The Day the Dancers Stayed explores the ways that cultural celebrations challenge official accounts of the past while reinventing culture and history for Filipino American college students. Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been rites of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification.

Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions - as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.

Cultural historian George Lipsitz, on The Day the Dancers Stayed: "This manuscript presents a genealogy of how performances of folk dances and music have shaped and reflected Filipino national identity in different ways at different historical moments. It explains the national and transnational dimensions of the codification of Philippine folkloric forms under U.S. colonial rule, the utility of folk performances as expressions of the nation in the era of the Cold War, the reinvention of national culture in performances by Filipino-American college students in California in the 1980s and 1990s, and the ways in which these performances and parodies of them reveal both continuities and ruptures, similarities and differences among Filipino Americans."

"With acumen, verve, and a politics of style that effect an important counter-appropriation of performance studies in today's American academy, The Day the Dancers Stayed offers a differently historicized analysis of the processes by which cultural--kinetic, aural, visual--knowledges get produced, repeated, and transformed. Gonzalves shows us or, more precisely and more crucially, reminds us how and why culture dies. And how it always lives on."

Sarita Echavez See
American Culture / English Language and Literature
University of Michigan

"Theo Gonzalves' brilliant riff on the modes of cultural productions adroitly taps into new realms of discourse, locating multiple sites where cultural memories are crafted, authenticated, challenged, and reclaimed though the aesthetics of performance. Elegantly written and grounded in historical swirls complicated and connected by U.S. colonial policies in the Philippines, The Day the Dancers Stayed delves into Filipino/a experiences and the tenets of a sustained vision of nation/nationhood that marks the arrival of a talent whose remarkable work is a necessary text in cultural analyses."

Linda España-Maram
Asian American Studies and American Studies
California State University, Long Beach

Stage Presence is a collection of essays and interviews with Filipino American performing artists. Each of the chapters features critically acclaimed and popular artists in their own right, who have also mentored hundreds of dancers, comedians, theater artists and musicians of all genres. In this rare collection, performers take time off stage to speak candidly about their creative processes, revealing personal frustrations and triumphs, while testifying to the challenges of what it could mean to be an artist of Filipino descent working and living in the United States. Featuring: musicians Eleanor Academia, Gabe Baltazar Jr., Danongan Kalanduyan; bandleader and poet Jessica Hagedorn; choreographers and dancers Joel Jacinto, Alleluia Panis, and Pearl Ubungen; and theater artists Remé Grefalda, Allan Manalo and Ralph Peña. The book also includes a thought-provoking foreword by scholar and musician Ricardo D. Trimillos.