Tinikling and Terror
A traditional Filipino dance has taught me that joy can be a deliberate act of celebratory resistance in the midst of hardship.
By Joshua Huver
D
ancing is a staple of Filipino culture.
At most large Filipino gatherings, you are sure to eat delicious food like lumpia, adobo, and pancit, sing for hours on a karaoke machine, and, if you’re lucky, dance between two large bamboo poles that may or may not crush your ankles. There are few dances as signature to Filipino culture as the national dance of the Philippines: tinikling.
This traditional folk dance involves a dancing couple who weave in and out of two clapping bamboo poles. The dance can become increasingly complicated through faster tempos, more dancers, and more bamboo poles. Together with the percussive clapping, the festive rondalla music, and the traditional outfits, tinikling presents a spectacular portrait of Filipino culture and encapsulates the bayanihan spirit (spirit of communal unity). The dance is often performed at large Filipino gatherings, weddings, and cultural festivals. Like many other young Filipino children, my sister and I found ourselves performing tinikling with the Filipino-American Association. We performed for several years, creating some of my fondest childhood memories.
Yet anyone who performs the dance can attest that tinikling is both beautiful and terrifying.
Therein lies the rich imagery of joy amidst hardship. The dance mimics a “tikling” bird, which famously weaves through grass and trees while also evading farmers’ bamboo traps with speed and grace. In the same way, the dancers evade the bamboo traps, and, despite the danger, continue to find joy and community.
Unsurprisingly, such a dance originated in the Spanish-Colonial era, when Filipinos mimicked the tikling bird not only in dance but in lived experience. Filipinos are no strangers to traversing difficult and dangerous situations. Over centuries of colonial oppression, military invasions, dictatorships, corrupt officials, and abject poverty, Filipino people have danced the tinikling life. And despite these ongoing struggles, Filipinos have managed to maintain a jovial, celebratory, and communal spirit. We eat and laugh, sing and dance, and cherish friendships and family.
Tinikling is a dance of celebratory resistance. It resists the fears of society and the oppressive structures designed to crush the vulnerable. It fights the long and strenuous fight for one’s community with joy.
In his book Toward a Theology of Struggle, theologian Eleazer S. Fernandez helpfully relates this character to the life of Christ:
To portray Jesus as one who struggles with joy in his heart is in consonance with the character of the Filipino people. The Filipinos have found in Jesus a person who knows pakikisama, as one who celebrates, even as he calls them to a higher cause that entails sacrifice, like leaving the family and facing the possibility of death.
Tinikling, like the Christian faith, presents a bewildering marriage between joy and suffering. In choosing joy, Filipinos may seem naive or lacking seriousness to some. But the opposite is true.
My mother is one of the most cheerful women I have ever encountered. Some may attribute such joy to an easy, silver-spoon upbringing; in reality, she has experienced more hardship and poverty than I can imagine. The character of joy and the hope for a better tomorrow were no doubt forged in a world of suffering and formed by the image of Christ and the bayanihan spirit.
There is no naivete in choosing joy. Joy in suffering is a conscious decision informed by hope for a better tomorrow.
Tinikling offers a valuable lesson for the strange and distressing time we live in. We are always battling to hold our communities, traditions, joy, and dignity intact. Each day, people fight battles for justice and dignity. At the same time, every day is met with new traps to ensnare and obstruct the lives and causes of minorities and vulnerable people groups. Over time, the incessant traps and attacks weary the soul, and breed doubt and discouragement.
But the terrifying realities of society need not rob us of our joy or crush our spirits. The Apostle Paul writes that “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3-5, ESV).
If there is anything we can learn from tinikling, it is this: Come what may, let’s keep on dancing.
Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash
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