The Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Studio 34 present:
SPECIAL TOPICS
by AniMalayaWorks (Philadelphia)
Saturday, September 14
2 shows:
6:00pm
8:00pm
Note: This is a “drop-in” event! Audience members can come and go anytime within the 2-hour time period. The whole show repeats twice on a 60-minute cycle.
About the show:
Special Topics is a multimodal production, a moving dance theater, telling stories of connection between Filipino and Puerto Rican cultures. This is a robust response to inequities upheld by art institutions that limit our stories within binary definitions. It’s a journey that will not just transport you but inspire and excite you on an ancestral autoethnographic journey through time and space, inviting you to be part of the collective sharing.
In the inclusive space of Studio 34 in West Philadelphia, a space that has provided somatic practices through yoga, West African drumming, bodywork, and more, AniMalayaWorks, a dance collective centered on community and social justice, will share a transformative world through film, poetry, dance, drums, and chants. Filipino and Puerto Rican descent performance makers will offer their autoethnographic stories, telling their personal relationship to colonization, the military, migration, and indoctrination. The audience will be taken on a journey, encouraged to explore from one room to another, and end the experience with an offering to process through journaling or a DANCE & DRUM cypher SESH. Pick your portal of healing.
Special Topics is part of a larger project, PRIMX (supported by MAPfund 2022). This inspiring project is a joint effort between Ani/MalayaWorks (a mother-daughter dance company that has now expanded into a global south-centered dance collective) and Puerto Rican-Dominican dance artist Marcel Santiago Marcelino, with the unwavering support of his cultural bearer father, Jorge Santiago Arce.
Through the powerful modes of Bomba, Philippine Folk Dances, Kali, and Kokobale, they weave together stories of colonialism, resistance, migration, and collective healing, taking the audience on an emotional journey of connection and understanding.
About the artist:
Ani/Malayaworks is a collaboration between Filipinx mother-daughter multidisciplinary artists Anito Gavino and Malaya Ulan. Together, they actively create multimodal artistic reclamations focusing on community/ Kapwa as the center of their practice. They use film, dance, and poetry as modalities to activate an anti-colonial storytelling, using art as a portal to ancestral land, spirit, lost histories, and community. In recent years, this mother-daughter duo familial practice has expanded to a collective of artists of first to second generation immigrants of the global south processing and healing together through collaboration and collective resistance.
About Philly Fringe:
The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, presented by FringeArts, is an annual citywide celebration of innovation and creativity in contemporary performance. Each September, the Festival explodes into every nook and cranny of Philadelphia with more than 1,000 artistically daring performances and events by local, national, and international artists.