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7:00 PM-8:00 PM
Bibingka
Performance | Dealing in Distance|By Alvin Collantes (PH/DE)
- Price Free admission
- Part of series: Dealing in Distance
Named after a traditional Filipino rice cake cooked over fire, Bibingka symbolizes resilience and complexity of Filipino identity in diaspora. Bibingka, also the name of Alvin’s drag persona born in Berlin’s queer nightlife, uses performance as intervention for decolonial joy, radical self-acceptance and community healing.
BIBINGKA arises from Alvin’s lived experience as a Filipino migrant worker, queer body, and cultural facilitator navigating the complex social terrain of Germany. As a drag performer in Berlin—a city celebrated for radical freedom and queer expression—Alvin accesses moments of gender euphoria through their persona “Bibingka”: a portal to the most fully realized version of self. Yet this euphoria is met with grief, rooted in Catholic guilt, familial obligation, and the fear of being ostracized by one’s own kin.
About the Artist
Alvin Collantes
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 in Strange Mountains. In 2026, Alvin will be premiering their solo work entitled Bibingka at Tanztage in Sophiensaele and Goethe-Institut's Dealing in Distance, Traveling Festival across Southeast Asia.