This is an excerpt from The Movers and Shakers feature in MEGA June 2025 issue
National Artist for Dance Alice Reyes did not so much as fall in love with dance as she just did it. She started with folk dancing with her father at a young age and kept on going from there. “We became known as the father and daughter folk dance team, and we traveled together with the Bayanihan [Philippine National Folk Dance Company] dancers when it first started out in 1958,” she recalls.
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“I didn’t think dancing was something extraordinary,” Reyes admits. She majored in History and Foreign Services, even as she took classical ballet under Rosalia Merino Santos and later with Leonore Orosa Goquingco. “I was going to be a diplomat!” She laughs at the memory and recounts how even as she pursued her studies, dance had always come alongside everything. She did the choreography for school productions and even did television shows. It was only when she was granted a scholarship to a summer dance workshop run by Hanya Holm in Colorado Springs that she realized that she should just give in to dance. “So that’s that,” she said with a smile.
And “That” is a career spanning over five decades that laid the foundation of contemporary dance in the Philippines as we know it. Reyes co-founded Ballet Philippines with Eddie Elejar, and later formed the Alice Reyes Dance Company which staged the very first modern dance concert at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts credits Reyes for creating a “Filipino modern dance idiom,” this unique language of dance expressed through movements derived from Philippine indigenous dance, modern dance, and classical ballet. Her major works that utilized this idiom include Amada (1969), At a Maranaw Gathering (1970), Itim-Asu (1971), Tales of the Manuvu (1977), Rama Hari (1980), Bayanihan Remembered (1970).
For someone who professed she didn’t fall in love with dance, Reyes has shown in her life and work how much love she has for the art form and for the dancers, even up to now. During the pandemic, she ensured that her dancers, and even the ones who lost their jobs, were able to survive. She launched the Adopt-a-Dancer campaign, alongside CCP’s Professional Dance Support Program, to keep as many of them dancing, training, creating, and earning by holding classes, lecture demonstrations, and short videos that they posted on social media. New works were produced. Reyes and her dancers kept busy throughout the lockdown.
When asked what she is most proud of in her career so far, Reyes replies, “Dancers have to be paid so they can dance, take classes, and rehearse. It’s a full time job. I was the first one to put it out there in everybody’s awareness here in the Philippines: dance is a career, a respectable one, and they are artists, they should be respected as such, and paid… success means being able to do what you really love and have enough to live on.”
Read more of MEGA’s Pinoy Pride Awardees in MEGA June 2025 issue now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Photography by JERICK SANCHEZ. Creative Direction by BRIE VENTURA. Fashion Direction by ROKO ARCEO. Fashion Associate ERICA TEROL. Editorial Assistant THESSMAR LECTURA. Photographer’s assistants KARL RIMANDO, BUDDY REYES, and DAVE ORPILLA. Makeup NADYNNE ESGUERRA. Hair MATT LEDESMA. Shot on Location at MEGA Studio.
