The field work for this study was conducted in Pingtung County, Taiwan over a five-month period in 1976 from February to July. The Paiwan tribe is one of the nine existing tribes in Taiwan; most of these people live in Pingtung County in the south (Fig. 1). Of the 300,000 Taiwan aborigines on the island today, approximately 45,000 are Paiwan. The methods employed in the collection of the data were: 1) observing and recording dances roughly in Labanotation, 2) participating in dancing, 3) filming dances, and 4) interviewing informants. Dances were observed in two ways – in their actual context, or especially elicited. Those elicited included some which are still performed today but were demonstrated for me by request apart from their natural context, and some which are no longer performed but were recalled by my informants. After my return from the field, Labanotation was refined and checked against films, and the raw data was then categorized and analysed. The purpose of the categorization was to identify the characteristics of Paiwan dances based on the data collected.

A total of 62 dances were witnessed in 12 villages of the 8 townships visited. Not all dance types were observed in each village (Figure 2). Some informants remember and can reconstruct more than others, so that data collected in each village may not necessarily represent the entire village repertoire of the present or the recent past. In many cases, the same movements were executed in dances of the same or different dance types. It is the associated song and song text rather than the movements that differentiates the dances.