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When there was none and no one, there
came Bayanihan, the Filipino
Dance Troop. And this happened half a
century ago. This is why Bayanihan
today is the depository of almost all
Filipino dances, dress and songs.
In the 1960s
National Artist Lucrecia Úrtula went to
Mindanao, to the Cordilleras and to
almost every Island to look for
katutubo ethnic Filipinos to dance
for her their own ancestral ethnic or
tribal dances. She noted them down and
captured their movements and translated
them into the stage for the Bayanihan
dancers to revive, to interpret, and
preserve up to the present time and for
posterity.
Sad to say, but today, the descendants
of those katutubo ethnic dancers
of fifty years ago, have literally lost
their indigenous roots along with their
vernacular languages, dances and songs.
Their assimilation into the "new
Americanized culture" through education
in compulsory English, or the pervasive
media, has made them forgot their memory
about themselves. Thus any Filipino
dance troop that came, or comes, after
Bayanihan was founded, will have
to copy those dances compiled and
translated to the stage by National
Artist for Dance, Lucrecia Úrtula.
And Bayanihan, aside from its
on-going shows and performances, has
produced teaching videos and organized
many Filipino dance seminars and
workshops to share with all those
interested what it has accumulated
through the years.
Lucrecia Úrtula and Lucrecia Kasilag,
another National Artist for music, also
researched on Filipino lowland or
Christian folk dances and songs to also
preserve them for posterity.
These dances and songs are classified
into three groups of levels: (1) the
urban or creole (kriolyo),
(2) the baile popular and (3)
baile rural o provincial.
The kriolyo dances and songs are
those brought to these Islands when
Filipinas was still an oversea province
of Spain. Thus the music is purely
Spanish. But their Jota,
Fandango and Sevillana steps
when executed by Filipinos end up
reflecting the native expression and
temperament thereby becoming purely
Filipino in soul.
The baile popular folk dances are
still Hispanic in their steps and motif,
but their music, even if still based on
the Spanish seguidilla chord,
were composed by Filipino musicians thus
rooting them further into the Philippine
soil.
The baile rural folk dances, as
compiled by Francisca Reyes Aquino, are
also Hispanic but they also betray a
greater native expression and soul even
if sang in Spanish or in a Tagalog or
Visayan with words spelled and
syllabicated with a thirty-two letter
Balagtás Alphabet.
While the reservoir of the ethnic
katutubo or tribal dances has almost
dried up, the Hispanic or Christian
Filipino native dances still remains to
be fully rediscovered and retrieved. A
source of these native dances and songs
is the moro-moro. Another is the
zarzuela and the revista
(stage shows), now long forgotten, that
popularized the pasadoble, the
pasacalle, the habanera, the
kundiman, the kuratsa, the
pandanggo, the valse, the
danza, the chótis, the
kumintang, the marcha, the
balitao, and the mazurka.
The thing to do now is to turn to
historical events and places to bring
back and string and coordinate all these
rich zarzuela and revista material into
purely Filipino choreography and dance
suites. And it will be Bayanihan,
who will do and achieve all these native
cultural wealth with its prudent
management and executive leadership
under Ms. Suzie M. Benítez, its
choreographer in Fernando José,
its artistic direction under Tony
Fabella, its costume design under
Tita Bill (Alicia Guillermo) and its
musicologist in Lito Vale Cruz
along with its ever flowering and
evolving body of young and formidable
dancers and artists. Nauna talaga ang
Bayanihan! |
