INTERVIEW: For Kinding Sindaw Melayu Heritage, it’s time to remember
Photo: Kinding Sindaw Melayu Heritage’s Pananadem shuts down at La MaMa due to the coronavirus pandemic. Photo courtesy of Juniper Park / Provided by Michelle Tabnick PR with permission.
For Kinding Sindaw Melayu Heritage, a nonprofit dance theater organization based in New York City, the next few days were meant to be focused on the art and meditative practice of remembering. They event made that word the title of their new show: Pananadem, which means “remembering” in the language of the Meranao people.
The show was intended to run through March 15 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in New York City, but the theater has canceled the remainder of the run due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Conceived and directed by Potri Ranka Manis, founder and artistic director of the heritage company, Pananadem is a dance theater piece determined to find inspiration and perspective from ancestral ties, according to press notes. “In this tale, old and new align as a young group of refugees whose quest for inspiration leads them to a transformative encounter with displaced tradition-bearers who recall the legends of Derangen, the Meranao epic,” a press release states.
In addition to the stage show, Manis intended to lead a Filipino indigenous dance workshop as part of the La MaMa Kids program. This now-canceled event was set for Saturday, March 14 at 11 a.m. Teachers were going to focus on hand gestures, footwork and musical instruments, encompassing everything from kulintang gong music to sultanate court dance movements.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Manis about this special weekend at La MaMa — a special weekend that unfortunately may never be experienced by audiences. Manis grew up in Mindanao, Philippines, where she soaked up the oral traditions and cultural heritage of the surrounding community. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired you to create Pananadem?
This is one of the dance theater [pieces] that I created to continue telling the systematically silenced stories of the people who [have] fought to keep the ancestral sovereignty, [while] continually being attacked and minoritized since the coming of the colonizers since 16th century.
How important is it to spread the culture and stories of the Merenao people?
Spreading, telling and remembering the stories of the Meranao people is to continue asserting the real, true stories of the Filipino people. It is the Meranao and the other tribes in the Bangsa Moro nation that defended Mindanao against the Spanish colonizers and became part of the Philippines on Dec. 10, 1898, when the Treaty of Paris happened, selling Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam to USA for $20 million. [At] this time the island of the uncolonized Mindanao was included in the map of the Philippines.
The Meranao people and other Moro people and other indigenous people in Mindanao were able to preserve the ancestral culture of the Filipinos. Culture and tradition was destroyed by the Spaniards in the areas [of] Luzon and Visayas, [which] they [had] colonized for 400 years. It is therefore important to assert these ancestral stories transmitted through oral tradition (epic, legends and myths) carried by chants (bayok), poetry (pananroonan) and court and ritual dances, including weaving and carving (okir).
This is the missing link of the Philippines history. Preserving this culture through performance and spreading these systematically minoritized unwritten stories is to continue asserting the sovereignty of the Filipino people, particularly those of southern Philippines. Recreating by staging dance theater performances is my way to prevent missing that part of human history because losing it is the loss of mankind.
What was it like growing up in a remote village in your country? Is that where you first experienced some of these oral traditions?
Growing in a remote village is growing in a pristine world where there is no electricity. During the night it is the moon, the stars and fireflies that provide light to the environment — eating food not from grocery stores but from the wild, climbing trees and picking up fruits, or going to the meadows and picking up wild vegetables and mushrooms, and at dusk being entertained by chanters lighted by bonfires and audiences who respond by chants and dance, and celebrating with kulintang music, jumping into the lake, playing [in] the ripples from the waterfall, or holding onto the tallest bamboo waiting for the wind to blow and get flown clinging, enjoying the festivities with food wrapped in banana leaves.
It is so much a fairytale, like memories of the ‘remote village’ that has no four-wheel drive transportation. All [these] childhood magical memories were taken from us when the road was built, and the forest were cut into logs to be exported, and the mountains were dug by foreign companies for open pit gold mines, where militarization (protecting the foreign companies) was the horror of the village people. Landslides and heavy floods came and eroded that happiness.
How did being a registered nurse change your life?
Being a registered nurse gave me a choice in this displacement — economic displacement due to the political crisis in the Philippines. The Moros are not loved by our existing government. We have been seized since the Spanish (1521-1898) and American colonizers (1898-current neo-colonization and proxy wars). Being a registered nurse is continuing the healing legacy of my ancestors and affirming [it] with the western medicine. This has actually enabled me to organize a home away from home recreating the stories untold. It can be the epics, legends and myths or the histories that were and are being systematically erased by the powers who want to grab our ancestral land.
What’s the future of Kinding Sindaw?
Kinding Sindaw will continue the quest to assert, reclaim, preserve and re-create the unwritten stories of the Banga Moro (Moro nations in which the Maranao is one of the 13 tribes) and continue telling these stories through court and ritual dance, kulintang music and silat martial arts.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Pananadem, conceived and directed by Potri Ranka Manis, was intended to play through March 15 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in New York City. The remainder of the performances have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Click here for more information.
