Dance
Patrick Alcedo
Professor
BIOGRAPHY
Recipient of the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award for the senior full-time faculty category, Dr. Patrick Alcedo is a dance ethnographer, a specialist on Philippine traditional dances, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is the Chair of and a Professor in the Department of Dance at York University, the most comprehensive department of its kind in Canada.
The Office of the President of the Republic of the Philippines, through the Commission on Filipino Overseas, recognized him in 2022 with the Pamana Presidential Award. Meaning “legacy and heritage” in the Tagalog language, Pamana is “conferred on overseas Filipino individuals, who, in exemplifying the talent and industry of the Filipino, have brought the country honour and recognition through excellence and distinction in the pursuit of their work or profession.”
Among Dr. Alcedo’s many recognitions are an Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario, a Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for International Dance Scholarship from the Fulbright Association of America, and Filipino-Canadian Making a Difference Honour from Philippine Festival Mississauga, a federation of community organizations in the Greater Toronto Area. From among more than 300 nominees, he was named one of Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awardees in 2022.
His PhD in Dance History and Theory is from the University of California, Riverside, under the auspices of the Asian Cultural Council’s Ford Foundation Grant. While pursuing doctoral work, he studied Baroque dance, performing in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Stanford University. His postdoctoral fellowship is from the Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual, and Performance (SEATRiP) program at UC Riverside. In 2007, he took residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. as a Rockefeller Humanities Foundation Fellow.
He received his BA in English: Language from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where after graduation he taught as full-time instructor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. At this state university, he performed for many years with the Filipiniana Dance Group, and with this group represented the Philippines at various international folklore festivals in France and Germany in 1992.
His documentary film, A Piece Of Paradise, won both Best Canadian Film and Best First Feature Film at the 2017 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. His They Call Me Dax had its world premiere at the Cannes International Independent Film Festival and received Best Foreign Short Documentary Film at the San Francisco Short Film Festival (2021) and Best Documentary at the Toronto Shorts International Film Festival (2021). In addition, it won Best Director, Best Documentary, and Best Cinematography at the New York City Independent Film Festival (2021).
His next feature-length documentary, A Will To Dream, was an official selection at the 2021 Los Angeles International Film Festival and won Asia’s Best Documentary Film at the All Asian Independent Film Festival that same year. In 2023, it received the Prize for Best Documentary Film or Video from the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance. His first short documentary, Boxing In The Shadow Of Pacquiao about lives of underprivileged boxers, some of who were his boxing coaches in his home province of Aklan on the island of Panay in the central Philippines, was published in the New York Times (November 12, 2009).
His written publications have appeared in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and in anthologies from Palgrave MacMillan, Playwrights Canada Press, and Northwestern University Press. He edited the anthology, Religious Festivals in Contemporary Southeast Asia (Ateneo University Press, 2016), along with Sally Ann Ness, his doctoral supervisor, and Hendrik M.J. Maier, his postdoctoral mentor.
By way of documentary films, print publications, and live performances, he continues to flesh out cultural identities of Filipinos through Philippine dance and movement practices as embodied by Filipinos both in the Philippines and in the various elsewhere where they have settled.
Publications
Sacred Camp: Transgendering Faith in a Philippine Festival” February 2007.
Published: Cambridge University Press. Citation: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (February 2007), 38 (1), pg. 107-132
ISSN: 0022-4634. Date: 2007-02
Grants & Awards
- SSHRC Creation Grant, 2011-14
- Dean’s Junior Teaching Award, 2010-11
- Young Professional Award, 2011
- Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, 2007
Dance
People of AMPD