Philippine Traditional Arts: Weaving, Carving, Music and Dance

In May 2025, nine Filipino artisans received the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan on the same night, the largest single class in the award’s history. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts, or NCCA, has used this award since 1993 to recognize masters of Philippines traditional arts who learned their craft inside a community rather than a classroom.

Sixteen artists earned the honor in the program’s first three decades, and the 2025 batch nearly doubled that number in one ceremony.

Philippines traditional arts are not a single style. The NCCA groups them into ten working domains: weaving and textiles, woodcarving, metalwork, pottery, tattooing, basketry, folk architecture, music, dance, and oral literature. Each domain has its own tools, materials, and named masters. This guide walks through all ten, using the NCCA framework and its living treasures as the throughline.

At a Glance

Aspect	Detail
Craft domains	10
Governing law	RA 7356 (1992)
Flagship award	Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan
Award basis	RA 7355 (1993)
2025 milestone	9 awardees in one ceremony, a record
Awardee benefits	Medallion, cash grant, stipend, medical coverage

The NCCA Framework and the National Living Treasures Program

Republic Act No. 7356 created the NCCA in 1992 and split Philippine art into two branches: traditional and non-traditional. Traditional arts are the ones a family or village teaches directly, without formal schooling. Non-traditional arts, such as easel painting or cinema, arrived through colonial or institutional channels. The NCCA’s Subcommission on Cultural Communities and Traditional Arts oversees the traditional branch through three regional committees.

The subcommission’s flagship program is the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan, created under Republic Act No. 7355. A National Living Treasure must show mastery passed down through oral tradition, a body of work tied to one community, and a commitment to training apprentices.

Nomination starts at the barangay or provincial level, moves through a technical panel of scholars and practitioners, and ends with confirmation by the NCCA Board of Commissioners before the President formally confers the title.

In May 2025, nine Filipinos received the National Living Treasures Award in a single ceremony, a record the NCCA credited to a deliberate push to document ethnic traditions of Philippine arts before their last practitioners are gone.

Most crafts under this framework never had a written manual. A weaver learns a pattern by sitting beside her mother at the loom for years, not by reading a pattern book. That is the exact transmission the award protects.

Weaving and Textiles

Weaving carries the largest share of GAMABA honorees. Magdalena Gamayo of Pinili, Ilocos Norte, still weaves inabel cotton on a footloom in her nineties, producing blankets and bedcovers in patterns that took decades to master.

Lang Dulay of South Cotabato spent her life producing t’nalak, a cloth dyed from abaca fiber using patterns the T’boli believe come to weavers in dreams rather than from a printed template. Four more weavers, each using a different fiber and loom, appear in the table further down this guide.

Yakan weaving in particular uses a warp-based technique with dense geometric patterns unique to Basilan Island, and it deserves its own explanation rather than a summary here. Our guide to Yakan weaving covers the technique, the colors, and how the tradition survives today.

Woodcarving and the Ifugao Bulul

The bulul is a carved wooden figure made by the Ifugao people of the Cordillera to guard rice granaries. According to the National Museum of the Philippines, the bulul functions as an ancestor effigy and guardian spirit believed to protect stored rice from pests and bad harvests. Carvers select narra wood for its associations with health and prosperity, and the figure is carved as a single stylized human form, seated or standing.

Creating a bulul is a ritual act, not a commercial one. Elders choose the tree, carvers shape the wood, and a priest recites the myth of the deity who made the first bulul before the finished piece is bathed in the blood of a sacrificial pig.

Bulul pairs, one male and one female, once stood in nearly every Ifugao granary, representing the union that Ifugao belief ties to good fortune. Missionary pressure in the 1800s and market demand from collectors have made new commissions rare, though carvers in the Cordillera still take orders for households that want to keep the practice alive.

Ifugao carvers also produce the hagabi, a wooden bench carved from a single narra log and reserved for families who have hosted a specific costly feast. Owning a hagabi signals rank the way a title once did in lowland society.

Beyond ritual objects, contemporary sculptor Rey Paz Contreras has carried Cordilleran carving technique into fine art, shaping anito and bulul-inspired figures from salvaged railway wood rather than fresh-cut timber.

Metalwork and Brassware

Maranao metalsmiths in Tugaya, Lanao del Sur, cast brass using three methods: hammering, cutting, and lost-wax casting. Their designs follow okir, the flowing leaf-and-vine motif shared across Islamic art of the southern Philippines. A single agong, the wide-brimmed gong used in Maranao ensembles, can take a smith more than a week to shape by hand.

Brass trays, betel boxes, and ceremonial vessels called gadur once served as bridewealth and status objects among Maranao and Maguindanaon families, since the metal’s gold color approximated the color of nobility.

North of Mindanao, Kapampangan metalsmith Eduardo Mutuc of Apalit, Pampanga, received the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan for pinukpuk, a repoussé technique that hammers designs into silver and bronze sheets from the reverse side. Mutuc applies pinukpuk to church retablos, carriages, and religious statues, carrying a Catholic-era craft forward alongside the Maranao smiths’ Islamic one.

The materials tell their own story of trade. Brass is not mined in Mindanao, so Tugaya smiths buy raw sheets shipped down from Manila, a supply chain that traces back centuries to Chinese and Bornean traders who first brought brass to the southern islands. Hammering time scales with the size of the gong:

• Large, five-kilo agong: eight to ten days by hand.
• Smaller, two-kilo gong: about two days.

Families in Tugaya still measure wealth partly by how many brass pieces line a household’s walls, a custom that predates Spanish contact and never fully disappeared.

Pottery

Filipino households still cook in the palayok, a porous clay pot known as kulon in the Visayas, prized because it lets steam escape so food cooks evenly. In the Cordillera, Kalinga and Ifugao women coil-build the banga, a water jar carried from rivers and irrigation channels, without a potter’s wheel. Kalinga banga also mark weddings and pregnancy rites, not just daily use.

Vigan produces a different tradition entirely. Burnay ware is a glazed stoneware, fired in the same dragon kilns Chinese potters brought to Ilocos generations ago, used for fermenting vinegar, curing bagoong, and aging basi wine. Potters still shape burnay jars by foot, kicking a stone wheel while their hands pull the clay upward.

The oldest known Philippine ceramic, the Manunggul Jar found in a Palawan cave, was a burial vessel rather than a cooking pot, showing pottery served ritual as well as domestic purposes. Its lid, carved with two figures riding a boat toward the afterlife, is now one of the most reproduced images of pre-colonial Filipino art.

Tattooing and the Batok Tradition

Batok, from the word for “to strike,” describes the hand-tapped tattooing once practiced by warriors in Bontoc, Ifugao, and Kalinga communities. A tattooist uses a gisi, a thorn-tipped stick made from carabao horn, and taps it with a second stick called a pat-ik at 90 to 120 taps a minute.

Soot scraped from a clay pot supplies the black ink. Men earned tattoos for combat deeds among the Butbut people, while women received forearm and shoulder designs marking status or protection.

Whang-od Oggay of Buscalan, Kalinga, born in 1917, is the last mambabatok trained under that warrior-era system. She began tattooing at age eleven and later broke tradition again by training women, including her grandnieces, as apprentices rather than passing the craft only to men, which had never happened before in recorded Kalinga history.

Traditional designs still carry the old meanings even when the context has shifted. Fern and centipede motifs on a woman’s forearm once signaled skill at weaving or farming, while lin-lingao marks on the face protected pregnant and married women from harmful spirits.

In Buscalan today, the Butbut community distinguishes between batok proper and emben a whatok, newer decorative designs made for visitors that borrow old motifs without the original ritual weight. The distinction matters to elders even if most tourists never notice it.

Basketry

Cordillera groups, including the Ifugao, Kalinga, Bontoc, and Ibaloi, weave baskets from bamboo, rattan, and nito vine using plaiting, twining, and coiling. Three types show how form follows function:

• Gor-bun (Ifugao): a coiled rattan basket with a fitted lid, used to store rice from the terraces.
• Labba (Kalinga): a wide flat basket carried on the back.
• Bayong: a market bag of dried buri palm leaf, a reusable alternative to plastic in lowland markets.

Function still shapes the form of every piece. A rice basket needs a tight weave to keep out weevils, while a fish trap needs gaps wide enough for water to drain but narrow enough to hold the catch. Weavers choose fiber the same way:

• Rattan, for strength.
• Nito vine, for the fine dark strands used in decorative rims.
• Buri or pandan leaf, where flexibility matters more than rigidity.

None of these choices are written down. A weaver learns which plant works for which basket by handling material that an elder has already rejected or approved.

Folk Architecture

Folk architecture changes by region and material. In lowland Luzon and the Visayas, the bahay kubo uses bamboo, nipa thatch, and cogon grass, raised on stilts to handle flooding and to catch breezes underneath.

Maranao communities build the torogan, a royal house resting on log posts carved with okir panels, historically owned by a datu’s family. Some torogan posts stand more than a meter thick and were moved into place by dozens of villagers pulling in unison, without machinery.

In the far north, Ivatan houses in Batanes use thick limestone and coral walls with heavy cogon roofs designed to survive typhoon winds that cross the Luzon Strait. Further south, the Sama Dilaut and other Badjao communities build houses on stilts directly over shallow reef water.

Some families still live aboard the lepa, a houseboat that doubles as a permanent home rather than a vessel for travel alone. Each style solves a different climate problem using only local materials, which is why folk architecture varies more by region than almost any other domain here.

Music and Instruments

Traditional Filipino music runs on percussion. The kulintang, a row of small horizontal gongs, anchors ensembles among the Maguindanao, Maranao, and other Muslim Filipino groups in Mindanao. Our separate guide to the kulintang covers how the gongs are tuned and played.

GAMABA awardee Samaon Sulaiman of Maguindanao earned recognition for the kudyapi, a two-stringed boat lute plucked rather than strummed, with a body carved to resemble a crocodile or a naga figure. Two more GAMABA musicians, honored for other instruments and for gong music paired with dance, appear in the domain table further down this guide.

In the Cordillera, gongs called gangsa are played flat, struck with the palm or a stick depending on the region, and often accompany a communal dance rather than standing as a concert piece on their own.

Lowland Christianized areas kept a different musical thread alive through harana, a serenade tradition sung outside a woman’s window, and kundiman, the art song genre that carried love and, later, coded nationalist sentiment under American rule. These lowland forms sit outside the GAMABA framework because they blend indigenous and Spanish influences, but remain just as traditional to the communities that still sing them.

Dance

Philippine folk dance mirrors the geography that shaped it, with each region shaping its own signature dance:

• Tinikling (Leyte): imitates a bird stepping between bamboo poles.
• Singkil (Maranao courts): uses clashing bamboo frames to represent a princess crossing a forest during an earthquake.
• Pangalay (Sulu): danced with metal fingernail extensions, rooted in Hindu-Buddhist court dance that predates Islam’s arrival in the region.
• Bendian (Cordillera): a circular thanksgiving dance performed around gong players at festivals, rather than as separate entertainment.

That overlap between music and dance is why Alonzo Saclag’s GAMABA citation covers both practices together.

Sakinur-Ain Delasas, one of the artisans honored in the 2025 GAMABA class, earned recognition as a master of igal, the flowing hand and shoulder dance performed by the Sama people of Tawi-Tawi. Our full breakdown of traditional Filipino dances covers more regional variations, costume, and where each dance is still performed at fiestas.

Literary and Oral Arts

Before Spanish contact, Filipinos across the archipelago wrote using baybayin, a syllabic script now taught mostly as a cultural symbol rather than daily writing. Alongside script, oral literature carried law, genealogy, and belief through memory. Ginaw Bilog of Oriental Mindoro received the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan for preserving ambahan, seven-syllable rhymed verses the Hanunuo Mangyan carve into bamboo.

Epic chanters Masino Intaray and Federico Caballero earned the same honor for performing multi-hour sung epics from Palawan and Panay that record migration stories and moral codes without a single written copy.

These oral forms face the sharpest risk of loss among all ten domains, since a chanter’s death can end a tradition that was never transcribed. NCCA grants now fund audio and video recordings of remaining epic performances to prevent that loss. Federico Caballero’s sugidanon cycle from Panay alone runs across dozens of episodes, some requiring multiple nights to perform in full, and only a handful of people alive can still chant the complete sequence from memory.

Ten Domains, One Framework

These ten domains look unrelated on the surface, from woven cloth to chanted epics. The table below places a region, a key material, and a named example next to each one.

Craft Domain	Region or Group	Materials	Named Example
Weaving and Textiles	Ilocos Norte to Tawi-Tawi	Cotton, abaca, pandan	Gamayo, Dulay, Sawabi, Ausalin, Monon, Appi
Woodcarving	Cordillera, Ifugao	Narra wood	Bulul granary guardian
Metalwork	Lanao del Sur	Brass	Tugaya smiths (agong)
Pottery	Ilocos, Vigan	Glazed stoneware	Burnay ware
Tattooing	Kalinga, Butbut	Soot ink	Whang-od Oggay (batok)
Basketry	Cordillera, Ifugao and Kalinga	Bamboo, rattan, nito	Gor-bun rice basket
Folk Architecture	Batanes, Ivatan	Limestone, coral, cogon	Ivatan stone house
Music	Maguindanao, Basilan, Kalinga	Lute, xylophone, gongs	Sulaiman, Ahadas, Saclag
Dance	Tawi-Tawi, Sama	Hand and shoulder movement	Sakinur-Ain Delasas (igal)
Literary and Oral Arts	Oriental Mindoro, Hanunuo Mangyan	Bamboo, carved verse	Ginaw Bilog (ambahan)

The GAMABA program treats them as one system because each depends on the same thing: a master willing to teach an apprentice before the knowledge disappears. That is the real significant contribution of arts in the Philippine culture and tradition that the NCCA framework protects, not a single craft but the transmission chain itself.

Philippines traditional arts will keep changing as fewer young people learn a craft the old way, and as artists like Eduardo Mutuc and Whang-od pass their tools to the next generation on their own terms. Readers who want the fuller regional and historical picture behind these crafts can start with our History and Culture hub, which links out to the festivals, communities, and figures behind each tradition.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does an artist become a Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan awardee?

The NCCA’s National Committee on Cultural Communities and Traditional Arts screens nominees for mastery of an indigenous craft, a body of work tied to a specific community, and a track record of training apprentices. A technical committee and the NCCA Board of Commissioners review each nomination before the President formally confers the award.

What is the difference between traditional and non-traditional Filipino art?

The NCCA divides Philippine art into two branches. Traditional arts are skills passed down inside a specific community, such as weaving or epic chanting, learned without formal art school training. Non-traditional arts include painting, cinema, and other forms that arrived or were formalized after Spanish and American contact.

Is Whang-od the last practitioner of batok tattooing?

Whang-od is the last mambabatok trained under the old warrior-era system, when tattoos marked combat deeds. She broke tradition by training her grandnieces and other apprentices as tattooists, so the hand-tapping technique continues in Buscalan even though the original headhunting context ended decades ago.

Why is the bahay kubo considered Filipino folk architecture?

The bahay kubo is built from bamboo, nipa palm, and cogon grass using joinery instead of nails, and it stands on stilts to survive flooding and stay cool in the heat. Its form and materials came from community knowledge passed between builders rather than a trained architect, which is why the NCCA classifies it as folk architecture.

Works Cited

National Commission for Culture and the Arts. “Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan Guidelines.” NCCA, ncca.gov.ph, n.d., ncca.gov.ph/about-culture-and-arts/culture-profile/gamaba/national-living-treasures-guidelines/.

“Bulul and the Socio-Cultural Significance of Rice.” National Museum of the Philippines, National Museum of the Philippines, 30 Nov. 2022, www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/2022/11/30/bulul-and-the-socio-cultural-significance-of-rice/.

“Batok (Traditional Tattoos): A Revival Here and Elsewhere.” VERA Files, VERA Files, verafiles.org/articles/batok-traditional-tattoos-a-revival-here-and-elsewhere.

“National Living Treasure: What Else Does a GAMABA Recipient Get?” Philstar.com, PhilStar Global Corp., 10 May 2025, www.philstar.com/lifestyle/arts-and-culture/2025/05/10/2442006/national-living-treasure-what-else-does-gamaba-recipient-get.

“The Gong and the Kris: In Lanao, the Art of the Metalsmith Lives.” Philippine Daily Inquirer, Inquirer.net, lifestyle.inquirer.net/332100/the-gong-and-the-kris-in-lanao-the-art-of-the-metalsmith-lives/.