Babaylan Sing Back depicts the embodied voices of Native Philippine ritual specialists popularly known as babaylan. These ritual specialists are widely believed to have perished during colonial times, or to survive on the margins in the present-day. They are either persecuted as witches and purveyors of superstition, or valorized as symbols of gender equality and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, Grace Nono's deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th year anniversary of the contact between the people of the Philippine Islands and the European colonizers.

“I know of no other work that succeeds beautifully in weaving together a history of the development of Filipino folk dance over the twentieth century, an outsider’s insider’s account of one of the top two folk dance companies in the Philippines, and a sensitive, wide-ranging reflection on how a ‘foreign’ (in this case, Japanese) dancer learns to become Filipino in bodily movement and sensibility.” — From the Foreword by Reynaldo C. Ileto