Special Topics

Overview

Special Topics is a site-specific experiential performance that bridges culture, history, and experimental contemporary performance art. This iteration is part of a two-year project between AniMalayaWorks and Marcel Santiago Marcelino, a MAPfund 2022-supported project called Primx (a non-gendered word for cousins), celebrating a shared culture between the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

Historically, dance production and education have contributed to binary definitions of dance, limiting conversations to a US-centric Western dance. Special Topics is our public course offering, an embodiment of choreographic monologues to ensemble work, video art, lecture, dance-and-drum (Bomba and Filipino Indigenous dances), and a communal sharing that centers our first-generation Filipino and Boricua stories. We weave stories of colonialism, resistance, migration, and collective healing, and ask our audience to find our connective tissue, share diverse perspectives, and celebrate communal joy.

This offering invites the audience to witness, move, journal, dance, learn a move or two, and reflect. Pick your portal of healing.

Cast & Crew:
Anito Gavino
Marcel Santiago Marcelino
Malaya Ulan
Athena Turek-Hankins
Marsell Anhel Chavarria
Brandon Aquino-Straus
Torian Ugworji

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.