Abstract
In recent years, the Philippine folk dances have generally been performed by student organizations at colleges and dance troops at Filipino towns in the US, mainly on the West Coast. The purpose of this paper is to consider what kind of meanings the folk dances assume for Filipinos by examining these two different types of groups. This analysis can offer a key to understanding the significance or meaning of the homeland for modern immigrants and also the kinds of situations faced by nations in the present globalization era; this is because these dances were originally conceived to embody the Philippines as a nation-state.
The dances performed by these two groups have much in common. The majority of their members are second-generation Filipinos. Their dances have almost the same style as that of the most famous folk dance troop in the Philippines and allow the performers to overcome their negative image of the Philippines and themselves. However, there are relative differences between the two groups. The folk dance of the community group expresses the members' long-distance nationalism toward the Philippines. On the other hand, the dance of the college students allows a glimpse of their Filipino ethnicity, which lies beneath their American identity.
This paper analyzes the causes of these differences in order to show the complexity of modern transnational phenomena.
