What the GAMABA microphone taught me about culture

I will not hide the fact that I was nervous before I stepped up to the microphone on October 6, 2026. I have hosted programs before, spoken in front of audiences, taught classes, facilitated discussions, and participated in many conversations about culture, language, and the arts. But there was a different kind of nervousness this time. It was my first time emceeing a Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) press conference, and I knew that I was not simply hosting another institutional event. I was standing in a room where the subject was the lives and work of people who had spent decades carrying traditions that existed long before we learned to call them “cultural heritage.”

I was excited that the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) had chosen me to host the Visayas leg of the GAMABA call for nominations, but I was also conscious of the responsibility. The microphone in my hand suddenly felt heavier than usual because the people being introduced were not simply speakers or guests. They were cultural bearers whose knowledge, practices, memories, and traditions formed part of the living inheritance of our communities.

Before the program began at the Pagwa Performing Arts Hall of the University of the Philippines Visayas, I went through the program flow several times in my head. I checked the names of the speakers, the sequence of activities, the transitions, and the details I needed to remember as an emcee. But more than anything, I was thinking about the kind of room I was about to enter. There were representatives from the NCCA, members of the GAMABA Executive Council, academics, media practitioners, representatives from local and national government agencies, and, most importantly, GAMABA awardees themselves. At an ordinary event, the work of an emcee might seem straightforward. Introduce the speakers, move the program along, watch the time, keep the audience engaged, and make sure everything runs smoothly. But that morning, I became increasingly aware that there was something more at stake.

How do you introduce someone whose knowledge comes from a tradition older than the institutions now recognizing it? How do you introduce a cultural bearer without reducing a lifetime of practice to a title, a citation, or an award?

That was what made the invitation meaningful to me. I was genuinely happy to have been chosen to host, not simply because I enjoy being onstage, but also because I have long followed the work of the NCCA and participated in conversations and projects involving language, literature, publishing, education, and regional culture. As a teacher and cultural worker in Western Visayas, I have seen how many stories, traditions, languages, artistic practices, and forms of knowledge remain deeply alive in our communities but do not always reach the spaces we call “national.” There are people who have spent their entire lives practicing, teaching, remembering, and transmitting knowledge without ever appearing in the cultural narratives we usually encounter in textbooks, conferences, museums, or mainstream media. So when I was asked to become part of a press conference calling on institutions and communities to identify traditional artists who might be nominated for GAMABA, I felt that I was being invited not merely to host a program but also to participate in a larger act of looking. We were being asked to look more carefully at our own communities and ask who among them had been carrying knowledge that deserved to be recognized, documented, supported, and passed on.

The experience became even more personal because I had already met some GAMABA awardees in Lake Sebu. Before meeting them, I understood GAMABA partly as an institutional recognition, a national award, and a familiar term in conversations about Philippine cultural heritage. But meeting the awardees in person changes the way you understand the award. A name on a list becomes a person. A cultural tradition becomes a face and a voice. A concept discussed in academic papers becomes someone sitting beside you, talking, laughing, remembering, and continuing to live with the responsibility of carrying knowledge entrusted to them by previous generations. They are no longer simply “National Living Treasures.” They are people with their own histories, communities, struggles, memories, and responsibilities. That realization stayed with me as I stood onstage in Iloilo. Every name I introduced represented more than an individual. Behind every name was a community, and behind every tradition was a long history of transmission.

This was also where I began to see a contradiction in the way we often talk about cultural heritage. When we discuss GAMABA, it is easy to become celebratory. We say that traditional artists are important. We say that Philippine culture is rich. We say that our traditions must be preserved and that our cultural bearers deserve recognition. All these things are true. But once we remove the ceremony, the stage, the photographs, the certificates, and the applause, more difficult questions remain. What was life like for a cultural bearer before anyone recognized them? Who supported their practice when there was no national award attached to their name? Are there young people in their communities who are willing and able to learn from them? Are there spaces where their traditions can continue to be practiced? What happens when the younger generation no longer sees value in inheriting the knowledge of their elders? And after we call someone a National Living Treasure, what are we actually doing to ensure that the knowledge they carry does not disappear with them?

These questions reminded me that recognition matters, but recognition cannot be the end of the conversation. We can honor a cultural bearer while failing to protect the ecosystem in which that culture survives. We can celebrate an artist as part of the national story while overlooking the community from which that knowledge comes. We can invoke a cultural bearer’s name to demonstrate the richness of Philippine culture while doing too little to ensure that another generation will have the opportunity to learn from them. This is where cultural preservation becomes more complicated than identifying who deserves an award. It becomes a question of what kind of society we are willing to build around the people whose traditions we proudly claim as part of our national identity.

The statement of UP Visayas Chancellor Clement Camposano stayed with me, particularly his emphasis on creating space for the authentic voices of communities rather than allowing the conversation to be dominated solely by academic voices. As someone who is also part of the academic community, I took this not simply as a beautiful line in a welcome message but as a challenge. Academics, researchers, cultural workers, government agencies, journalists, and institutions all have important roles to play in documenting, interpreting, teaching, and protecting cultural heritage. But there is always a danger when the people who study culture become the people who speak most loudly about it. We can become so accustomed to interpreting other communities that we forget to ask whether the people from those communities are being given enough space to interpret themselves.

That question is uncomfortable because I know that I am also part of this system. I write about culture. I teach. I participate in cultural programs. I work with communities and institutions. I use words such as heritage, tradition, identity, preservation, and representation. So I cannot simply point to government agencies, universities, or cultural institutions and say that the problem belongs to them. I have to ask myself the same questions. When I write about a community, am I actually listening to its people, or am I simply using their experiences to strengthen my own argument? When I organize a cultural program, am I creating space for communities to speak in their own voices, or am I simply placing them inside a program that institutions have already designed for them? When I describe someone as a cultural bearer, am I recognizing their agency, or am I turning them into a symbol that makes my own cultural narrative more impressive?

This is one reason the GAMABA call for nominations is so important. It is not simply a search for another name to add to a national list. It is also an invitation to look beyond the people we already know. The Visayas has enormous cultural wealth, much of it existing far from the centers where national cultural narratives are produced. Federico Caballero of Calinog, Iloilo, an epic chanter and traditional arbiter who received the GAMABA award in 2000, remains an important reminder that extraordinary cultural knowledge exists within communities often treated as peripheral to the national imagination. If the NCCA is once again asking the country to identify traditional artists deserving of national recognition, then the more important task is not simply to find one person worthy of an award. It is to recognize how many people may still be carrying extraordinary knowledge without anyone having looked closely enough to see them.

This is why regional cultural work matters. When we talk about Philippine culture, we often unconsciously imagine culture as something produced in major institutions and then distributed to the regions. But culture does not always move from the center outward. Much of Philippine culture has always existed in communities before institutions learned how to name it, document it, study it, or celebrate it. The songs, stories, rituals, crafts, languages, performances, food traditions, oral histories, and systems of knowledge found in our regions are not footnotes to the national culture. They are part of what makes the national culture possible in the first place. The challenge is to create institutions that do not simply extract these traditions from communities and bring them to national audiences, but also return resources, visibility, opportunities, and agency to the communities themselves.

As I stood there as an emcee, I also began thinking about the microphone itself as a symbol of power. Whoever holds the microphone has the ability to direct attention. The person holding it decides who is introduced, when someone speaks, how someone is described, and what the audience is asked to listen to. At an ordinary program, these may seem like technical details. At a cultural event, they become questions of representation. Who gets the microphone? Who is given the longest time to speak? Who is introduced as an expert? Who is treated as the subject of knowledge? Who is recognized as a producer of knowledge? Who is photographed and quoted afterward? And who quietly returns home after the event without ever being asked what they think about the cultural systems that claim to represent them?

I did not think about all these questions every second while I was hosting. There were moments when I was simply trying to pronounce names correctly, follow the program, manage transitions, keep track of time, and make sure the event moved smoothly. I was nervous because I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to honor the trust placed in me by the NCCA and UP Visayas. But after the program, when the room became quieter and the formalities were over, I began to understand more deeply why the experience had affected me. I was reminded that cultural heritage is not an abstract concept. It has faces. It has voices. It has bodies. It has communities. It has people who grow old, people who teach, people who forget, people who struggle, and people who continue to carry knowledge even when the rest of society has already moved on.

That may be the most important lesson I took from my first experience emceeing a GAMABA press conference. It was not really a lesson about hosting. It was not about learning how to sound confident onstage, introduce important people, manage a program, or speak before an audience of academics, government officials, media practitioners, and cultural workers. It was a lesson about listening. I may have been the person holding the microphone, but that did not make my voice the most important voice in the room. My responsibility was to help create a space where the people whose lives and knowledge were at the center of the conversation could be heard with dignity and attention.

I left the program proud to have been part of it, but also more conscious of the responsibility that comes with speaking about culture. I was grateful for the opportunity, especially because I knew how much the NCCA’s work mattered to the communities and traditions it sought to recognize. Yet I also left with questions that I hope we will continue asking. If we truly value cultural heritage, are we willing to support the people who carry it when there is no ceremony? If we call someone a National Living Treasure, are we prepared to invest in the community that helped make that knowledge possible? If we say that we want authentic community voices, are we willing to step back when necessary and allow those voices to speak without interpreting them on their behalf?

My first GAMABA hosting experience taught me that cultural preservation is not simply about keeping something from disappearing. It is about creating the conditions in which something can continue to live. It is about transmission rather than mere documentation, participation rather than mere representation, and partnership rather than speaking on behalf of others. It is about recognizing that a tradition cannot survive simply because we have placed it in an archive or honored its most visible practitioner. It survives because someone continues to practice it, someone continues to teach it, someone continues to value it, and someone younger is given the opportunity to inherit it.

So yes, I was excited. I was nervous. I was honored to have been chosen to emcee the GAMABA Visayas press conference. But more than anything, I am grateful for what the experience made me think about. I entered the room worried about whether I would be a good host. I left thinking about something much larger than hosting. I left wondering whether we are really listening when we say that we want to preserve culture and whether we are prepared to recognize that the people who carry our traditions should not merely be invited to our stages. They should have a voice in deciding what happens on those stages, what happens to their traditions, and what happens to the communities that will inherit them.

That is the strange lesson of holding a microphone at a cultural event. Sometimes, the most important thing you can do with a microphone is not to make your own voice louder. It is to make sure that the people who have been carrying the culture long before you arrived are finally heard.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.