Brown Madonna

The UP Vargas Museum, through its Open Studio program, presents dancer and choreographer Ea Torrado’s latest work-in-progress presentation of Brown Madonna on 17 July 2025, Thursday, from 4:30 to 6:30 pm at the UP Vargas Museum Basement space. It follows her previous performance at the UP Vargas Museum last February 2025 as the inaugural project for our Open Studio program. 

The performance is a living ethnography of the Filipina performer’s body shaped by forces of colonialism, Catholicism, and global pop culture. Ea Torrado interrogates how women in Philippine society are conditioned to be spectacular givers: mothers, martyrs, entertainers, saints. Through physical movement, live singing, and sound catharsis, she performs the burden of performance and the exhaustion of upholding an idealized self.

Queering, transgressing, and Filipinizing the imagery and songs of divine feminine archetypes and colonial exports—namely Mama Mary and the pop icon Madonna—Brown Madonna is a layered invocation. It confronts Torrado’s own veneration for the performing arts, embraced in tension with fatigue, financial precarity, and loneliness, and navigating deeply ingrained socioreligious and familial conditioning.

Told through a postcolonial, queer-feminist lens, Brown Madonna is a fusion of dance, theatre, and storytelling. It reveals the risks of performance, challenges inherited roles, and gestures toward embodied liberation.

Brown Madonna has received production and artist residency support from Daloy Dance Company, The Japan Foundation Manila, Goethe-Institut Philippines, Linangan Art Residency, Muni Philippines, Orange Project, We are Shape Shifters, and the UP Vargas Museum.