Chula Palang – Isan Music & Dance Show | Culture

Hello one more time and welcome! I hope you’re having a wonderful time. I certainly am while just recently participating in a very special event for me here in Thailand.

If you’ve followed along my blogs from the begging you’ve already heard about the not very common story of how I came across this club (if you haven’t you can read it out here). Well, ever since then I attended to as many practices as possible the afternoons I had free to be able to learn to dance and sing different Thai songs.

The club that I’ve joined in specific is an Isan Club which is a specific region of Thailand with their own specific costumes and traditions. To give you an overall idea here’s some information about Isan:

“(…) consists of 20 provinces in the northeastern region of Thailand. Isan is Thailand’s largest region, located on the Khorat Plateau, bordered by the Mekong River to the north and east, by Cambodia to the southeast and the Sankamphaeng Range south of Nakhon Ratchasima.

The history of Isan (อีสาน) has been determined by its geography, situated as it is on the Korat Plateau between Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.

The national government claimed that the name “Isan” was derived from Sanskrit Īśāna, a name of Shiva they claimed referred to his rule of the northeast (Sanskrit īśānya). This interpretation was intended to reinforce Isan’s identity as the northeast of Thailand, rather than as part of the Lao kingdom because of the fear of the Lao people seceding.

This because actually in the past, Isan region used to be part of Laos but was then claimed by Thailand.

The Thai king Vajiravudh reinvoked the ancient name, designating the northeast sector of the Rattanakosin Kingdom “Isan”. Previously, in the reign of Chulalongkorn in early 20th century, the sector was generally called Hua Mueang Lao (Lao Townships หัวเมืองลาว) for the area north of Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat) and Khamen Pa Dong (Wilderness Khmer, เขมรป่าดง) for the townships to the east. Later, the term Isan came into wide, if unofficial, use as a term for the northeastern region, and khon Isan (Isan people, คนอีสาน) as a general term for the peoples of Isan.”

This Palang is the biggest event for Isan Club of the year. They’ve been gathering around and preparing for months. I came across them in the middle of one of their practices and started attending every time I could.

The practices always consisted on arriving, getting the instruments, speakers and other tools ready as well as the cooking (yes, the cooking!). Then practicing a little bit just before eating dinner and having a wonderful connivance.

I learned around five different dances and the overall basic dance moves for traditional isan thai dance like the “yip” (a hand position which represents a flower and its very commonly used while doing other dance movements around different choreographies).

 

When the time of the event came tho, I just participated in three dances but two of them where the entrance and ending where everybody participate anyways and the third one where I was holding an offering to the gods along with the bigger offering in the dance called Bai Sri (a huge floral craft ornament made by some of Chula’s student and artists).

  

Here’s some pictures of the first outfit we got and the only one we could take proper pictures of because of the light and the time we had before the show started.

Aside from the dancing experience, I was able to learn and sing a traditional thai song, “Lamduan Sisaket”, from Sisaket province. I sang with a thai friend from the club and we actually didn’t have much time to prepare as we were not sure throughout the practices if we were going to sing or not.

At the end on last week the group decided we were indeed going to be singing so we just have a few days to prepare and for me a few days to learn the full song as good and properly as I could just by hearing and writing the sounds I heard in alphabet letters.

I didn’t got a lot of pictures myself but I’m so grateful I was able to do this and even if it was nothing cultural involved I think the gathering itself with these wonderful people was a mesmerizing experiences.

John and I were the first foreigners ever to join the club and I don’t want to sound special or anything but I don’t think its that common in general for foreigners to be interested and involve in these type of clubs.

When I was at my own school in mexico greeting foreign exchange students, I noticed even if I put any effort to show them a little bit of our culture as I used to be a guide at the Mexican History Museum and had training and a lot of information about Monterrey and overall Mexican culture, not many were interested.

For this I could guess we might even be if not the first, one of the first foreigners to join a club like this in Chula ever.

I ended up knowing a little peak of thai traditional dance, music and crafts in general. I dance and sang a song in the Palang and I met a lot of amazing people. This is an experience that not everybody is able to have and I’m super grateful for it.

Thank you so much to stay with me and see you all soon in an upcoming post!