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This article addresses the work of researchers Francesca Reyes Aquino, Sally Ann Ness, and Benildanze, all of whom use embodied practices to study Filipino folk dance in the academy but with divergent methodologies: Aquino uses ethnography, Ness phenomenology, and Benildanze practice as research. It examines the processes by which dances have moved from functioning rituals to representative artifacts and research tools. These processes reveal a complex and constantly developing relationship between dance practice and the academy.
In 1959 Bayanihan, the folk dance company from the Philip- pines, created a great sensation at the Brussels World's Fair when it presented the dances of this Southeast Asian archipelago with great flair, jointly winning the gold medal. This was the first of many Baya- nihan triumphs, leading to its appointment as the national folk dance company of the Philippines, and the date marks the moment when Filipino folk dance was well and truly represented on the world stage (Santos 2004). This European recognition created a particular rep- resentation of the dances, not only outside the Philippines, but also internally. That representation was largely designed by one person: the great pioneer of Filipino folk dance, Francesca Reyes Aquino, who was a principal player in the construction and implementation of the Baya- nihan dance program. Aquino, from her base in the Physical Educa- tion Department at the University of the Philippines, started collecting folk dances as part of her master's thesis in the 1920s, which she later published in several collections of dances, particularly in her seminal work of 1946, Philippine National Dances.
The academic focus Aquino brought to the collection and inscription of the dances was the product of a particular time and place. As time has progressed and study of the dances has spread to academic institutions outside the Philippines, the methods of study and the research focused on the dances have changed and developed in relation to other academic disciplines, such as the phenomenologi- cal approach taken by the American scholar Sally Ann Ness, who dis- cusses the experience of dancing tinikling, the most popular of the folk dances of the Philippines, in "Dancing in the Field" (Ness 1996). More recently, in 2006, the university-based dance company Benildanze that I led with Cynthia Lapeña used practice...