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1 The Art of the State Inventing Philippine Folkloric Forms (Manila, 1934) The nation state sees the entire territory as its performance area; it organizes the space as a huge enclosure, with definite places of entrances and exits. These exits and entrances are manned by companies of workers they call immigration officials. The borders are manned by armed guards to keep away invaders; but it is also to confine the population within a certain territory. The nation state performs its own being hourly, through its daily exercise of power over the exits and entrances, by means of passports and visas and flags. . . . The state performs its rituals of power not only by being able to control exits and entrances into the territorial space, its entire performance space, but also by being also to move people between the various enclosures within the national territorial space. —Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Vaudeville, Vod-a-vil, and Bodabil Luis Borromeo began his musical training at an early age in the central Philippine region of Leyte. He caught the performing bug and traveled to San Francisco to see the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Recognized by fellow Filipinos, he was later asked to perform at the Dutch Pavilion, where he was discovered. He signed a three-year contract to perform on the Orpheum Circuit, a large chain of vaudeville and motionpicture theaters.1 Borromeo saw the United States from the inside of those venues, while scores of other musical acts from the Philippines with names like the Filipino Collegians, the Varsity Four, the Manila Filipino Orchestral Quartette, and the Royal Philippino (sic) String Band entertained millions at the Circuit Chautauqua.2 Fans urged Borromeo to write about his home; he gave them “My Beautiful Philippines.”After Borromeo returned from a large overseas tour, his revue became legendary at ballrooms, cabarets , and dance halls. The company featured an eclectic mix of performers: 30 • Chapter 1 the “Muslim Queen” Miss Mundi, the Sulu island saxophonist Dudu; the Chinese tenor Chong Ying, and the Malayan baritone Zaelea, as well as dancers, other song stylists, and instrumentalists. Their repertoire featured jazz, the blues, ballads, Latin tunes, and native folk melodies arranged as art songs. Musicians were only part of a larger act that also involved contortionists , comedians, animal trainers, and tap dancers.3 Borromeo’s experiences might seem anomalous when compared with the thousands of labor migrants shipped to the United States and Hawai‘i during the early twentieth century as neither alien nor citizen. But Borromeo and musicians like him parlayed careers in commercial entertainment that would anticipate the global reach of the Filipino entertainer in the second half of the century.4 The first vaudeville troupes came to the archipelago just a few years after the formal conclusion of the U.S.–Philippine War. Minstrel troupes performed their buck-and-wing, clog, and tap routines for white American audiences. Other performers came to town, including the Japanese Infantile Company, the Baroufski Imperial Russian Circus, the Denishawn Company, Helen and Lucy Martin, and Richard and Raymond Williams. Soon, troupes from around the world would market directly to Filipinos, and all-native ensembles, largely based in Manila, would spring up throughout the islands. Luis Borromeo called these performances vod-a-vil, while his audiences re-dubbed it bodabil. Some of the earliest advertisements promised peerless variety:“GoodAmerican Orchestra , New Acts, New Songs, the Most Brilliant and Stupendous Minstrel First Part Extant, Beautiful Lights and Scenic Effects, Gorgeous Costuming, Ragtime Talks, Ragtime Songs, Ragtime Walks, Every Feature Bright and Up to Date PLUS—A Grand Walk of All Nations!”5 Some commentators in the Philippines had prematurely written jazz’s obituary, assuming that the only worthwhile forms of entertainment were those patronized by the upper crust. “While it is true that the modern, snappy, syncopated music (jazz) is popular in the ballrooms of America, what we call the ‘best people’ frown upon it and continue their communion with the great masters of the art,” wrote Ernesto Vallejo. “Jazz will never displace real music in the United States. In fact in recent years, it has had a tendency to become less popular.”6 Published in a Philippine newspaper in the late 1920s, Vallejo’s observation could not have been more wrong. Jazz became “more real” as the years passed, aided by sophisticated marketing techniques, improved recording technology, and, most important, the uprooting and mixing of rural and urban populations that pushed music across the continent by rail car and steamship...

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