“The story is older than my body, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. For years we have been passing it on so that it may live, shift, and circulate. So that it may become larger than its proper measure, always larger than its own in-significance.” - Trinh T. Minh-ha
'bumalik,' the Tagalog word for 'return,’ is a performance installation series of dynamic bamboo that centers the profound power of imagined memories as the gateway to returning home. The co-creators share that the work, revolving around the sculpture ‘sirkulo,' "... re-imagines the relationship between the brown Asian body and environment as sites of trauma, reorientation, then liberating transmutation. Our transformation of ‘sirkulo’ explores the disorientation and reorientation of the peripheral Filipina, shaped by geographical migrant stories of our mothers and our psychological migrations out of and into ourselves."
Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina-American dance/vocal performer, choreographer, director, writer and educator. She is interested in collaborative Filipinx-American diasporic identity work within spaces of memory, fascia and time, igniting 'kapwa' (Tagalog for “shared one-ness”). Her work to re-root the small, brown body through movement/vocal forms juxtaposes patrionormative white-dominated spaces. She is Bessie-awarded for choreographic contributions to Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, 2024 Target Margin Theatre Institute Fellow, 2023 Gallim Moving Artist Resident, and 2022 Jadin Wong Fellow. Recent features include film in Taikang Space (Beijing), MASS MoCA, TOPAZ Arts, and press in The New York Times and Fjord Review.
The performance will utilize designs created alongside Almasphere. Almasphere creates atmospheres through large-scale sculpture and installation, inviting individuals to commune with inner worlds, ritualize with community, and embark with the cosmos. Sabrina Herbosa Reyes, Filipina-American architect, sculptor and movement artist, draws from Filipinx cosmology and memory to conjure extensions of environments into and out of bodies. Antonio Giovanni Rivera, the son of a Puerto Rican, ignites architectural experiences as modes of universal language. Their cross-cultural collaboration encourages the exploration of building spaces that evoke intuition and curiosity. Their work was shown in Mexico City, Brooklyn and Queens.
Paspe, Reyes and Rivera come together to build highly imaginative environments that transform and ignite each discipline into transcendence and potentiality. Sculpture and architecture imprint on the skin of those moving and making sound, cyclically impacting the skin of their diasporic landscapes.
Click here to watch a trailer of bumalik!
Performances take place December 8th and 9th at 8:00pm. Advance sale tickets are $20 online purchased here. Tickets purchased at door will be $25 cash or card."