Memories from the "Battle"field

It was almost 10 years ago that I got my first taste of what a Filipino Organization was like. I was about 10 years old and my parents dragged me to some bamboo battle I wasn’t aware of. At first, I wasn’t really fond of the idea. At that time, I had no self-concept of the culture that I came from, let alone how rich it was beyond the surface. In fact, the only real exposure I had to anything related to the Filipino culture was the 2000 film, The Debut staring Dante Bosco and the dances I would see at Simbang Gabi as a kid (which, for those of you who don’t know, is a special Filipino tradition of nine consecutive masses that are held leading up to Christmas.) This all changed once I saw Battle of the Bamboo 2006. I distinctly remember every time a story dance was being performed, I turned to my mom and said: “hey, what’s that?” I remember the feeling of sheer anxiety that flushed through my system when I saw people climbing up to the third tier of bangko benches. I remember loving every moment of watching it happen. And I remember craving that feeling that each act left on that stage that night.

(Not me from my first battle, just me from 10 years ago lol)

Fast forward 10 years.

Coming off of a fashion show high, those feelings that I felt as a kid started to resonate within me again. “So have you guys thought about battle?” was a question that people had faced us, the CEC’s, with that I was not entirely sure how to answer. On one hand, it was something that I had been waiting years to do because of how big of a factor it was for me to join Bayanihan in the first place, despite it not seeming so apparent at first. On the other hand, I had my doubts about realistically being able to perform in Battle of the Bamboo. The esteem that Battle of the Bamboo is held to some soars high in the heavens and I was not sure that we would be able to keep up with this. However, I learned to swallow my pride and put my faith in the choreographers.

The practices leading up to the show always seemed so casual. I always took practice seriously, but even by the night before Battle, I felt uncomfortably calm with performing the whole routine on a stage that I looked up so high to as a kid.

February 20th, 2016.

Gathering together, you could read the anticipation and anxiety in everyone’s eyes before we drove down to Chicago. Or maybe it was just caffeine, I don’t really know. At this point, it still did not feel like we were going to be performing in front of a crowd of hundreds. Backstage, everyone was just excited to be in Chicago. Getting to be with other schools, seeing old friends, AND GETTING POP-EYE’S was the Bee’s Knees. However, once we got called up for stage time, it Battle morphed into a different beast. During stage time, three people sat at the judge’s panel. Though I later found out they were not the official judges of the competition this year, I felt my heart skip an entire eight-count. We were only marking our spots for formations on stage, but that entire time felt like an eternity. That eternity got cut-off mid-dance of our first run-through, which did not really help with the pent-up emotions everyone was holding in.

Fast forwards two hours to about 10 minutes before the performance.

After getting into a massage circle and a tinikling battle with one of the other groups, we got called to go backstage. At this point, it finally hit me that we were about to lay our hearts down on the stage in front of hundreds. And I felt like my heart was beating out of chest. Trying to recall the actual performance while on stage is still quite an Olympic event for me. I felt like I was in auto-pilot mode for a majority of the dance because the synchronization of our moves had to be precise in order for our dance to be perfect. My auto-pilot jet crashed the moment we heard the audience roar when Riane and Alyssa were hoisted up upon the sticks. Now, I was fighting to finish the dance while staying in character. But in that moment, I knew we did what we went there to do. The stern masks that we all wore that night were a stark contrast to the high emotions we were all running on at the end of the dance. Walking out, one of the judges remarked: “Marquette Bayanihan, you should have competed.” However, everyone knew that we had already won with our performance.