Staging History: Notes on Donna Miranda’s The State of Philippine Dance 

by Angelo V. Suarez

The state of Philippine dance cld be the subject of a heated argument, surely among dance scholars & academics but more so among those more truly invested in its articulation—choreographers & dancers themselves, as well as artists in other fields who pay attention to the phenomenon of the contemporary, each in the endeavor of finding out how to proceed. The argument has in fact been taking place, but off the radars of institutional sanction—as small talk exchanged behind the closed doors of studios, as chatter shared under the roofs of homes that shelter endlessly self-fragmenting coteries, as after-show gossip whispered in theater toilets or the halls of state cultural structures.

Conceptual choreographer Donna Miranda attempts to lure the state of Philippine dance from its cave of whispers into the open, turning it from subject of hushed discussion to object of overt scrutiny. To do so she has devised The State of Philippine Dance, a solo collaged from 10 discrete works by 10 living Filipino choreographers—Paul Morales, Ava Villanueva-Ong, Jethro Pioquinto, Cristine Crame, Rhosam.Mia (choreographic duo of Mia Cabalfin & Rhosam Prudenciado, Jr.), Ma. Elena Laniog, Myra Beltran, Jose Jay Cruz, Agnes Locsin, & Denisa Reyes. Bulky as the work may seem, it is reducible to a statement or what Joseph Kosuth wld call an analytic proposition: A single body performs the state of Philippine dance, surveying choreographies across generations crucial to the emergence & dev’t of the contemporary, in a format as portable as a textbook.

Poster for TSPD, a detournement of the cover of volume 2 of Francisca Reyes Aquino's landmark 6-volume inventory of Philippine folk dances.

A cursory Google search reveals it has been almost 40 years since the contentious phrase “state of Philippine dance” last appeared in a title, owing to a 1976 article by Filipino dance historian Basilio Villaruz. That the phrase is so brazenly called attention to is expected to raise a few eyebrows, if not voices as in a shouting match. Not since National Artist Francisca Reyes Aquino’s 6-volume textual inventory of folk dances in the ‘40s has such a compendium tracing influential trends in Philippine dance been attempted—an inventory that till now is used as a reference material for compulsory reading in elementary & high school physical education, & a critical impetus for pursuing The State of Philippine Dance’s textbook-like approach. That said, Miranda’s effort is similarly anthological, & in being so it is at once sadistic & masochistic: sadistic for burdening the involved choreographers w/ the guilt of belonging to a canon, masochistic for burdening Miranda w/ accountability for the inevitable violence of canon-making.

& this violence is as physical as it is discursive. Miranda takes it upon herself to perform 10 distinct choreographies, each more-or-less 5 minutes long, inscribing into muscle-memory a multiplicity of movement vocabularies for what amounts to an hour-long variety show, as if to ask: Just how much history can one body bear? But just as any articulation of history cannot help but distort the history it desires to render—one is tempted to declare all history as no more than a generative distortion, whose melancholy consists of a dream of fidelity impossible to fulfill—Miranda’s effort too is bound to fail in its necessary reductionism.

But the reductionism is not so much a flaw as it is a condition of possibility—for what constructs an archive if not its mere indices? Ultimately The State of Philippine Dance is one such index, an index that is a gathering of indices, a reduction that is the sum of reductions. The gathering has been accomplished in 2 ways: direct correspondence w/ choreographers, in w/c they have directly supervised Miranda in studying a particular work by each of them; & resort to video documentation, viewed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines if not on YouTube. As if the representation of a choreographer’s oeuvre by one work weren’t violent enough, each choreographic work had to be subjected to the formal demands of The State of Philippine Dance w/c as a distinct choreographic work all its own functions like a kind of archi-choreography, a structure w/ its own compositional strictures.

Foremost of these strictures keeping the work together is the fact of its being a solo. The decision is simultaneously practical & polemical; in fact, its practicality—that is, its material inevitability—forms the very core of the polemic. In the essay “On becoming choreographers and the contemporary turn in Philippine dance” (https://secretdancemoves.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/on-becoming-choreographers-and-the-contemporary-turn-in-philippine-dance/)—a text that exists independently of this work but cld be said to be complementary to it—Miranda argues for the critical role the solo plays in the construction of (or the turn to) the contemporary, this format “being the point where limited resources and autonomy converge.” It has been the solo, after all, that has allowed best her generation to “produc[e] work in which the object and instrument of labor coincided in the bodies that were in our control: ourselves.” This polemic underpins the decision to present or, more accurately, to adapt the works that involve more than one body as a conventional solo.

The 1984 performance of Muybridge Frames, for instance, whose video documentation Miranda has dug up & studied at the CCP, has 7 male bodies performing Reyes’ choreography; as a component of The State of Philippine Dance, the work features a single body, a female 1 at that, w/ Miranda adapting Reyes’ choreography so it cld be carried out by her own body. W/ the quality of the audio she managed to record so bad, Miranda has had to resort to a different musical score for a proxy. Another instance: Miranda wrenches a solo from Locsin’s full-length dance drama Elias—whose video documentation from the CCP again features a male dancer playing the lead role—displacing it from that context (a narrative containing multiple dance sequences) & into The State of Philippine Dance w/ a female dancer in Miranda. The music she uses has been directly recorded from the video documentation itself, attested to by the hiss in the audio.

Possibly the most interesting formal negotiation has been w/ Cruz’s work, itself an adaptation of Beltran’s Rosas ng Maynila [Rose of Manila], w/c in itself functions like anadaptation of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s famous Rosas for having been a response to the public call for remixes of this originary text. Keeping all movement Beltran lifted & combined from De Keersmaeker intact, Cruz reduces the number of dancing bodies to 1, depriving this body not only of the chair the original has but also of visibility, shrouding the dancer w/ a blanket. The work, intended as a solo, involves a 2nd body—a naked white presence onstage, a breathing prop, machinic in its recitation of movement notations corresponding to the dancer’s movement, annotating what watchers cld only intuit based on the protrusions on the blanket’s surface & swishing of its edges. In Miranda’s adaptation, however, the naked presence becomes fantasmatic, embodied by no more than the introductory text (as each of the 10 works is introduced by Miranda w/ a script) that calls attention to its disembodied presence. The music for this, too, has been extracted by Miranda from a video documentation of Beltran’s work available on Vimeo.

Miranda’s most poignant adaptation, however, must be of I Thought. Performed in 2011, I Thought had been Beltran’s performance of protest against a piece of legislation proposed by Senator Bongbong Marcos known as the Philippine National Ballet Act of 2011 (http://senate.gov.ph/lisdata/107269172!.pdf). The proposal had sought to institute Ballet Philippines—the CCP’s official dance company in residence & arguably the country’s best-known—as the national ballet company, a designation that grants it not only prestige in addition to that already attached to the company, but increased state subsidy as well, eliminating its precarious reliance on private funding & the oppressive logic of philanthropy (the fancy neoliberal face worn by feudal patronage). The issue had been particularly delicate, for on top of its being an issue of labor in a circumstance where dancers as hardworking as BP’s cld drastically benefit from tenure & increased pay at the cost of total institutional subsumption, the dance community is particularly small (to note: among BP’s former artistic directors are Reyes & Locsin, 2 of the 10 choreographers featured in The State of Philippine Dance) & the incumbent artistic director is Morales, a former student of Beltran’s.

Screenshot of the video documentation of Beltran's "I Thought" on YouTube.

That an incongruence exists in Miranda’s adaptation needs to be pointed out. In the original, it was Beltran dancing to the rhythm of her own recorded voice, in a monologue whose anaphoric structure began every line w/ “I thought,” in a line of questioning that reconsiders the legal gesture of establishing dance’s dependence on state institutional support. Disembodied as the voice may have been in its recording, it nevertheless coincided w/ the body onstage that had been its source. W/in the context of The State of Philippine Dance, however, the audio has been lifted from a video documentation on YouTube, such that Beltran’s voice is inscribed onto Miranda’s dancing body. Inadvertently, the mis-correspondence between Beltran’s voice & Miranda’s body mirrors a difference in position: While Beltran had been against it, Miranda had been vocal in support of the proposed bill, if only as a move to shield BP from worsening precarity, contest the widespread privatization of virtually every state formation, & add meaning to a role already fulfilled by the company—for what else cld being the official resident company of the country’s official cultural center mean if not functioning as a sort of national dance company?

But the inscription is nevertheless accurate, for nothing in the monologue per se is directly a point for contention for Miranda. In framing contemporary dance’s materialist roots in the struggle for institutional independence, Miranda’s argument finds Beltran’s at its heart—“that dance,” in Beltran’s articulation of autonomy, “was its own reward and that all that mattered was the sincere passing on of dance.” Miranda traces this passing-on in The State of Philippine Dance, & by tracing it choreographically—that is, as a work of choreography—she also actively passes it on.

One powerful aspect of the original I Thought that Miranda cld not replicate was its having been performed at the historic Dance Forum, Beltran’s own studio-theater. It had been a nesting ground for the institutional autonomy that had been crucial in the construction of the contemporary in Philippine dance—a space for the pursuit of autonomy that wld lead to a chain of succeeding spaces for the same pursuit. Where Miranda learned Cruz’s choreography, for example, had been at the studio in Manila of Transitopia, the company of w/c he is founder & artistic director. It had also been at Ong’s studio at Ava’s School of Dance that she wld teach Miranda her work; & at the studio of Airdance, the company Prudenciado & Cabalfin are affiliated w/, where Miranda wld learn Rhosam.Mia’s choreography.  

Miranda rehearsing Pioquinto's choreography at home. Photo by Pioquinto himself, uploaded on Facebook.

But harking back to the originary problem of contemporary dance involving the intersection of limited resources & autonomy, the rest of the choreographers too were like Miranda in having no available studio for study & rehearsal, a question of limited resources. & so Morales wld turn to the studio of the institution of w/c he is artistic director but under whose auspices his work as a contemporary choreographer is not necessarily under; Crame wld turn to the studio of the university whose dance department she chairs despite this work having nothing to do w/ her pedagogic affiliation; Laniog wld turn to whatever space Miranda cld get her hands on—be it a studio she cld rent at a discount (for, again, the dance community is small w/c when it doesn’t translate to contempt translates to kindness) or her own cramped home, all furniture moved to the periphery to yield some workable space, 3-yr-old toddler tossed to the bedroom for extended playtime. It warrants mentioning that initial sessions between Miranda & Pioquinto were carried out on Skype before moving to the makeshift studio of her home. 

While De Singel Int’l Arts Campus’ co-production of The State of Philippine Dance has certainly smoothened this process, providing not only financial support in building the work & a space in w/c to string the work’s various components together but, even more importantly, a presentational platform that allows the work to even be visible & have an audience—the institution’s main contribution has been in making palpable the fact that the very desire for institutional independence is sustained by institutional dependence itself. Such material challenges attest to & extend her testimony that those working in contemporary dance “needed to be choreographers in order […] to become choreographers,” calling attention to the para-choreography of the multiple “administrative and organizational roles that we had to fulfill in creating an environment conducive to our propositions and practice.”

Part of this administrative para-choreography is the construction of a canon, indexing the state of the art so that every practitioner discovers how to proceed w/ composition, find out what has not been done & needs to be done. & in pursuit of what choreographically has not been & needs to be done, Miranda as a choreographer turns this para-choreography into actual choreography, affixing the infrathin that needs to be traversed for non-art to be redistributed & made sensible as art—committing as much historicizing as hystericizing in staging what has been taking place offstage. That she has made a choreographic construct that does not allow her own work to be among the canonized is not at all a gesture of humility, but the intimation of a challenge: Fact is, every choreographer is burdened w/ choreographic history; every dancing body bears the weight of a history of movement. How can one compose that w/c does not (yet) belong to the canon? To ignore this question is to turn our backs on the very possibility of the new, & one who has turned his/her back on the possibility of the new has already turned his/her back on art.