Ifugao square dancing

Kiangan, Ifugao – This municipality is usually known among tourists as the place where the Japanese forces under Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita surrendered at the end of the World War II.  Just like other tourist spots in Ifugao, visitors normally expect to see traditional things:  The rituals, the songs and the dances.

But known to many, especially to first-timers in the area, people living here are into something that urbanities would think could never reach the highlands: barn or square dancing.

During our brief stay, we witnessed members of the Tuwali tribe dancing gracefully to the tunes of country songs such as Living to Love of American folk singer Allan Jackson, My Maria of Brooks and Dunn, and Achy, Breaky Heart of Billy Ray Cyprus.  It was like seeing Eezy Dancing live with the mountains of Ifugao in the background.  We even saw members of one clan at the Surrender site competing with each other, one generation against the other, to determine which group is the best in dancing.

Lena Dait, a student of the University of the Philippines who hails from Kiangan, explained that her people jumped into the square-dancing craze when a dance instructor, who is also from Kiangan, introduced the dance last summer.  Interest in square dancing heated up with the showing of the movie Pure Country, which starred George Strait, a popular American country singer.  The Kiangan people particularly liked the scene where the actors are doing line, square and barn dancing, which they successfully copied.

Dait further noted that this could be a result of the influence of Baguio City, where many Kiangan youth are currently studying.  It is a common scene in Baguio City, people who don cowboy outfits.  This is probably because country music is really quite popular in Baguio.  When the Kiangan youth return to their hometown, they “import” the love of country music with them.

Dait says the dance is not as complicated as people may think, which normally involves the feet more than it does the hands or hips.  Dancers step forward, then sidewards to the left, then backwards, then sidewards to the right, then forward again.  Sometimes the steps are done in the reverse.

Dait explained that townsfolk still do traditional dances, but only on special occasions.  In most of the rituals, the often-used percussion instrument is the gangsa or gongs.  They are made either of brass (paliha) or bronze (ginilling), and are played during the performance of prestige festivals like the ballihong, balog, bulol, uyuay and hagabi, and during ceremonies like the kate (death ritual) and ayag (sickness ritual).         

Ifugaos normally do their war dance carrying spears called baghe, which are thin and primarily used for ceremonial and formal occasions.  At most, three inches wide at the base, it tapers toward the tip.  It has a pair of curving spikes on its base laterals.  Sometimes the dancers use bamboo stakes and wooden clubs.

During the bulol, a kind of gong music called liya is played, the beating and rhythm is done in a manner to “invite” the bulol deity that has caused the illness to possess the ill person or any other person among those gathered who becomes the medium.

Ifugao has four major ethnoliguistic groups: Ayangan, Tuwali, Kalanguya, Kalinga and Lagawe.  The Tuwali subgroup occupies major parts of Banaue, Hingyon, Hungduan, Lagawe and Kiangan; the Ayangan occupies Mayoyao, Aguinaldo, Lamut, Lagawe, Kiangan and Alfonso Lista; the Kalanguya group is found in Tinoc, and the Kalinga group in Alfonso Lista.

The term Ifugao is the modernized form of the word ipugo, which means “people of the earth,” as distinguished from the deities and other supernatural beings that inhabit the five words in the Ifugao system of worship.  These are the Luts (earth world), Kabunyan (skyworld), Dalom (underworld), Daya (western world) and the Lagud (eastern world).

It is also derived from the word pugu, meaning hill, since the Ifugao in the olden days built their villages on elevated places or hills and people from such localities were referred to as i-pugu, which, literally translated, means “from the hill”.

As tourism is one of the major sources of income in this province, retired public-school teacher Manuel Dulawan, the resident historian of Kiangan, said his people were admittedly anticipating that tourism would, in some way or another, have adverse effects on their culture.

“We are anticipating that tourism will flourish and at the same time we fear it will do harm in the preservation of our cultural heritage,” Dulawan said.