Sisa Reimagined

Sisa Reimagined is an ongoing interdisciplinary performance research project that revisits the tragic maternal figure of Sisa from José Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere as a fractured subject undergoing a ritual process of self-encounter. Through Butoh movement, physical theater, and Filipino ritual practice (tawas sa papel), the piece seeks to exorcise the textbook stereotype of Sisa as merely a madwoman and a symbolic victim of colonial oppression. Sisa Reimagined calls to reframe pain as power and madness as meaning, responding to the urgent need to reexamine (trans)national and literary narratives about women through a feminist and decolonial lens.