bumalik

‘bumalik’ (Tagalog 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 disorientation of losing one’s sense of belonging and the reorientation of regaining one’s bearings that AAPI migrants experience within foreign environments. The work incorporates Almasphere’s sculpture ‘sirkulo’ (‘circle’), made up of 19 standing bamboo poles. 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 reinhabiting 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.