Pangasinan's Missing Folk Dances

Pangasinan's Missing Folk Dances

"The more things I know, the more things I know I do not know." I found this saying very much applicable when researching about my current interest, pre-colonial Pangasinan culture. How did our ancient folks dress up on a daily basis? I've learned from historian Rosario Cortez that the men wore G-strings while the ladies wore not only the local equivalent of baro't saya, but also Chinese silks and cotton garments, based on a Boxer Codex illustration and according to Chinese records referring to Pangasinan as Feng-jia-shi-lan. Both nobility and commoners, according to these accounts, wore gold ornaments. What music did they play? I've encountered a book on Filipino music history by D.R.M. Irving ("Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila," Oxford University Press, 2010) that says Pangasinenses used kutibeng, a ukelele-like instrument, for one, and past researchers were able to save a considerable amount of lyrics, but I couldn't access the records for now which must be hiding is some basement somewhere. (I am particularly interested in the panagcorona ritual song.) Now, what kind of dances did they dance?

This last question was most intriguing to me because I had zero knowledge of it at the time the question cropped up in my mind. I had never come across of any of them as a term, much less saw any as a performance.

It was only upon digging up with intent that I was able to learn about a few of them.

The first one was a dance called colorong, "an indigenous pre-Hispanic dance with movements similar to Igorot dances," according to the book "Pangasinan, Pinablin Dalin." 

The same book mentions tagam, another "pre-Hispanic war dance performed by two male warriors and accompanied by the tulali, a most likely indigenous bamboo flute."

Studying the lyrics of Pangasinan folk songs, I came across the word "kindo-kindo" from the song "Pagatin," the traditional Pangasinan wedding song. What could it be? If even Melchor Orpilla doesn't know about it, that's a bad sign.

Recently, I was able to purchase Emmanuel Sison's book compiling the most well-known Pangasinan folk tales. In a tale told in a clearly pre-colonial setting, he mentions two dances I've never heard of: talokatik and banayaban. What could these dances be?

Meanwhile, a former teacher of mine mentions that a native term for the pandanggo dance is pokliwet, and this lead is worth looking into, as to whether there was a precolonial version of fandango. 

Yet another folk dance that I have come across but never encountered as a performance nor read about in a detailed way is balangbang.

There may be other folk dances invented in certain towns that may have been suddenly lost without the rest of us every knowing about them. In Bayambang, for example, aside from binasuan, there is the siwi-siwi dance that I only have watched on grainy YouTube videos and another dance, sayaw na sumisigay, that I have yet to see.

Fortunately, for colonial-era Pangasinan folk dances, local scholars were able to document and save a lot of materials from certain oblivion. For me, they are a kind of local folk heroes: Francisca Reyes Aquino and her “Philippines Folk Dances and Games,” circa 1926; Jovita Sison-Friese and her "Philippine Folk Dances from Pangasinan," circa 1980; Januario Cuchapin and his "Bali-Balin Pangasinan" monograph with notations (graphic illustration of choreography) in 2006. So far, I haven't heard of any other researcher in this field who has published an equally authoritative book. 

However simple and basic (or outmoded) they were, the loss of these most likely unique native dances,  before the advent of colonialists is sad and concerning because, for me, it is a little, quiet tragedy: it means we Pangasinenses have lost a part of our cultural heritage and ethnic identity that we might never be able to recover again from collective memory. 

This also implies that we had not given enough value to this aspect of our cultural resources or intangible wealth for some reason. Not to blame any particular group or individuals or institutions, but I lay the blame squarely on all of us, Pangasinenses. I hazard that the reason could be our collective neglect due to low interest which is due, in turn, to low self-regard. 

At this point, I am reminded of the cultural critic Marian Pastor Roces's eye-opening observation that, no thanks to centuries of colonialism, we Filipinos have been exiled, cut off, uprooted from our core identity, as attested by the great wealth of historical and cultural artifacts that had been snatched from our possession and are now either preserved or gathering dust in the museums and archives of the Western world, way out of our ability to access. This, if I am reading her right, led us to developing an amnesia over how great our native culture once was and to being led to believe that there is nothing worth treasuring about it and about who we once were.