D DANCE, FILIPINA/X/O AMERICANS IN Filipina/x/o Americans generate dances, choreog- raphies, and embodied movements for education, entertainment, social criticism, art, spirituality, and identity formation. This entry assumes a non- essentialist, capacious approach to the topic of Filipina/x/o Americans in dance, given the multi- ple intersections of the moving human body and fluid notions of the meaning of both Filipina/x/o and American. Thus, its composition is liberated from domestic, linear, biological borders so as to discuss how Spanish and U.S. colonialisms influ- enced the dances of people in the Philippines and North America; the existing scholarship on Filipina/x/o American (FA) dance; migration as racialized and gendered bodily movements; and geographic variations by FAs since the late 20th century. The Emperor’s New Dances Since the Philippine–American War (1899–1902), the U.S. government, colonial education, and visual media manufactured dance as one of many colonial tools to institutionalize and enact policies of benevolent assimilation, civilize so-called sav- ages, and justify immeasurable violence. These tools also included language, medicine, and sports. U.S. White supremacist logic rendered the Filipina/ x/o dancing body as a vessel for anti-blackness, native dehumanization, and orientalist Other-ing. Political cartoons like the Boston Sunday Globe’s “Expansion, Before and After” visualized progress as the replacement of native war dances with the post-emancipation Black dance of the cakewalk. The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, in which people of the Philippines danced and performed rituals and other cultural practices within a 47-acre human zoo, thereby racialized different ethnic groups for U.S. fairgoers to further justify imperial expansion. In Manila during the early 1910s and 1920s, ballet, modern dance, and Black and Latinx popu- lar dances from the Americas circulated within bodabil, or Filipinized vaudeville, and social dance halls. Colonial educators like Frederick O. Eng- land, a Swedish American playground director of Manila, instructed White settler dances and games within primary and secondary school physical education curriculum. While this period saw increased access for non-elites with the importing of public education, the curriculum miseducated natives that dances of mostly Scandinavian origin were a pathway to Filipino national identity and linked it to morality, hygiene, and the gendered body. Francisca Reyes Aquino (formerly Reyes- Tolentino) employed fieldwork, modern adapta- tion, and standardization of multiple dance forms for her master’s thesis. Citing England’s work, Aquino’s research, subsequent teaching manuals, and founding of the Philippine Folk Dance Soci- ety famously heralded a nationalist movement for preservation from the 1930s onward. Aquino also rooted the national body in line with 233 Nadal, Kevin Leo Yabut, Tintiangco-Cubales, Allyson, and DAVID, E. J. R., eds. <i>The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies</i>. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Incorporated, 2022. Accessed March 3, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from uhm on 2023-03-03 21:27:13. Copyright © 2022. SAGE Publications, Incorporated. All rights reserved.