In Taitung’s Indigenous festivals, song and dance are never simply entertainment or performance. The Amis annual festival is one example. Every July and August, the dance circle begins to move, with participants arranged counterclockwise according to age groups. Young and middle-aged members of the community, known as kapah, take the lead, while the youngest service group, pakarongay, follows at the end. Senior and elder groups sit in the center of the circle, drinking and talking as they keep time by stamping their feet, watching closely to see whether the younger members are taking part seriously. When one age group rises, everyone younger must stand and join in. By the time the oldest group gets up, no one is left sitting. The order of each step becomes a lesson in one’s place and responsibilities within the community.
(Photo credit: nov_image)
(Photo credit: nov_image)
What the Body Remembers
Every stage of the ritual follows its own rules. In Sa’aniwan Village in Chenggong Township, Taitung County, the songs and dances begin at night with Iflod, a spirit-welcoming ritual open only to men. This is followed by Kailisin, the spirit-feasting festival, when men and women dance together, with women joining on the right side of their male family members. During Pipihayan, the spirit-sending ritual, each household sends one woman to take part according to age order, singing and dancing to respectfully send off the ancestral spirits. Hands linked together may form a circle or stretch into an arc. A lead singer begins the melody, and the group responds. A subtle movement of the little finger signals when it is time to change songs. Through repeated steps and call-and-response singing, people remember with their bodies not only the stories left by their ancestors, but also their relationships and places within the community. What is carried through these movements is daily life, culture, and inheritance.
(Photo credit: Taitung County Government)
Understanding Comes Before Learning
When these dances move onto the stage, younger creators first choose to enter the community and learn. Weaving the Cycle, a work by the Indigenous Dance Troupe of National Taitung Senior Commercial Vocational High School, brings Bunun weaving culture onto the stage and has helped the troupe win the National Student Dance Competition for 15 consecutive years. Such a long winning streak does not come from technique alone. It comes from taking the time to understand. The students spend long periods conducting field research, grinding millet with their teachers and learning Bunun songs. One Paiwan student explained that the goal was simply to understand their culture. Instructor Hui-Ying Lin deliberately places the focus on what comes before weaving. Students first learn how a piece of cloth is actually made, then gradually weave that understanding into their own bodies, stitch by stitch.
(Photo credit: Taitung County Government)
Returning to the Community with Questions
The Bulareyaung Dance Company, based in Taitung, follows a similar path. At the age of 40, choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava stepped away from his roles as a choreographer with Cloud Gate 2 and the Martha Graham Dance Company and returned to Taitung, bringing his dancers into Indigenous communities. His work Not Afraid of the Sun and Rain is rooted in Pakarongay, the Amis coming-of-age training system in which children begin taking on community labor and learning cultural skills from around the age of 12. The dancers joined them in setting traps in the mountains, identifying plants, learning skills by the sea, catching freshwater shrimp at night, and gathering green turban snails. Bulareyaung once asked cultural consultant Suming Rupi, “What kind of people are you actually trying to train them to become?” It was a question Suming could not immediately answer, and that unanswered question became the foundation of the work.
(Photo credit: Bulareyaung Dance Company, Photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)
(Photo credit: nov_image)
Dancing Back to the Land
The physical language shaped through labor and festivals ultimately returns to the land. Bulareyaung has said that he hopes to bring dancers back to Indigenous communities every year, so elders, young people, and children can see the performances close to home. For him, letting go of technique, standing truthfully on the land, and dancing a song that belongs to that place is already enough. In Taitung, these dance companies return to communities year after year, while also carrying the circles of festival dances onto stages farther away. When a song is sung again and again, and a group of people joins hands, the stories Indigenous peoples tell through dance continue to be passed from one generation to the next.
(Photo credit: david_huang_taitung)
