KIDAPAWAN CITY, North Cotabato (MindaNews / 18 June) — Region 12 is still recovering from the goose bumps.

Earlier this year, the Kidapawan City National High School contingency to the Bayle sa Kalye Competition of the Regional Festival of Talents performed a very unusual dance.

In a competition dominated by typical—and rather unimaginative—showcases of bountiful harvest and indigenous culture, KCHNS performed a re-enactment of a violent murder.

“Too dark!” I said to Eljay Buzano, the dance’s artistic director, when he opened the idea. He had read my essay on the murder of the Italian priest Tullio Favali in Tulunan by Norberto Manero, and was thinking of drawing inspiration from it.

(The murder made international news when it took place. Full details of the case can be read on the Supreme Court ruling upholding Manero’s conviction).

This would be our third year of collaborating for Kidapawan’s entries to the competition. In our first attempt, we made a dance out of the Greater Kidapawan Area’s eclipse-related mythology (the dance won first runner up). In our second collab, we developed a dance inspired by Salomay Iyong’s rescue of orphans kidnapped and sold into slavery (that dance won the regionals).

But for the first time in the three years, I was sceptical. Too dark, too morbid—the region, I felt, was not ready.

But Eljay did not give up on the idea.

It’s not difficult to see why: that morbid incident featured what is perhaps the most iconic dance in North Cotabato’s history, when Norberto Manero, after shooting the priest in the head in the middle of Tulunan, picked Favali’s brains up and danced as his comrades sang the folk song “Mutya ka Baleleng.” Any creative worth his salt—and Eljay is a very talented artist—would be captivated.

But more than that too was the need to remember: the essay—“Remembering the Danse Macabre of North Cotabato”—focused in particular on how the incident passed into legend, but concluded with pointing out that the memory of the incident is now fading.

It seemed as if Eljay felt in his bones the duty to revive that memory.

I am grateful he did not listen to my advice—he pushed on with the subject matter.

And I was even more delighted to know that he put great emphasis on the process. His dancers were not just made to memorize and rehearse dance moves, they were encouraged to understand and process what happened on that fateful day in 1985.

Eljay and choreographer Thean Raffiñan even made them pay a visit to Favali’s grave in the Guadalupe Formation Center in Balindog, then to the actual site of the murder in Tulunan (where a small shrine dedicated to Favali now stands). Later they met Fr. Peter Geremia, who was a friend of Favali and was the actual intended target of the murder.

It emerged during the rehearsals that some of the dancers were descended from members of the same violent paramilitary group to which Manero belonged, the Ilaga, and so the performance took a personal turn. Later, when they were rehearsing the dance in M’lang (venue of the regional competition and very near the site of the murder), teachers and residents from the area—descendants too of both victims and perpetrators of Marcos era atrocities—saw the performance and were so moved by it they were invited to dinner by one of them, and the dinner became another opportunity for the dancers to hear more bits of history from their own hometown.

The emphasis on process proved to be what made the difference: even before they performed it, the dance was already having an impact.

When it did see the stage, it only served to reach an even bigger audience than it already had at that point. Videos of the dance instantly went viral, and the unusual subject matter easily became a talking point.

And those in the region’s culture and arts community knew something rather momentous just took place. Region 12 (and North Cotabato in particular) has had a particularly dark and bloody history, but much of its mainstream creative expressions have only ever served to avoid that, offering escape instead of confronting and processing it.

But finally, it seems, the region is beginning to be ready to talk about its difficult past. 

That the dance won first place on the regional competition—and later bagged second runner up on the much more competitive national level—only felt like the icing on the cake.

For some years now I’ve been pioneering more creative ways of raising greater public awareness about history in the Greater Kidapawan Area.

But the idea of using street dancing to tell history is entirely Eljay’s idea. A grandson of Datu Amag Madut (Kidapawan’s only Municipal District Vice President), Eljay is fast becoming an important figure in the area’s—and the region’s—creative scene.

This recent success is particularly surprising given the rather shady track record of contemporary Kidapawan dance when it comes to history and heritage. The Guinness World Record for Chacha held in 2016 was organized by the City Government to erase the memory of the bloody rally of 1 April that year. And just earlier this year, a Kidapawan dance group earned flak from the cultural communities, first for remixing an Islamic prayer into their music, then for inappropriately using Monuvu traditional rituals and attire in the Sinulog Dance competition in Cebu. 

That this is the situation of the field makes culturally sensitive creatives like Eljay all the more important: in a place where dance has been used as a tool to erase and distort, creatives like Eljay are harnessing it as a means by which we can remember.

As early as the day they won the Regionals, Eljay asked me for ideas what to mount for next year’s competition. While I did give him some suggestions, I’ve learned by now that it is best to trust his instinct, and that will take time.

In the Greater Kidapawan Area, dance is becoming a means of telling history. And we better let the dancers to their thing.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Karlo Antonio G. David has been writing the history of Kidapawan City for the past thirteen years. He has documented seven previously unrecorded civilian massacres, the lives of many local historical figures, and the details of dozens of forgotten historical incidents in Kidapawan. He was invested by the Obo Monuvu of Kidapawan as “Datu Pontivug,” with the Gaa (traditional epithet) of “Piyak nod Pobpohangon nod Kotuwig don od Ukaa” (Hatchling with a large Cockscomb, Already Gifted at Crowing). The Don Carlos Palanca and Nick Joaquin Literary Awardee has seen print in Mindanao, Cebu, Dumaguete, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo. His first collection of short stories, “Proclivities: Stories from Kidapawan,” came out in 2022.)