Meet Choreographers Frank Rabon and Leonard Iriarte

A lot of us Chamorros, our knowledge of our culture was simply what our elders remembered during the Spanish colonization, which had a lot of adaptation. Our dances, our songs, our movements, were mostly from the colonial period.

The Spanish waltz or batsu and the polka or scoltes were brought in by sailors who passed through the island.

Chamorro actually is a Spanish word, but the original people that populated the Mariana Islands... we were Tau Tau Tauro. Tau Tau Tauro is our indigenous language. Tau Tau meaning people, Tauro meaning land. Our language still is alive... there's still a lot of us that speak the Chamorro language fluently. But as far as the dance movement and the songs, that basically just disappeared.

As I grew up the dances that I was taught were Spanish. We did the Spanish waltz, we did the stick dance. I never knew Tahitians existed. I never knew Hawaiians existed, and Samoans. And I started learning those kind of dances. I was getting into it. Then my instructor said to me, "Frank, don't you guys have any of these dances?" Your people — they're island people. They must have had chants. They must have had something other than this coconut shell dance, whatever. This is very Spanish, right? So it got me to thinking, and I think that's the seed that really started me. I mean this was back in 71, 72, 73… Working with partner Leonard Iriarte, Frank Rabon works to recreate the dances that might have been.

It's very important to us to honor them as best we can, preferably on a daily basis.

We do what we do to connect ourselves through that 300 year gap to our ancestors who last practiced the traditional chanting and dancing in 1690s.

Frank Rabon:

This is who we are, this is some of the ceremonial dances, the ceremonial chants that we use, that ... or could have used, you know, I can't say that it is authentic as it was 3000 years ago. It's just maybe a similarity. I don't think that I can authenticate. I can substantiate a lot of my creation through research, through written documents that people from outside have written about our people.

Frank Rabon: I did not want people all over the world to think that the Spaniards or Magellan brought us in on their ship in 1521.