Galaw-nilay: Articulating Interiority in Meditative Movement
Rina Angela Corpus

To cite this contribution:
Corpus, Rina. ‘Galaw-nilay: Articulating Interiority in Meditative Movement’. Currents Journal Issue Two (2021), https://currentsjournal.net/Galaw-nilay-Articulating Interiority-in-Meditative-Movement.

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Course of study:
Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (Dance), University of Melbourne

She begins the day centered
In a space behind her thoughts
A silent witness to herself.
She wears a raiment of white
Navigating soundlessly to
A world beyond this one, 
A place she has always known.

Sa ibayo, kung saan walang
kawayan, hangin,
dagat, ulap.¹

She graces a world
beyond the dancing elements
of her earth. Her mind
relocating into a subtle skyscape
where a constellation of wonder
conspires to speak only one
blessed language:

Silence.

Infinitesimal star
she becomes
a mirror of light
from an eternal source,
incandescent.

Taking her fill
she emerges
sweetened in awareness
mind luminescent

Returning from her secret
voyage, she steps on terra firma
once more,

Brightened

by that silent, still one.²



This article narrates the artistic process and intentions behind the creation of the short dance film, Still One (2020). The essay is part of a broader research project  that investigates interiority as a key element in meditative movement practice, considering its potential not just as a source of movement-material but as a locus of experience and creative expression. I define ‘interiority’ in dance as communing with the silent and still spaces of one’s inner life, drawing from my meditative practices of Raja yoga and Qigong. Raja yoga is a seated form of meditation while Qigong is an ancient Chinese movement art; both are attentional practices that articulate a sense of communion and attunement between body-mind-spirit.³ They also use and draw from an interior life, using concepts of silence and still moments to access one’s internal, physical, creative and psychic resources. 

I call my specific practice of interiority in dance galaw-nilay, an iteration of meditative movement through Philippine language. Galaw is Filipino for ‘movement’ and nilay means ‘to meditate or contemplate’. Galaw-nilay is a somatic proposition that encompasses a practice of self-attunement and awareness, to access interiority as a means for dance preparation and movement generation. The words explored in this article give a sample of how local Philippine cultural wordings can be expressed and resonate through somatic experiences of movement and self-attunement. The terms I offer here are from my own language usage/coinage, following my native use of Filipino in conjunction with consulting Philippine academic colleagues who have offered me other possible terms.⁴ I know that there are some movement terms that still exist, especially in the regions outside the Philippine capital of Manila, but a wider understanding of such terms would require an additional movement-linguistic project beyond the scope of this current research. The Philippines has more than 170 languages, which makes the task of finding local wordings a challenge because of the linguistic diversity of the culture. Furthermore, many of the dance terms used in the Philippines have been acculturated from colonial, particularly Spanish-American, sources. There are few movement practitioners who use Filipino words in teaching movement, or they have not been extensively documented.⁵ This research is an initial attempt to incorporate local Philippine linguistic and cultural understandings into the field of meditative movement and dance.

I define the somatic-affective experience of galaw-nilay, by engaging the affective qualities of the term from local Tagalog language that are incorporated into my corporeal and experiential archive.⁶ I use the solos of Filipina-American choreographer Kristin Jackson as a case-study for my iteration of the interior in meditative movement, and I also outline my own creative process through one of my dance films, co-directed with a Manila-based filmmaker Antonne Santiago, Still One. My use of Filipino language to create and define a somatic and movement vocabulary has deserved further research, and this particular study is a nascent effort towards that endeavor.

Overall, interwoven in Still One is the process inherent in galaw-nilay, articulated using my native tongue, Tagalog. I employ a series of Tagalog terms that are integral to galaw-nilay and the somatic, experiential facets of my movement vocabulary. These three terms, defined below, are utilised throughout the paper to structure my discussion of Still One:

1.   pagdama: feeling/sensing the self and the world
2.   pagtuon sa sarili: interiority and going inside one’s life world
of memory, emotion, story, imagery, and,
3.   danas at daloy: the process of allowing inner and outer experiences to be felt and find flow, finding structure and nuance in choreographed and improvised movements.  

I posit that the three meditative practices embedded in galaw-nilay are a source of the interior-led articulation that occurs in live performance, and the discrete iteration of creative processes in Still One.

Throughout my research, I use phenomenological descriptions and a first-person methodology of autoethnography, drawing relevant moments from my autobiography to affirm and demonstrate, as academic Brene Brown avers that ‘stories are data with a soul’. Autobiographical research methodologies have been expounded by various African American feminists such as Sarojini Nadar in the way that they have used the power of story and narrative to ground qualitative research pertaining to narratives of the lives of women.⁷ Through a journey that explores consciousness and corporeality, I tell the story of meditative movement from the perspective of my own ‘lifeworld’⁸ and how it intertwines with the meditative research in Kristin Jackson’s body of works.

I define meditative movement as a movement quality characterised by the kinesthetic, expressive and affective attributes of stillness and silence in motion.⁹ My specific usage of the terms meditative movement and galaw-nilay is partly informed by own experience of movement meditation and improvisation. It is also influenced by my practice of Raja yoga meditation over the last two decades. Raja yoga is an open-eyed meditation that can be performed whether sitting or whilst active. My study is also influenced by my somatic practice of Qigong, an ancient Chinese energy work, which I have practiced for over twenty years. In this research process, I operate within an emergent discursive field that draws broadly from phenomenology; somatic processes, using feminist autoethnography, poetic writing, and the aesthetic of quiet as a way to intervene into a postcolonial condition.¹⁰ 

Interiority in dance speaks to an aesthetic of quiet interiority, enabling me to develop galaw-nilay as a mode of meditative movement practice to access my own work and Jackson’s. I construe our shared inclination for this aesthetic as an iteration of black cultural theorist Kevin Quashie’s notion of the ‘aesthetic of quiet’ as an instance of the self as sovereign. Quashie has offered a rich close-reading of a range of cultural and literary expressions from black culture in America on how an ‘aesthetic of quiet’ defines a large part of silenced, yet culturally rich black cultures. He explores the notion of quiet through various photographs, songs, music as well as the writings of Toni Morrison, Marita Bonner, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker (among others) where a space of interiority and surrendered affectivity can always be gleaned. In these readings of the quiet aesthetic, Quashie notes that interiority and a sense of surrender is part of this lifeworld, positioning surrender, not as passive act, but a moment of re-invention and recuperation of an active self and with fulsome expression. As Quashie notes, ‘surrender evidences the agency and wildness of the inner life and is at least human and sustaining as any act of protest’.¹¹ The cultural heritage and subsequent postcolonial effects that Jackson and I share and experience stems from a culture we inherited that has survived ‘300 years in convent and 50 years in Hollywood’, its people bearing the psychic burden and cultural consequences of Spanish and American colonisation. The aesthetic of quiet is a continuing assertion of the sovereignty of the Filipino self and culture, even through centuries of attempted historic and cultural subjugation, if not erasure.¹²

This essay utilises the three Tagalog terms outlined above as a guide to open up the artistic process behind Still One. I discuss the choice of location, influences from traditional Philippine baybayin writing, the imagery of water, the gathering of movement phrases, and notions of memory, poetry and story that intersect with autobiographical elements in dance

Pagdama

Pagdama is a Tagalog word which means to ‘feel or sense the self and the world’. ‘Feel’ or ‘sense’ encompasses a spectrum of sensorial experiences and inner states that I use as an initial approach to navigate my creative process, including the creation of Still One.

Still One was informed by a period of contemplation following my studio practice and performance of Kristin Jackson’s solos. Through my practice of galaw-nilay I open myself to internal and external stimuli to elicit new movements and explore the relationality of inner and outer worlds, entwining aspects of place, memory and imagery. These attentional flows experienced through movement combine so that an idea or theme emerges. Through the process of exploring, imagining, embodying and refining, these find artistic form in movement.

True to the mobile nature of the migrant body in this study, I situate Still One as a process of locating and re-locating myself in different times and spaces. I have looked at and participated in practices in various settings, some of these part of my own cultural life–and some of these are set in Melbourne. First shot on a beach in Batangas, Philippines, and subsequently with a few scenes shot on the Yarra River, Melbourne.

I was assisted by cycles of practice, writing and contemplation in developing this work. In my studio work, I remembered and recreated traces of Qigong, modern dance and ballet training by my body. I also played with the more familiar ideokinetic imagery of natural elements in Qigong, and the imagery of water as a metaphor for cleansing, catharsis and rejuvenation that has been part of the solo work Still Waters (1990), that I learned from Kristen Jackson. I also played with the notion of tracing with my body, using the letters of the baybayin, an ancient Philippine script, evoking a sense of my shared cultural origins with Jackson. The term baybayin comes from the Tagalog root word ‘baybay’, which means ‘to spell, or to write’. Its other meaning is ‘the seashore, or the beach’, which further resonated with the imagery of water which appears as a trope and spatial point of orientation in Still One. 

This constellated further with traces of subconscious layers in my own soma-kinesthetic experience that have accrued in the period of studying Jackson’s solos, and the various practices and classes I have taken at that time with Katrina Rank. As a semi-choreographed piece, I learned how to work through bare movements, and trim them down to evoke the simplicity and sparseness of the mindful body, a tool I picked up from Jackson and my exposure to the minimalism of Japanese dance.

Pagtuon sa sarili: journeying inwards

The film begins with the main character waking up from sleep to the tune of a bamboo chime, the rustle of leaves, the waves of water. The music I originally had in mind for the video was of bamboo chimes; later, I collaborated with musician, Isha Abubakar, who composed a score mainly using piano and the ambient soundscapes of natural phenomena.

The narrative continues with the character moving from the bedroom into a landscape by the beach, which can geographically symbolise our agricultural island nation comprised of more than seven thousand islands. After moments of contemplation and motion, she is transported to a dreamlike space where she meets an ethereal woman who hands her a chime. She receives the chime as a gift, plays with it, and it subsequently becomes another ‘presence’ in different parts of the film. After a series of movements, she returns to a state of repose by the seashore, facing the sunrise, returning to a more active sense of stillness.

Here, I used the chime as symbolic of a spiritual presence, which the woman in the dream signified. The chime has become a personal metaphor of the healing journey I have been through. As I was recovering from grief and illness, while researching and learning Jackson’s solos, I learned to play musical instruments as part of the healing process, which included the calming bamboo chimes.

Interiority or going inside one’s lifeworld of memory, emotion, story, imagery is a second step of galaw-nilay, which I drew upon. The dance film is layered with subtle autobiographic content. It was filmed about a year and a half after a period of grief and illness following my father’s passing. While I could already feel the lightness and vitality coming back into my body, there was a sense of ennui that I would fall into, and I felt that it was my meditation, dance practice, and time spent in natural settings that assisted me back to a state of wonder and exploration that was being called for by the project. This film not only pays homage to the process of learning Jackson’s work, and our shared culture, heritage and identities, but also to my own personal journey of carving out spaces for soulful expression and creativity, even amidst grief and adversity.

In hindsight, I can read the older, ethereal woman that I meet in the dream section of the screen dance as a maternal figure or presence. My musical collaborator Isha Abubakar readily offered the reading that the woman was a maternal figure, and that the dance could be read as a search for a motherly presence. Whilst that narrative was not what I had consciously conceived, I think the maternal reading could alternately cast the older woman’s presence as an avatar for Jackson, imaged as a dancing mother, passing her legacy and work to a younger artist. The maternal presence also reflected another psychic utterance, expressing my longing for a strong maternal presence at the time it was made, as I realised that the loss of my father, actually felt like losing a very maternal and nurturing figure in my life. My initial idea of the ethereal being was to use a subtle feminine presence as a trope for a spiritual self-presence that I anchor myself into and aim to embody in my own meditation practice. The other reading that came up from Abubakar and my own resulting realisations are, however, welcome and opened me up to how these alternate readings of the work. These diverse reflections on the work are imprints of my personal realities drawn from my subconscious and imparted through movement. 


^{Image ^^^ Tracing letters from the baybayin with my arms and hands while lying down. Video still from, Still One (2020), Rina Angela Corpus co-directed with Antonne Santiago.}

The bamboo chime is also a key figure that appears throughout the film, not just as an ornament, but almost a ‘living presence’ that persists throughout the visual story. I note how the bamboo has been a persistent cultural symbol of the Philippines, as well as a signifier of culture in most Asian societies. It is often used for traditional houses, weapons for hunting, food and ornamentation, a versatile material known for its resilience and growth, withstanding adversities through time, which our nation has been known for across its long history of resistance and struggle amidst colonising cultures.  To me, the bamboo is a trope for the homeland where Jackson and myself have drawn our sense of cultural grounding and historical roots.

Danas: Tracing letters with the baybayin

Notably, in my study away in Manila, I found myself in a workshop on baybayin, an ancient Philippine script that had Indic origins, widely used in the Luzon region throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before the Latin alphabet came to dominate the main writing system in the homeland. This old alphasyllabary belonged to the family of Brahmic scripts, which are part of the writing systems in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia, showing the long tradition and continuity of languages and modes of writing across various cultures. It is nearly a forgotten art in the Philippines, but baybayin has recently been recovered by cultural researchers and artists who aim to connect more deeply to their cultural heritage. In 2018, a law was passed to recognize baybayin as the national writing system of the Philippines, to generate greater awareness of the legacies of Philippine cultural history.¹³

Significantly, in the workshop, baybayin was taught to us as a form of meditative writing by a group called Ginhawa. Led by Minifred Gavino and Leah Tolentino, the Baybayin Creativity Workshop is one of the teachings the group offers ‘so [that] fellow Filipinos may come to understand their roots, awake their creativity, and continue to be conscious about life’s important lessons.’¹⁴ Each of the 17 syllables seems to have a distinct code, beauty and wisdom, which can be rendered in calligraphic or visual writing. Outside the workshop, a healer-friend from Ginhawa also shared me her ‘baybayin oracle stones’, where a baybayin syllable is written. She had asked to pick up two stones, and each revealed a baybayin word that is interpreted to have a significant message for the person at that time.¹⁵ This brought me to see how Baybayin has been used by Filipino modern creatives for spiritual work and psychotherapy.

The group also practiced a ‘baybayin dance,’ where they asked us to write the letters of our names with our bodies. Spelling the letters of my name with my body felt like a playful game, and seeing each one ‘dancing’ their own names also brought a lot of lightness and laughter to the workshop, as if we were ‘speaking’ in another language for the first time. The group also has a baybayin prayer, which they do in the form of a dance.

Taking this practice, I did an exploration by using my hands and arms to trace select baybayin letters as part of the filmic choreography. I specifically learned to spell ‘Shiva’ a Sanskrit word that is known to be the oldest name of the divine.¹⁶

This experiment resulted in close-up shots of my hands tracing specific letters in the air whilst I was in bed, and another whilst I was on the beach, and a third in the black studio. These were juxtaposed with the dreamlike scenes with another performer, Tina Diaz, a classmate of mine in meditation, who plays the character of an ethereal being in the film.

I conceive of writing and dancing as similar forms of self-inscription and I found that learning the baybayin has become a conduit for expressing the agency of the self through a re-writing using words and the body, channeled through baybayin script that connects me to the richness of my cultural roots.

Daloy: sensuous waters

The first movement phrase I used in the film was an improvised piece of moving across a pathway among trees. On hindsight, the movements that emerged had a sweeping and spacious quality, a play of scooping and welcoming the space, gestures as if to greet and begin the day. On hindsight, elements of contemporary ballet and Qigong came to fore.

The next movement phrases on the beach shore were the beginnings of the choreographed piece. I started with the image of playing and tracing water with my arms and my body, as if they were waves. I also evoked the image of cleansing my body with water, and similar gestures of scooping, bathing and drinking water.

The notion of water as a healing element came to the fore of my gestures. It was also a gesture of waking up the body, as one would begin the day, which to me parallels how meditation also works as a healing, awakening element in one’s day, if not in one’s life.

These movements of tracing letters on air blended with the initial phrases I have created where I trace and play with the sensuous image of water. I was initially attracted to the imagery and sensuous nature of water that was especially present in Still Waters, so I decided early on to include water as a primary presence in the work. This informed the decision to locate the film on a beach shore in Matuod, Batangas, and additionally, a riverbank along the Yarra in Melbourne. This sense of bi-location as a movement artist straddling two worlds and cultures also came as another palpable element to my experience of crafting the dance film, however subtly hidden from the viewer. The film depicts a seamless connection between the two geographies, due to careful editing. It was almost as if they were shot in the same location. I wish to register that despite the temporal and geographic differences I encountered in dancing on screen in two places, I noticed that it was eventually the sensorial scape of natural settings that provided a sense of home and temporality to the film, besides the overarching narrative in the work.

^{Image^^^ One of the photos that Kristin Jackson had sent in our email correspondence from her travel to the Angkor Wat temples. Many of the images have been defaced due to their Hindu origins. I reference and dialogue with these poses as a movement motif in Still One.}

In the next series where I begin to stand up, I made use of arm poses by deity sculptures from Angkor Wat derived from photos that Jackson had sent me earlier. In one email correspondence, Jackson shared how she uses sculpture to inspire her own choreography. Knowing my interest in spirituality, she shared various photographs of religious Christian and Asian sculptures from her travels in Asia and the US, as a way of inspiring me to create new choreography. I picked the Angkor Wat temple deities photos because of their closeness to an Asian sense of the sacred, and an evocation of yogic poses. As I mimicked the deities’ royal arm poses, I incorporated slow turns to show the shifts in every pose.¹⁷ I then moved to follow a short scooping motif from the Still Waters choreography, continuing the play with water imagery. I then started a phrase of tracing the baybayin letters with my arms and hands, which juxtaposed with other shots of the same in the bedroom, and later, in the black studio. We also included a shot of me gesturing with a bouquet which evoked a scene from Pakiusap (Plea) (1989), Jackson’s bride solo dance which I had learned.¹⁸

In this instance of dance and filmic techniques, I see myself delving into an interior landscape. It is an interior that conjures a world of intersubjective realities, a corporeality of ‘body-mind-world unity’, of self-other, self-world in a communion of wordless yet culture-specific expressivity that have found inscription in the mindful body.¹⁹


Conclusion

Besides the future possibility of research in Philippine languages of movement, I suggest that the dancing body and one’s biography are important elements in dance and somatic research. These elements are embedded in one’s interior life and in turn fuel outer experience and dance expression. Being mindfully aware of my interior body as primarily metaphysical while considering my materially and historically positioned self, allows me to re-position my sense of being while finding my language for the interior life of dance.

Overall, the dance film Still One is an iteration of galaw-nilay, my notion and conception of meditative movement taken from my experiential and corporeal archive. I also consciously used Philippine terms as a way of decolonising the somatic and movement experience, which has largely been taught to us in the foreign language (i.e. English) via the dance schools and institutions. It is an initial attempt of researching Philippine vocabulary of dance and movement which still needs further scholarly attention.

In this essay, I also narrated the discrete elements of the creative work in dance film, from the choice of location, influences from baybayin writing, the imagery of water, the movement phrases, notions of memory and story, and inspiration from sculptural images, allowing these to intersect with an element of autobiography in dance. All of these inform my conception of galaw-nilay as a meditative movement and creative practice.

Notes:

1. Filipino/Tagalog words for: ‘far away, where there is no bamboo, air, ocean, clouds.’

2. Still One, a poem I wrote that partly inspired the dance film I discuss throughout this article.

3. I have studied Raja Yoga with the Brahma Kumaris since 2000 and still continue to practice and teach the meditation technique. Meanwhie, my study of Qigong started in 2006 with a nun from the Religious of the Good Shepherd in the Philippines, and I have studied with different teachers from thereon.

4. I am thankful to University of the Philippines Professors Bry Viray, Anril Tiatco, Felipe de Leon and Edru Abraham for sharing their own thoughts on translation of the terms I use. A Filipino poet friend Rem Tanauan, also offered ‘galaw-nilay’ as a term for meditative movement used by his wellness group Ginhawa, though no literature has been written about it.

5. Daloy Dance Company and Ginhawa are two groups in the Philippines that I have known to practice the use of Filipino language in their movement practice.

6. Brown in Sarojini Nadar (2014) “Stories are data with Soul” – lessons from black feminist epistemology, Agenda, 28:1, 18-28, DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2014.871838

7. ‘Lifeworld’ or Lebenswelt in German is a term in phenomenology which refers to ‘the concrete world of our practical involvements.’ It was introduced by Edmund Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences (1936) and was developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jurgen Habermas, among others. See Ted Toadvine, “Phenomenology and ‘hyper-reflection,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (UK: Acumen Publishing, 2008), 20.

8. I make a distinctive usage of ‘meditative movement’ in my research, though it has been used in other literature, especially by Larkey et al, defining it as a category of exercise such as Taichi/Qigong which aims to promote deep states of relaxation through movement. See Larkey, L., (2009). “Meditative Movement as a Category of Exercise: Implications for Research,” Journal of physical activity & health, 6. (2009): 230-8. 10.1123/jpah.6.2.230.  
9. I draw from black cultural theorist Kevin Quashie’s notion of the ‘aesthetic of quiet.’ See Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

10. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 34.

11. This is a popular expression used in various historical essays and literature that document the impact and influence of Spanish and American conquest throughout the Philippines. It is thought to have been first used by Philippine writer Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and later used by various other authors. Also see Gemma Cruz Araneta’s “In her own words” Manila Bulletin, Aug. 30, 2018 at https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/08/30/in-her-own-words/

12. “Why Philippine millennials are reviving Baybayin” Agence France Press in South China Morning Post, Aug. 1, 2019.  Why Philippine millennials are reviving Baybayin, an ancient written script | South China Morning Post (scmp.com). Also see Baybayin, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin

13. ‘Why is Baybayin relevant today?’ Oct 19, 2012, https://ph.news.yahoo.com/book-review-why-baybayin-relevant-today-064017350.html

14.  ‘Why is Baybayin relevant today?’ Oct 19, 2012, https://ph.news.yahoo.com/book-review-why-baybayin-relevant-today-064017350.html

15. I picked up two stones that revealed the syllables ‘ba’ and ‘ng’ which formed two possible words, ‘bango’ (fragrance) and ‘banga’ (a vessel).

16. As taught to me in Raja yoga classes. ‘Shiva’ is also called ‘God of gods’, and in Sanskrit means ‘benign, kind, auspicious’.

17. Kristin Jackson, email message to author, October 9, 2016. It has the following notes: ‘My understanding was that the images and sculptures were defaced or damaged during the Khmer Rouge due to their Hindu origins. You may repeat using each photo as needed, but each image has to match one motif. I like to cut out the symbols/verbs and randomly arrange them (like the "chance" method), so that it takes me out of my comfort zone. The most important goal is to be able to remember this "non-sequitur sentence," in order to replicate or manipulate. But it is more important to have fun with it and make new discoveries.’

18. Pakiusap is originally a dance about the plight of Filipino mail-order-bride women in the 80’s which Jackson choreographed as part of an exhibit installation by Filipina artist Genara Banzon in Sydney, 1989.

19. Apasia Leledaki and David Brown. “Physicalisation’: A Pedagogy of Body-Mind Cultivation for Liberation in Modern Yoga and Meditation Methods,” Asian Medicine 4 (2009) 303–337.



About the author:
Rina Angela Corpus is a movement artist, dance scholar and poet coming from a lifelong interest in the arts, spirituality and sacred narratives in culture. Born in Manila and now based in Melbourne, she integrates her long-time practice of Qigong and Raja yoga meditation with somatic and dance practices, bringing their meditative and poetic resonances into her movement expression.
She studied and performed with the Quezon City Ballet, trained in Limon dance in New York, nihonbuyo in Kyoto, and Qigong in Manila and Australia; published two books in dance, “Defiant Daughters Dancing” and “Dance and Other Slippages” (University of the Philippines Press), and widely written essays on culture and dance. Currently, she is on leave as an Assistant Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, as she pursues a PhD Dance at the University of Melbourne.