blog revival '09

The Goethe Institut organized a Regional Dance Summit for Contemporary Dance choreographers and dance critics from August 5 to 8, 2009 at the GoetheHaus, Jakarta, Indonesia. The summit brought together over 40 participants from ten different countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, of course Germany and the Philippines. For the Philippines, Donna Miranda presented her work, Beneath Polka-Dotted Skies, while I was the country's representative dance critic.

Part of the idea of the summit was networking and as I met up with a lot of critics and journalists from other countries, it became clear to me how important the online component of our writings were. Luckily for me, Malaya publishes my work on their website and they're online for at least a year; other critics either write for websites without online components or the paper they write for charges for their online readership. But it does make sense that I should have a blog for dance.

I've already been toying with the idea of a blog that's open to the public, really about my thoughts about dance that other people might enjoy and get something out of. Most of my previous blogs were private, personal blogs and while there were some important dance stuff in it, there was also a lot of stuff that I only wrote for myself. So, in the interest of sharing thoughts of dance with the general public, welcome to this dance blog.

Thinking of a new name for this blog (because the old name was very personal; yet again everything is always about me), I remembered something Donna said to me on another blog - a "magazine blog" I started years ago with a bunch of friends that we couldn't sustain because everyone was busy with their own thing. I had put up my initial thoughts on her piece, Summer Begins and Ends as You Wish in that blog, and she left me a comment which ended with, "Mabuhay ang Blog!" This is because dance writing was very sparse - it stil is - and blogs were so cool because they were an alternate means of getting the news out on dance and art to a wide audience. Spending this week with her, I am reminded of that comment of hers, our first actual exchange and thought, how apt!

And so, mabuhay!
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