Tradition Makes the New: Practitioner Knowledge and the Making of Creative Igal

Abstract

This study examines how experienced Bajau dance experts draw on culturally acquired knowledge when producing and evaluating deliberate creative Igal performance. Igal is practised among Sama-Bajau communities in the Sulu-Sulawesi region, with this study focusing on Semporna, Sabah. Seven transcript files representing four practitioners are re-analysed within an ethnographic archive built through fieldwork in 2007-2011 and follow-up practitioner research in 2015. Across the accounts, participation, mobilisation, transformation, and evaluation recur as connected moments in creative practice. Ros's encounter with the festival category kreasi (creative work) shows that practical creative competence may precede familiarity with an institutional vocabulary of creativity. Johan's compositional practice brings movement, musical repertoire, childhood memory, narrative, wedding practice, material culture, and professional artistic knowledge into new relationships as performance problems change. Ros, Johan, Haji Zainal, and Hajah Intan also describe judgement through culturally learnt relations among movement quality, musical response, style, adat (customary conventions), and rasa (felt practical judgement). Knowledgeable transformation names cases in which prior knowledge can be traced directly into creative decisions, while practised recognisability describes the culturally learnt and socially situated practice of judging whether transformed work still reads as Igal. Festival classification makes such expertise public by giving creative work categories, stages, audiences, and consequences. The expert accounts also show that institutional categories do not replace practitioner judgement. Festivals expose creative decisions to comparison, but movement-musical relationships, repertorial distinctions, customary expectations, and accumulated teaching experience remain central to how new work is made persuasive. In Semporna, tradition becomes creative knowledge through practitioners who draw on histories of participation to select, reorganise, and judge cultural resources in new artistic conditions.