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PRESS
Spot.ph arts + culture
on the environment, magic, and politics of art residencies across regions
Portia placino
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Rethinking Indigeneity
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Connected to the conversation on climate and environment are the connections with indigenous culture. Aaron Kaiser Garcia, a performance artist, spent his residency at Emerging Islands in San Juan, La Union. His engagement with the environment extended to creating connections with artists and indigenous groups near La Union and the Cordilleras.
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As a Philippine High School of the Arts graduate, he trained in Filipino folk dances mostly invented by choreographers, rather than by the indigenous. Upon further exploration, he began contextualizing the idea of Philippine dance and opened himself up to the sound and movement of local communities.
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Dancing from the North and towards an Archipelago presents an installation, photographs, sound, and later a video and performance to express the unlearning and engagement process. Garcia does not claim authenticity but rather a shared process in exploring movements with the communities he connected with.
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Taking this further is his collaboration with Jao San Pedro, Kristone Capistrano. Joar Songcuya, Genavee Lazaro, JD Yu, and Wendell Garcia—artists of different mediums and translated the sound and gestures into photographic expressions and material remnants of the performance. During the residencies talk, he presented his video and performed, carrying the beats of his engagement to viewers.
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SPOT.PH ARTS+CULTURE
SNEAK PEEK: 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO SEE AT ART FAIR PHILIPPINES 2023
CHRISTA I. DE LA CRUZ
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Aaron Kaiser Garcia, a performance-maker with background in folk contemporary dance, explores the potential of the body in telling the stories of the people from the Cordilleras.
The exhibition at Art Fair Philippines shows photographs of his movement studies that aim to trace this journey that's rooted in the indigenous concept of Kalawakan and Kalibutan.
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CNN PHILIPPINES LIFE
SPOTLIGHT: THE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCY AND THEIR EXHIBITED PROJECTS AT ART FAIR PHILIPPINES 2023
JAMES TANA
A dance major graduate of the Philippine High School for the Arts in Los Baños in Laguna, performance-maker Aaron Kaiser Garcia embarks on a spiritual and experiential journey for his residency under Emerging Islands in La Uñion.
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Garcia is an alumnus of the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore. He trained in different traditional dances and performances such as Philippine Folk Dance, Odissi, Chhau, Kuttiyatam, Beijing Opera, Wayang Wong, and Noh Theatre.
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Opting to explore the idea of “archipelagic thinking” in relation to the island’s inhabitants, geography, and history, Garcia collaborated with fellow artists and creatives: Genavee Lazaro, Jao San Pedro, JD Yu, Joar Songcuya, Kristone Capistrano, and Wendell Garcia. The performed “collaborative rituals” as Garcia would call it, manifested in the form of ceramics, paintings, objects, sound, and photography which will be showcased in the exhibit.
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He says, “The process started by meeting and observing different indigenous communities in San Gabriel, La Union, and Baguio City, Benguet… I endeavored 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 seas.”
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According to Garcia, their collaboration “is an attempt to position dance and performance (as folk in my practice) as a starting point for the creation of a countermyth set in La Uñion.”
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photo courtesy: Jo Yanis aNTETOKOUNMPO
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Cristian Tablazon's Variations of the Field at Curatorial Development Workshop Exhibition, University of the Philippines Vargas Museum
Cristian Tablazon
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Aaron Kaiser Garcia with Komunidad X
Dakel Saday, The Unpublished Philippine Folk Dances of the Tasaday, Volume III
Single-channel video projection with sounds
Shot at the Makiling Botanic Gardens (MBG), this hybrid project of ethnochoreography builds on the Tasaday hoax of the Marcos regime and the many choreographic fabrications by dance scholars passed as ethnographic notation to be later canonized into our dance traditions. Garcia’s project commemorates and critically reimagines the controversial Tasaday people while doubling as a work of fabulation and counter document to problematic myths of authenticity and ‘nation’ and the role of cultural production in assisting state power. Through his work, he asks: “How much of the narratives in our history have been fabricated and false? How come the remains of a former dictator now lies in a graveyard reserved for heroes? What influence have artist-choreographers contributed to such insidious fictions and assisted the state machinery over the decades?
Nestled on the legendary mountain sacred to many locals and pilgrims, the MBG shares the same ecosystem that prompted the Marcos administration to situate the National Arts Center in Los Banos. The facility was formally established as a training laboratory for scientific and silvicultural studies for the purpose of supporting professional instruction and many local and international researchers. Its public launch and development as a tourist attraction and recreation site coincided with the promulgation of the Marcosian New Society and ran parallel to its “beautification” projects and governmental efforts “to articulate [our] decidedly Filipino identity” while being “world-class” at the same time, in their bid for national development. Other than serving as a picturesque backdrop for and welcome site of bonding and recreation of the ‘happy’ and ‘content’ Filipino family of the New Society, the MBG had been poised as source of pride in our indigenous natural wealth. The instatement of the national botanic garden and the curation of local natural environment and endemic life forms conveniently fit the authoritarian scheme to fabricate the so-called deep structures. Garcia rigorously wields choreography and dance as a tool of critical discourse, interrogating discourses and fantasies of authenticity and nativism against the dense histories of the MBG and its ecology and wilderness that are both natural and fabricated at once.
CNN Philippines Life: 2018 in Philippine Art
Cristian Tablazon
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Initially produced as a senior thesis at the Philippine High School for the Arts staged in March at the National Arts Center this year, “Dakel Saday” debuted as a solo performance in Baler, Aurora as part of the one-day group exhibition “Littoral Drifts.” Performance artist, dancer, and choreographer Aaron Kaiser Garcia’s hybrid project of ethnochoreography builds on the Tasaday hoax of the Marcos regime and the many choreographic fabrications by dance scholars passed as ethnographic notation to be later canonized into our dance traditions. Garcia’s project commemorates and critically reimagines the controversial Tasaday people while doubling as a work of fabulation and counterdocument to problematize myths of authenticity and ‘nation’ and the role of cultural production in assisting state power.
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Through this work, he asks: “How much of the narratives in our history have been fabricated and false? How come the remains of a former dictator now lies in a graveyard reserved for heroes? What influence have artist-choreographers contributed to such insidious fictions and assisted the state machinery over the decades?” Rarely does one encounter a rigorous project that wields choreography and dance as tools of critical discourse, not to mention the commanding intelligence of Garcia’s body and the utter sorcery of his movements as he blazed the ground barefoot.
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https://www.cnnphilippines.com/life/culture/arts/2018/12/31/art-2018.html