In Flight: Contemporizing Winged Motifs in Philippine Folk Dance for the Canadian Stage

This thesis is a choreographic and filmic exploration of contemporizing selected Philippine folk dances that have winged motifs. It examines dance rehearsals as a site for ethnographic research. Metaphors of birth, growth, life, immigration, struggle, failures, resilience, and hope will be manifested and expressed. The output of this research is a dance film. Titled In Flight, it critically responds to themes of isolation, limited movements, the precarity of flight, restricted travel, acts of transferring from one place to another, and the ways in which dance artists adapt to quarantined movements of life. Its aim is to identify an increased knowledge of natural movement of the avian species paralleled or in discussion with how humans translate the naturally occurring movements of birds into human expressions and dances.