Sayaw ng Pagitan (Dance of Distance)
10–01–22
10–01–22
If the Indigenous Igorot concept of antayutani (“we will be projected far”) signifies a transmission of gangsa frequencies across vast distances, what then would that signal sound like as received from afar?
View the full performance.
...
”Sayaw ng Pagitan (≈ Dance of Distance)” (2022) is the debut video performance work of xuvenir, the collaborative experimental sound and performance arm of Chris’ practice. Sayaw presents a series of collaged travel footage set to a soundtrack of field recordings and live gong and electronics improvisations, samples, and loops. These elements amount to a visual compression of space, place, and time as well as the marriage of ancient and modern sound technologies emerging in-tension, suspended on the cusp of legibility.
xuvenir owes its existence to a questioning about our diasporic identities and, in the case of Sayaw, our relationship to the gangsa (gongs): an Indigenous
ceremonial and celebratory instrument of the Philippines’ Mt. Province. With Sayaw, we consider the production of a speculative spatial and sonic imaginary by asking ourselves: If the Indigenous Igorot concept of antayutani (“we will be projected far”) signifies a transmission of gangsa frequencies across vast distances, what then would that signal sound like as received from afar? Furthermore, in the interval, or space (pagitan) between sender and receiver, how might the projected sound expand, contract, deform, fracture, or even erase itself during transit?
View the full performance.
...
My belief in this work has grown over the course of it’s making despite much hesitation on my part at the beginning of the year when curator @nica_aquino asked me to create a sound piece for the opening of the Hatak 2022 exhibit. What remained constant throughout, though, was the need to explore my relationship to the instrument (the gangsa) as a diasporic Filipino-American without explicit ancestral ties to the Mt. Province and as a balikbayan having grown up in both the Philippines and the US.
Hence the term “Pagitan,” in the title which refers to a distance or an interval between two or more points in space and time. The physical and psychic distance between ourselves and our motherland. The intervals of time and memory delaying, decaying, echoing between arrivals and departures. The space between our cultural identity as Fil-Am balikbayans to the Bontoc, Ifugao, Kalinga, Kankanaey, and other indigenous ethnic groups of which these instruments are of vital importance to the socio-cultural and spiritual life of their communities. Do we even have the right to play gangsa? And if so, how might we play them in a way that honors them while remaining true to our perspective in relation to them as outsiders? Can this work have any legitimate and lasting claim as an artistic ‘exchange, dialogue’ or, despite all intents, is our work just plain appropriative and exploitative and therefor effectively colonialist in nature?
These questions fueled our “Sayaw” which we consider more process than product, a manifestation of questioning-at-work rather than something created to provide any answers. So maybe there is some consolation in this work-as- questioning, this realization that the work was made in a kind of vacuum, and that we acknowledge that our next steps will require deeper engagement with tradition and with community. Ultimately, we are driven by this questioning and the resulting views that begin to open up ancient untrodden paths through that living Cordilleran fog of our memory.
View the full performance.
View the full performance.
...
”Sayaw ng Pagitan (≈ Dance of Distance)” (2022) is the debut video performance work of xuvenir, the collaborative experimental sound and performance arm of Chris’ practice. Sayaw presents a series of collaged travel footage set to a soundtrack of field recordings and live gong and electronics improvisations, samples, and loops. These elements amount to a visual compression of space, place, and time as well as the marriage of ancient and modern sound technologies emerging in-tension, suspended on the cusp of legibility.
xuvenir owes its existence to a questioning about our diasporic identities and, in the case of Sayaw, our relationship to the gangsa (gongs): an Indigenous
ceremonial and celebratory instrument of the Philippines’ Mt. Province. With Sayaw, we consider the production of a speculative spatial and sonic imaginary by asking ourselves: If the Indigenous Igorot concept of antayutani (“we will be projected far”) signifies a transmission of gangsa frequencies across vast distances, what then would that signal sound like as received from afar? Furthermore, in the interval, or space (pagitan) between sender and receiver, how might the projected sound expand, contract, deform, fracture, or even erase itself during transit?
View the full performance.
...
My belief in this work has grown over the course of it’s making despite much hesitation on my part at the beginning of the year when curator @nica_aquino asked me to create a sound piece for the opening of the Hatak 2022 exhibit. What remained constant throughout, though, was the need to explore my relationship to the instrument (the gangsa) as a diasporic Filipino-American without explicit ancestral ties to the Mt. Province and as a balikbayan having grown up in both the Philippines and the US.
Hence the term “Pagitan,” in the title which refers to a distance or an interval between two or more points in space and time. The physical and psychic distance between ourselves and our motherland. The intervals of time and memory delaying, decaying, echoing between arrivals and departures. The space between our cultural identity as Fil-Am balikbayans to the Bontoc, Ifugao, Kalinga, Kankanaey, and other indigenous ethnic groups of which these instruments are of vital importance to the socio-cultural and spiritual life of their communities. Do we even have the right to play gangsa? And if so, how might we play them in a way that honors them while remaining true to our perspective in relation to them as outsiders? Can this work have any legitimate and lasting claim as an artistic ‘exchange, dialogue’ or, despite all intents, is our work just plain appropriative and exploitative and therefor effectively colonialist in nature?
These questions fueled our “Sayaw” which we consider more process than product, a manifestation of questioning-at-work rather than something created to provide any answers. So maybe there is some consolation in this work-as- questioning, this realization that the work was made in a kind of vacuum, and that we acknowledge that our next steps will require deeper engagement with tradition and with community. Ultimately, we are driven by this questioning and the resulting views that begin to open up ancient untrodden paths through that living Cordilleran fog of our memory.
View the full performance.
Filed under:
performance, sound, video, xuvenir
performance, sound, video, xuvenir
