By Isabella Rose Cort
A recent experimental dance performance at BackBone Festival, Bahala/o arises like a sweaty hurricane of interchanging gestures, intimacy, and frantic grasps towards the (unattainable?) perfect bowl of rice. Upon entry, the audience passes by two performers (QUT alumni Buddy Malbasias and Clare Dark) sat upon the stage floor, who remain intently focused on counting out a pile of spilled rice grains. Adorned in lumpy white boiler suits – much like grains of rice themselves – the performers’ bodies soon begin to dance, moving with an ecstatic mixture of precision, erraticism, and flow.
Receding backwards and forwards towards a rotating pedestal fan (positioned downstage left), a new relationship between body and object is quickly established. Here, the fan becomes a potential stand-in for the familial home, evoking not only the hot, sticky, Filipino days but also the embodied memories and familiar faces of domestic childhood. This third body-like object captures the key patterns of the work: Filipino culture and identity, everyday interactions, and the online iconographic sphere, through which much of the diaspora experience is consequently mediated.
Intelligently captured by the work’s soundtrack, this sense of the kaleidoscopic and nostalgic online world flows effortlessly throughout the piece. From EDM to game show theme tracks and live spoken culinary tutorials, the work encompasses a wide range of cross-cultural paraphernalia. Changing continuously in response to the chime of a bell, the dancers’ bodies then become the conduits of this material, interchanging content like a well-tuned television.
Photography by Georgia Haupt @g.h__photos
Similarly, it must be said, the performance quality of the artists lies equally as memorable. Shying away from no human response, the two artists travel across a spectrum of theatrical emotions. Traversing hysteria, exhaustion, lust and joy; the relationship produced between Buddy and Clare is deeply intimate, queering all boundaries of social limitations. Deeply heavy in gesture, the two performers’ use of vocabulary also compliments each other well, particularly between Dark’s elastic classical lines and the dynamic contemporary whacking of Malbasias. The combination of these elements is liberating, as we (the audience) resonate with them, even if only through the somewhat voyeuristic dynamic of the theatre environment.
With only three weeks of development to transform the original 15-minute showing into an hour-long performance, a remarkable amount of detailed work has been produced. Combining elements of contemporary dance, physical theatre, and found objects, Bahala/o presents an engaging example of experimental performance, which all together questions the broader queer Filipino identity. However, as an independent production, residing in what is a seemingly crashing local arts industry, we can only hope the work receives its next due support instalment; or perhaps more appropriately, this is just to say, “bahala na”.
Isabella Rose Cort is an independent artist, choreographer, and arts writer, based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Following a career as a classically-trained dancer (Queensland National Ballet School, Elmhurst Ballet School of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, DJKT Ballet), Isabella has since moved into the contemporary art industry. Having recently completing her BFA (Visual Arts) at QUT, the artist’s practice explores the relationship between Western media legacies and feminist identity politics, whilst remaining an ongoing relationship with contemporary dance and performance disciplines.
