Aaron Kaiser garcia
Aaron Kaiser Garcia (b. 1998, Philippines) is a performance-maker and an alumnus of the Intercultural Theatre Institute (Singapore) and the Dance Program (Folk Dance) at the Philippine High School for the Arts, with a background in folk, contemporary dance, and theater. He is trained in Philippine Folk Dance, Odissi, Chhau, and has immersed in different traditional forms like Kuttiyatam, Beijing Opera, Wayang Wong, and Noh Theatre.
Aaron’s work currently explores the potentiality of the body to process and reveal the layered landscapes of the Filipino socio-political psyche, or even actively counter political revisionism via choreography. Trained in the folk dance tradition, he now seeks to interrogate the term’s implication in state mechanisms of violence and erasure by invoking the true spirit of folk as a mutable and mutualistic practice.
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🔗 SINGLE PAGE BIO & CV
🔗 INSTAGRAM
SELECTED WORKS
HOW DO WE WALK TOGETHER, SEPARATELY
(EXPERIENCE NO.1)
How Do We Walk Together, Separately (Experience No. 1) is an inquiry to investigate the question around the notion of folk and mobility through the lens of walking especially through the experience of various people & nationalities. In this iteration, this takes place in a multiple channeled video and sound installation.
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Produced: Invisible Dance: The Body in Friction
Ahmedabad, India
Mandeep Raikhy & Garasi Performance Institute
Goethe-Institut Jakarta & New Dehli
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DANCING FROM THE NORTH AND TOWARDS
AN ARCHIPELAGO
Dancing from the North and Towards an Archipelago is an attempt to position dance and performance (as folk in my practice) as a starting point for the creation of a counter myth set in La Union. Several artifact were produced in collaboration with collaborators (ceramics, painting, objects, sound, and photography), and all were prompted by his movement, as a choreographic portal for these artists to experiment with me in mythmaking.
Together with Emerging Islands, the process started by meeting and observing different indigenous communities in San Gabriel, La Union, and Baguio City, Benguet. We approached the journey through the lens of Deep Time, the same indigenous concept of geological time involved in local conceptions of Kalawakan/ Kalibutan. By stretching the imagination across a longer epoch, I endeavoured to cast a larger web of belonging and solidarity with peoples and ecologies, to tell a more empathic story that included rather than separated, the vast ecological realities of a surf town sandwiched between the mountains and the sees.
To give birth of a new myth, six Filipino artists answered my call for collaborative rituals: Genavee Lazaro, who works mostly in ceramics, Jao San Pedro, an artist working on the intersection of the body and its performativities, JD Yu, a potter and photographer, Joar Songcuya, a former seafarer and a self-taught painter, Kristone Capistrano, a Philippine-born artist working and in Australia across an expanded field of drawing and portraiture, and Wendell Garcia, a musician, producer, composer, and musical director.
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Aaron Kaiser Garcia
February 2023
Makati City, Philippines
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🔗 On the Environment, Magic, and Politics of Art Residencies Across Regions by Portia Placino
transmutation
Site-specific Installation. Illustration, Sound, & Video. 2023.
Produced by Jao San Pedro In collaboration with Kristone Capistrano (AU) & Aaron Kaiser Garcia (PH).
Exhibited at the Emerging Islands Residence, San Juan, La Union
The work is a catalog of multimedia transcriptions of a moment - a moment of body and gesture responding to a series of prompts (parameters, sound, atmosphere). Its framework explores transition, transference, and loss in dis/embodying as a mode of auto/regeneration.
Expo-Yarn?
Online Performance (Dance).
2022.
Tokyo Festival Farm
Asian Performing Arts Camp
Open Sharing Presentation
Performance exploration exhibiting the manifestations of expositions of the body as an evidence-based research project by mapping different Philippine ethnolinguistic groups that are exploited in expositions, and reimagining/recreating the performances and the exploitations of the Filipino body as represented by my own vessel as an artist. Tracing the expositions of the Filipino body throughout history will unveil how the exploitation of the body is manifested in several ways such as:
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How it affected the contemporary Filipino body and how it maneuvers through different political bodies.
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How colonization led to several violations of the Filipino body;
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And how these violations, conducted through oppressive systems, distorted our national perception of the Filipino Dances
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🔗 Asian Performing Arts Camp Open Sharing Session Brochure
🔗 Asian Performing Arts Camp Intermediate Session (September 2)
Dancing at gunpoint
Performance (Theatre)
Intercultural Theatre Institute
2021
This is not a political story. It’s a simple one.
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Inspired by real events around the world, Dancing at Gunpoint breaks down these questions: how do we unpack systemic oppressions? What if the conditions of your time take away your rights to live? What are the repercussions in advocating a culture of violence? What does justice look like, in a land where innocence and guilt and criminality and legality are intertwined and compromised beyond recognition?
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Direction and Performance: Aaron Kaiser Garcia
Production and Stage Manager: Clarisse Ng
Photos: Intercultural Theatre Institute
Filming: Pangolin Films
DAKEL SADAY: THE UNPUBLISHED PHILIPPINE FOLK DANCES OF THE TASADAY
Performance (Dance)
University of the Philippines Vargas Museum 2019
Solidarity In Performance Art Festival 2018
Littoral Drifts 2018
National Arts Center 2017-2018
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Artists have the ability to take part in creating new stories, hence, new cultures and our new history. The conflict, however, lies in how we use that ability—whether in presenting truths or manipulating them. It is the very same ability, which we may use to create our identity and culture as Filipinos, that dancers and choreographers during the Martial Law used, for example, in introducing the Sayaw sa Banga as an “authentic folk dance”, when in fact it was simply a choreography inspired by people carrying bangas at hagdan-hagdang palayans. It is indeed unimaginable for the Cordillerans to dance while carrying these objects. The mass was just convinced that the dance was authentic. The Singkil is also a choreography that was foreign to the Maranaos until an artist constructed it and brought it to their community, leaving the dance for them to claim.
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Historical constructivism. The time of the Martial Law was deemed as the age of exploration or construction of the “Filipino Identity” and its supremeness. It was also the time when the discovery of the Stone Age group, the Tasaday, in Mindanao surfaced. The whole world gushed about this newfound treasure. After ten years, the age of existence of the Tasaday was proven wrong and the truth about them having been payed to bare their skins and act like members of a stone-aged community, innocent of the civilization beyond the confines of theirs. The Tasadays were just figments of imaginative minds, and the group who portrayed them was, undeniably, used as objects, and for what? For establishing an identity and its greatness or for the attention of the world to be diverted from the countless cases of abuse and disorder during the Martial Law?
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During the past year, we’ve heard a lot and too much of Fake News, which the inventors of the Tasaday seemed to be experts at. How much of the stories in our history were fabricated and false? How come the remains of a former dictator now lies in a graveyard reserved for heroes? What influence did artist-choreographers contribute in such fallacies?
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I choose to reveal the untrue, the just, and our capability as artists to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct—the use of anthropology as a way to create movements to move the audience.
-Mt. Makiling, 2018
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31 modules project: folk dance of peace
Performance Research (Dance)
Culture as creative construct.
Folk as contemporary.
Creative contemporary folk dance.
Devising new/folk dance of peace
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The 31 Modules Project is an initiative of Sipat Lawin Inc’s KomunidadX ; we aim to create 31 modules/ toolkits/ notations/ instructions on how to create 31 devised performances. 31 Modules Project is supported by Arts Network Asia and Davis Peace Prize Network.
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Collaboration: Komunidad X, Aaron Kaiser Garcia, Husnie Malik, Hash Magarang, Roger Federico, King Velasquez
