BUMALIK

bumalik — the Tagalog word for “return” — is a co-creation between choreographer Marie Lloyd Paspe and installation artists Sabrina Herbosa Reyes and Antonio Giovanni Rivera of Almasphere. Bamboo sculpture, dancers, composer-musicians, and stagehands weave together, tending to the stories of the Philippine diaspora, the migratory journey of Filipina mothers and their children, and the profound power that memory and community have in rooting back home.

bumalik explores the adverse experience of migration: the dis-orientation of losing one’s sense of belonging and the re-orientation of regaining one’s bearings that AANHPI migrants experience finding home in foreign environments. The work incorporates Almasphere’s sculpture installation sirkulo (“circle”), made of 19 standing bamboo poles, with the collaborative cast’s prowess of storytelling, of imagined and real memories. The use of bamboo, a natural material carrying ancestral memory, feels oriental and unassuming against the NYC backdrop. Over time, performers arrange the bamboo into multiple landscapes capturing the change of environments from a cage to the jungle to a prison — unraveling the memories within each migratory location. In our journey towards re-inhabiting our skin, our audiences share with us in the Philippine ideology kapwa-- Tagalog for “I and the Other are One,” a healing balm of radical empathy in today’s polarizing climate.