56 Carving Out a Space she is not unaffected by critical assessments, she has been dispassionate about this, aware of the risks one takes in creating dances with materials derived from the cultural practices of our country’s ethnolinguistic groups. Indeed, coming from a landed family in Bacolod who later moved to Davao, Locsin’s subject position will always be susceptible to criticism. What, for example, symbolic investment does a Christian, landed woman, educated in exclusive schools in the Philippines, with an MA in Dance from the Ohio State University have when she creates works based on the movements of the “tribal” communities in the northern and southern Philippines? What cultural appropriations and transformations are made in such choreographies? What incursions into the narrative of the Philippine nation are effected by these choreographies? These questions and issues are no longer new as they were the same questions raised by scholars and choreographers as regards the folk dances staged by performing companies from the 1930s to the 1980s. In his book The Day the Dancers Stayed (2010), Theodore Gonzalves re-visits the works of Francisca Reyes Aquino (National Artist for Dance, 1973), Helena Benitez, Jose Lardizabal, Lucrecia Urtula, and Isabel Santos, and situates them within a particular historical juncture to show the entanglement of the narrative of the nation with that of folk dance. Gonzalves analyzes the full support given by UP president Jorge Bocobo (1934-1939) to the efforts of the founding scholar of folk dance, Reyes Aquino, as part of the University’s enterprise to prove the Philippines’ ability to stand proudly beside other nations. Bocobo decried the onslaught of Americanization because imported dances, songs, movies, and literature were chipping away at the Filipino identity (40). Believing that the younger generation had to learn how to “perform their specific repertoire” with confidence and that a sense of nationalism had to be “internalized viscerally but exhibited kinetically” (Gonzalves 2010, 39), Bocobo recognized the crucial role Aquino would play in his plans. Aquino’s academic career was fostered by Bocobo’s administration—from her trips to the barrios in order to research on the folk dances to the writing of her M.A. thesis on Philippine folk dances and games in 1926. Gonzalves makes a significant observation of the 1930s as the decade when curricular changes during the American occupation saw the emergence of folk dances as a crucial component of the PE program conceptualized by American teachers. Folk dances, thus, became “part of playground demonstrations, athletic meets, and schoolwide events” (47). In line with Bacobo’s vision, Aquino’s teaching of folk dance—the UP Folk Song and Dance Club (the group was reorganized as the Filipiniana Dance Troupe after World War II and was supported by the US military—was a means of “foster[ing] patriotism and nationalism”