Still remember this April, the Amis Music Festival team traveled to the Cordillera region on the island of Luzon in northern Philippines to participate in the 2017 Cordillera Day, to join in cultural exchange and exchange of issues with Indigenous peoples from different parts of the Philippines.
With an opportunity that is hard to come by, we are able to invite members of the CPA (Cordillera Peoples Alliance), among them mostly young people, committed to carry out artistic activities through cultural performances, preservation, and publicity to achieve economic, cultural, educational, social, and even political objectives — they are the DKK (Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera, in English: “Center for Cordillera People’s Culture”).
DKK was founded in 1991, with original intention to serve the people through arts: from the streets, cultural centers, classrooms, the metropolitan areas, to remote villages and other places, they carry out cultural performances for the public to have correct understanding of Cordillera’s true appearance. Their artistic approach may be presented in music, visual arts, plays, street performances and other art forms, presenting Igorot's rich cultural essence, recounting the historical stories of defending their land and the challenges most Filipinos face today.
DKK maintains its core — cultural performance, education and training, organization and international alliances — to enhance members' ability and sensitivity to the above actions. In addition to broadening the artist's horizons, they also use arts to strengthen links with domestic and international cultural and arts teams.
Amis Music Festival also choose to use cultural and musical means to care about issues pertaining to Dulan, pertaining to Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, and even to events that take place on this land of Taiwan. I still remember the modern play performed by the Philippines’ youth tribal members back in April, recounting the history of the tribe and the issues they face today; it has been a shocking cultural education lesson for me, unforgettable to this day.
We sincerely invite you to the 2017 Amis Music Festival, let’s get close to the land and listen to the stories of the Indigenous peoples from the Philippines and Taiwan.
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Note: In the past three months, five of the tribe members defending women’s rights in the Cordillera region have been continuously subjected to life-threatening harassment by the local military forces, and amongst them are also relatives of DKK members. Related information can be found in this web site on the right, we can also care about them https://goo.gl/EoteB7
