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