Pison 59 was only by being a Filipino and drawing from her cultural matrix that she would excel, Locsin continued to mull over Igorot and used it as the topic of a paper she submitted in one of her classes. At that time, she had already wanted to create a modern choreography which later motivated her to go to Bontoc and research on the movements of the tribes in the Northern Philippines. Strong as her desire and vision may have been, the choreography was just not ready. With concepts and ideas already brewing in her mind, she finally choreographed the work for the Le Petite Theatre Amsterdam in 1987, the year she was in Europe to further her knowledge on modern dance techniques (Corpus 2007, 106). The Amsterdam experience further strengthened her belief that as a Filipina choreographer and dancer, she could only create works that would make her distinct and different from the “white dancers.” Hence, her decision to “go Filipino” and to create a dance based on the fieldwork she had done in the Northern Philippines in 1983.5 In the 80s, Filipino dance music was not quite visible in stores so Locsin had to request her mother to send her Bayanihan cassette tapes and these provided the much needed accompaniment for her choreographies (Locsin, e-mail to author, July 22, 2011).6 Using the grammar of modern dance,7 Locsin created a dance whose movement phrase was inspired by the dances in the North and the dance genre she chose was ideal as it “emerged out of this international interaction between folk, national, and global cultures” (Turner and Yangwen 2009, 13). For her project, modern dance had a useful vocabulary. In her essay “Originality in the Postcolony: Choreographing the Neoethnic Body of Philippine Ballet,” (1997) Filipino dance anthropologist Sally Ness places dance in a global context and looks at Igorot with a critical angle. Considering the piece a “Philippine transnational ballet,” Ness rejects a simplistic treatment of appropriation as “‘cultural imperialism’” and shows how the choreography chooses and combines elements from both ethnic and ballet styles. Neither Western nor Filipino, the hybrid dance embodies a number of contradictions. Although Ness acknowledges that Igorot is a “‘decolonizing’ dance” whose choreography is an articulation of a kind of Philippines, she likewise problematizes how the piece tends to conflate the identity of the Igorot with all the Filipinos. Such conflation, in effect, does not only gloss over the multiple ethnic identities in the Philippines, but also ignore the power relations operating in the nation state (Reed 1998, 514). In the “Postscript” of her forthcoming book entitled My Neo-Ethnic Choreography: A Creative Process, Locsin recounts how she took comfort