The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora (Temple University Press, 2010)
Author: Theodore S. Gonzalves. Since the 1980s, Pilipino Cultural Nights on U.S. campuses have served as rites of passage for Filipino American youth and sources of pride for local communities. These performances—often with elements of parody—celebrate national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives, while reaffirming what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore S. Gonzalves examines the development of Filipino American performance traditions, using interviews and participant observation to explore the relationship between performance repertoire and diasporic identity. Tracing a genealogy of cultural performances from the 1930s to the present, Gonzalves reflects on how culture nights have functioned as nostalgic rituals, entertainment for the community, and sometimes platforms for political intervention. He also critiques how recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights have muted the rebellious spirit that initially fueled these performances.
“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, author of The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance
“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, author of Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture in the United States