Performance Ecologies

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Philippinen, in collaboration with Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Linangan Art Residency, and Orange Project, Performance Ecologies – a Filipino performance platform - presents a series of multi-phase workshops for 10 participants from across the Philippines.

About the Project

Performance Ecologies is an innovative initiative designed to support Filipino artists working in performance art, dance, and theater. It offers a dynamic space for participants to develop, test, and present their creative work to a diverse and engaged audience. With a focus on fostering artistic experimentation and dialogue, the project encourages works that challenge traditional formats, explore new ways of engaging audiences, and address contemporary social, cultural, and political issues.

The platform is structured around two intensive workshops:

the first will take place from February 26 to March 2, 2025, at the Linangan Art Residency in Alfonso, Cavite, while
the second will be held from June 12 to 16, 2025, at the Orange Project in Bacolod’s Art District.

Together, these workshops create opportunities for deep engagement with vital themes such as the connections to land and nature, exploring how physical, cultural, and emotional landscapes shape identity, belonging, and collective memory. Participants will also delve into the dynamics of community and care, examining how relationships are sustained and repaired through interdependence, mutual aid, and environmental stewardship.

The project invites reflections on colonial and decolonial perspectives, encouraging artists to investigate the impact of colonial histories on contemporary identities and cultural practices, while exploring the transformative potential of decolonial movements. Themes of memory and voice are also central, focusing on how storytelling and ancestral knowledge preserve histories, especially those marginalized or erased. Additionally, the program addresses the influence of invisible forces and gendered histories, shedding light on the often-overlooked roles of women and other marginalized voices in shaping cultural movements and resistance narratives.

Work-in-progress Showings

in Bacolod

Experience work-in-progress performances by participants of the Performance Ecologies workshop at Orange Projects, featuring daily showcases and a special June 12 performance by facilitator Eisa Jocson.

Performance Ecologies: Work-in-progress Showings © Goethe-Institut Philippinen © Goethe-Institut Philippinen

Gallery

Meet the Artists

Sasa Cabalquinto's artistic practice aims to deepen the politics of the body toward personal and collective healing while acknowledging cultural and sociopolitical identities through ancestral remembering, indigenous ritual practices, and decolonial embodiment in the lens of Butoh movement.
Cadag is an artist creating at the nexus between craftwork, performance, and community work; within the tensions and transitions between theatre, as well as installation; and through the voice as a fundamental site of creative resistance and poetic reexistence. Her practice is anchored in indigenous gender diversity and contemporary gender equality and shared through a trans approach to healing and song alongside which she nurtures a decolonial composure toward folklore and tradition.
Bjork Colao is a storyteller and cultural worker engaged in ongoing research on Mindanao’s culture and heritage, as manifested in daily performativity, tradition, shared language, natural and communal ecologies, and archipelagic imagination. As an artist working across dance, film, writing, community documentation, and art activation, she explores the role of art and culture in community building, spirituality, and contemporary forms of symbiosis.
Alvin William Collantes (b. 1989, New Jersey) is a Queer Filipino performance artist based in Berlin (Germany). Their interdisciplinary body-centered practice merges improvisation, contemporary dance, decolonial perspectives, the art of drag, and queer dance floor histories as both archival and embodied sites for resistance and transformation. Through movement and performance, Alvin explores migration, displacement, and the diasporic struggles of loss, memory, and belonging while imagining new possibilities for queer-centred worlds. They are a participant of the Performance Ecologies Residency hosted by the Goethe-Institute Philippines under the curation of Eisa Jocson and Franchesca Casauay, where they continue to deepen their artistic research. Alvin often has premiered works in Futurium Berlin and collaborate with artists such as Kiani Del Valle of KDV Performance Group; Leeroy New, RambaZamba Theatre and Alvin Tolentino of Company Erasga Vancouver, and recently exhibited at Schwules Museum in Berlin for "Young Birds from Strange Mountains." In 2026, Alvin will be premiering their solo work titled "Bibingka" at Tanztage Berlin in Sophiensaele.
Jenny Logico-Cruz is a performance-maker, teacher, and cultural worker interested in challenging the process, boundaries, and expectations of performance, as well as exploring novel frameworks and methods of engaging with the audience while tackling significant contemporary issues that intersect the personal, social, cultural, and political. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Langgam Performance Troupe, a Manila-based contemporary performance company focusing on experimental, process-based, and practice-as-research works.
Magenta is a performance artist incorporating dance, painting, craft, and electronic music into his works. With a diverse range of influences such as experimental queer club culture and folklore, his loud, eclectic, and often biophilic expressions explore how mythology, supernatural phenomenons, and animism mirror the realities that we face.
Garcia’s work currently explores the potentiality of the body to process and reveal layered landscapes of the Filipino socio-political psyche and how choreography can actively counter political revisionism. Trained in the folk dance tradition, he seeks to interrogate the term’s implication in state mechanism of violence and erasure by invoking the true spirit of folk as a mutable and mutualistic practice.
Garcia’s artistic practice navigates the tension between the documented and the undocumented, tracing the fragile imprints of those who move unseen. Through performance, fieldwork, and visual documentation, he explores the disappearing, the overlooked, and the vulnerable, reflecting on the intersections of ecological fragility and human displacement.
Sales is an artist and researcher whose work revolves around food systems and geography. He has facilitated workshops internationally related to embodied mapping and performances to ground knowledge production in a collective manner.
Ea Torrado is a queer-identifying La Union-based contemporary choreographer, performing artist, and educator. She explores identity, society and culture, eroticism, spirituality, healing, and environmental care through various mediums such as dance theater, performance rituals, community gatherings, and experimental films. She performed solo and principal roles in productions by the Ballet Manila and Ballet Philippines, before forming her own group in 2014, the Daloy Dance Company. Her body of work has garnered awards such as the Alvin Erasga Tolentino Koreograpiya Award, the Remedios De Oteyza Award for Choreography, and the Asian Cultural Council Grant.

About the Facilitators

Eisa Jocson is an interdisciplinary artist based in La Union, Philippines. Trained as a visual artist with a background in ballet, she came to contemporary dance through pole dancing. In her works, she explores body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of the Philippines through migrant work. In her creations, from ‘Death of the Pole Dancer’ to ‘Macho Dancer’ to ‘Host’ to ‘Princess’ to ‘Superwoman Band’ and ‘Manila Zoo’ – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into developed geographies. She regularly presents her pieces at renowned theatres and international festivals in Asia and Europe, such as Tanz im August, TPAM Yokohama, Zürcher Theaterspektakel and Frankfurter Positionen. She is a recipient of the 2018 Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Award, the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2019, the SeMa-HANA Award 2021 and the Tabori Award International 2023.
Franchesca Casauay (b. 1984, Metro Manila) is a cultural worker and independent producer with a practice spanning new media, performance, visual arts, and hybrid formats. She has led production, curatorial, and research projects across the Philippines, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Recent roles include project coordinator for Soil-Beings (Philippine Pavilion, 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture), lead researcher for ASEF Green Guides PH, and production management resource person for CCP and DTI-CITEM. She has collaborated with Eisa Jocson on The Filipino Superwoman Band since 2018 and was a guest curator for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN. A Sociology graduate from UP Diliman, she is based in Quezon City and volunteers at artist-run space NO.