I won’t hide the fact that the history section of the book hews closely to my own research on history and the cultural politics of nation-building. It is at the core of much discussion between supervisor and student in the context of a vibrant period of Southeast Asian Studies at NUS.

From the start of her studies at NUS, Kanami was already exploring the kind of career that she intended to pursue. It was to be a dynamic combination of scholarship and art, academics and dance. Her first research paper was a comparison of the careers of the dancer-scholars Claire Holt and Sally Ann Ness. Holt was an accomplished ballet dancer who learned classical Javanese dance and went on to write scholarly articles on Batak and Minangkabau dances. Ness was also a ballet dancer who branched out into ethnic dances, and whose doctoral thesis on sinulog dancing in Cebu became a classic book on Philippine performance arts.

Holt and Ness, indeed, have been exemplars of the dancer-scholar engaged in the study of Southeast Asia. But now we have a no-less fascinating exemplar in Kanami herself. The path she took in actualizing the dancer-scholar ideal is revealed in the sections of the book that detail her experience as a Japanese dancer slowly becoming accepted into a Filipino group. Her command of the Filipino language was certainly a factor in her success. More than the mastery of language, however, was the way she came to internalize a Filipina sensibility through her bodily movements, facial expressions, and the ability to work in harmony with other members of the group. She came to possess not just linguistic skills in Filipino but the ability to behave, if not to be, like a Filipina. This was the most difficult lesson that Ramon Obusan managed to impart to her. The often-amusing narrative of the nihonjin being disciplined, scolded, chided, and finally praised by Obusan, foregrounds the latter as mentor, in addition to all the other qualities that made him National Artist. I know of no other work that succeeds beautifully in weaving together a history of the development of Filipino folk dance over the twentieth century, an outsider’s insider’s account of one of the top two folk dance companies in the Philippines, and a sensitive, wide-ranging reflection on how a foreign (in this case, Japanese) dancer learns to become Filipino in bodily movement and sensibility.

Reynaldo C. Ileto

March 15, 2014

Singapore

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST OF ALL, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FACULTY OF ARTS and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore (NUS) for the generous grants and the opportunity they gave me to study at the university and write an MA research thesis which became the basis for writing this book.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Reynaldo Ileto of the National University of Singapore, who gave me valuable direction, insights, and much needed encouragement and inspiration. I applied to NUS because I wanted to learn from him and write my thesis under his supervision, and I have indeed learned a lot.

I would also like to thank my co-supervisor, Dr. Jan Mrazek of NUS, for his helpful advice and refreshing and insightful approach to the study of performing arts. He continuously inspires and challenges me to study and write about dance as a practitioner.

It has been my great fortune to have Nikki Briones as my classmate, friend, and regular discussion-mate at NUS. She helped me articulate my thoughts and I am indebted to her for reading my draft and providing valuable suggestions, though she was busy writing her own dissertation.

I would also like to thank the following individuals who gave me support and advice over the years: Dr. Michiko Yamashita of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; Dr. Hiromu Shimizu of Kyoto University; Dr. Takefumi Terada of Sophia University; Dr. Nicanor Tiongson of the University of the Philippines; Dr. Nagasura Madale, for inviting me to Marawi and giving me opportunities to interview dance practitioners in Mindanao; Dr. Michael Tan and Dr. Eufracio Abaya of the University of the Philippines, for guidance while I was studying at UP; and the staff of various libraries that I had the opportunity to use. Among them are the Mauro Garcia Collection and the Institute of Asian Cultures Library of Sophia University, the Cultural Center of the Philippines library, the Philippine Women’s University library, and the National Library of the Philippines.

Many thanks also go to the late Ramon Obusan and my dance masters and co-dancers of the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group, especially Marciano Viri, Raul Nepomuceno, Cherry Ylanan, Christine Carol Singson, Jhunnard Jhordan Cruz, Emelita Medina, Alfie Franco, and the Obusan family (especially Tito Ivan, Tita Amy, Tita Iris and Tita Bing), who allowed me to take part in the ROFG family and taught me Philippine culture and tradition, both on the stage and in daily life.

Finally, I would like to thank my family in Japan, who allowed me to study in the Philippines and later in Singapore, and helped me financially in the first four years of my study/stay in the Philippines before I transferred to NUS.

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK IS MY ATTEMPT TO CONVEY THE UNIQUENESS OF THE Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group (ROFG), its approach to dance, pedagogic style and aesthetic principles, its philosophy of representation, and most importantly, its notions of Filipino identity, drawn from my insights as one of the group’s non-Filipino dancers.

My entry into the world of Philippine folkdance was as a practitioner/dancer and my understanding of Philippine folkdance then was largely derived from being a member of the ROFG. Later, I decided to study dance seriously from a scholarly standpoint, and wrote my MA thesis on Philippine folkdance. I was a graduate research student at the National University of Singapore’s Southeast Asian Studies Program, and my teachers inspired me to investigate local forms of knowledge. I was encouraged by my mentors to capitalize on what I knew, given my wealth of experience as an insider. I gained enough confidence to consider my body not just as an instrument of expression, but as a source of information. My body—in the way it moves, in the way I learned to make it move, in the way Ramon Obusan’s teachings molded and re-shaped my dancing form—all these are embodied local knowledge, and are subjects of scholarly investigation.

Writings on Philippine folkdance range from instructional dance books,¹ coffee-table books,² encyclopedic volumes,³ autobiographical books,⁴ to scholarly work,⁵ but I was uneasy at how these existing works seem to have frozen folkdance history at the point when they succeeded in promoting the beautiful image of the Philippines in the international scene in the 1960s and 1970s. The focal point of analysis generally tends toward the international significance and role of Philippine folkdance in nation-building. What was happening or what changed in the national scene during and after the Martial Law era of Imelda Marcos, the period of the emergence and development of the ROFG, is largely disregarded. I do not mean to say that no one has written capably about contemporary Philippine folkdance, rather, that the framework or perspective used has remained fairly constant since the 1960s and 1970s.

I wish to draw attention to the discursive breach that Obusan represents. When he broke away from Bayanihan and formed his own dance company in 1972, he introduced a representational philosophy, aesthetic sensibility and approach to Philippine folkdance performance that contrasted markedly from Bayanihan’s. This added new dynamics and aesthetic pluralism to the field of Philippine folkdance, but to this day,