Oberlin Digital Commons at Oberlin Honors Papers Student Work 2020 Moving Honestly - pangalay performance, national identity, and practice-as-research Kara Elena Nepomuceno Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors Part of the Dance Commons Repository Citation Nepomuceno, Kara Elena, "Moving Honestly - pangalay performance, national identity, and practice-as- research" (2020). Honors Papers. 797. https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/797 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Digital Commons at Oberlin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Oberlin. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Oberlin College “Moving honestly” pangalay performance, national identity, and practice-as-research Kara Nepomuceno Dance Honors Spring 2020 Nepomuceno 1 Abstract Previous research analyzes the legacies of various Philippine dances in the United States. This project seeks to describe the growing impact of the dance form pangalay, given its rising popularity among Philippine performing arts groups and among individual artists in the diaspora. Pangalay’s sustained, curvilinear style supports Filipino American dancers’ needs for physical well-being, relationship to colonized land, and expression of diasporic culture. Yet when pangalay is framed as a unifying dance aesthetic of Filipino identity, it obscures ongoing internal oppression within the Philippines as Christianized upper classes embrace the dance form yet cohere wealth by displacing Muslim groups. To explore these tensions, this paper draws on the method of practice as research. Through a six-week creative process, my collaborators and I used choreographic tools to engage Philippine regional dances.