Dance, Dance Globalization

As part of the legwork for a preview of the 30th Annual Ethnic Dance Festival in San Francisco I'm writing for the Daily Californian, I decided to do some YouTube watching (OK, it began as research, which swiftly regressed into procrastinating, but whatever, it still gave me some insight for my article). Side note: In case you ever find yourself nursing a sudden urge to watch pretty much every performance of the Merrie Monarch Festival hula dance competition from the last few years, YouTube is the place to be.

Anyway, watching a few (alright, a lot) of clips of hula, flamenco and traditional filipino dance made me realize how although the dances seem oceans apart, just like the countries that they hail from, they really aren't all that different. The hip movements characteristic of hula are just a styling away from the maya movement (skip to the end of this video, unless you want to learn to do a maya) used in belly dance and the attention that's paid to coordinating projection (where your face and eyes are directed) and hand and foot movements are strikingly similar to bharatanatyam (traditional indian dance). Also keep in mind that the gestures in both bharatanatyam (called mudras) hula mean something and are used to tell stories. Filipino dance bears resemblance to flamenco (of course this has a lot to do with colonization, but I'm trying to write a positive post here).

Another, tenuously related thought about dance that I had today: American dance (and what's regarded as prototypical American culture) is pretty boring—unless any form of swing counts as "American" dance, but surely that was gifted to this country by immigrants, like almost everything else. Pretty much every other culture is so much more lively and colorful. Also, I find it interesting that dancing isn't something that's considered integral to American culture in the way that hula is for Hawaiian culture and I wonder why that is. Of course, this is only true in the broadest sense; of course there are localized communities where dance is very important. Take DC Swing for instance, the official dance of our nation's capital (I gleaned this information from "So You Think You Can Dance"—yes, I watch it and I'm not ashamed to say so), which is a fascinating fusion between hip-hop and lindy hop, the ancestor of all swing dance. Apart from some colorful enclaves, it seems like "Americana" is pretty bland and ... well ... cultureless. I mean, really, what does "American culture" even signify?

But getting back to the festival, if you think about it, regardless of where you come from, we all share similar bodies and there are only so many ways that a body can move. The dance festival may be a celebration of ethnic diversity, but at a more fundamental level, it's also a celebration of our shared humanity. Hey that's kind of good, I should use that in my article.

Other thoughts about dance:

Is it okay for people to learn dances outside of their ethnic traditions? Being a Filipino-American who belly dances (or tries to at the very least), I've pondered this never really wanting to know how I truly felt about it. Is it an expansion of my ethnic horizons or just ethnic co-optation?

I interviewed Rudi Soriano, artistic director for filipino dance company Likha, for my article and walked into a studio full of filipinos practicing traditional dance. I have to admit, I felt pretty inadequately filipino.

I danced tinikling once when I was a kid with another filipino boy, Angelo, that I went to the same school and church as. It's a dance where you jump in between bamboo sticks being beaten together. It was kind of an embarrassing experience, not because I fell or got my foot crushed between the bamboo sticks, but mostly because I remember feeling really inept at it and out of my element. I maybe filipino, but I was raised white, white white—we learned to square AND line dance at my junior high.