Kamote Kamayan

Kamote Kamayan is a performance installation that serves as a cultural bridge, weaving together socially engaged dance theater, architecture, film, puppetry, food-sharing, and civic responsibility. This unique blend is a community practice of Kapwa, a deeply rooted Filipino concept that embodies a shared identity and inner self, fostering a culture of inclusiveness and interconnectedness. The event is hosted at the Arts + Culture lab, a creative, multi-disciplinary space that intersects cultural preservation, music, design, and education, emphasizing its cultural significance.

The event will begin with a performance of Sinawali, a term that refers to a weaving pattern performed in Indigenous Filipino warfare, Kali. In Anito Gavino's choreography, she uses the term as a metaphor describing solidarity between resistance movements. Together with her daughter, Malaya, they bring their experimental forms and community-based familial practice, AniMalayaWorks (which in Tagalog means Harvesting (Ani) liberation (Malaya). Sinawali is a choreographic demonstration of a Filipina immigrant mother's process of undoing Western hegemonic history taught to her first-generation immigrant child. They weave under-represented ancestral history with critical analysis of the NOW, inviting the audience to have a voice. Education is not gatekept within academic institutions. The audience becomes participants in this active lecture. This is their mother-daughter liberatory practice that manifests as acts of love.

The dance theater work is a form of contemporary oral history epitomized by Malaya Ulan's spoken word, Anito's poetry in motion in collaboration with Carlos' music + design, Alex's visual images, Killjoy's puppets, Reia's voice, and audience participation. Gavino's research of Mexican and Filipino social movements united in solidarity during the Farm Labor Movement of the 60s, juxtaposed with lost histories of spiritual to socio-political movements in the pre-colonial to colonial Philippines, will be synthesized into illustrative embodied storytelling and collaborative practices. This 60-minute dance theater work is a powerful collaborative effort that weaves together the diverse talents of the artists in the Kamote Kamayan collaboration, creating a profound sense of unity and shared purpose.

Carlos Castienera, a Mexican designer of space, material culture, and ideas, an ARTchitect, and director of the Arts & Culture Lab, will play a pivotal role in the Kamote Kamayan performance. He will weave together architecture, music, and dramaturgy to create a Bahay Kubo, a native hut made of natural materials on stilts (bamboo and nipa) indigenous to the Philippines and said to have influenced the Mayan huts of Mexico. This Bahay Kubo will serve as a symbol of cultural exchange and shared heritage. He will also collaborate with Anito to design an ancestral fishing village and an altar of under-represented heroes.

Malaya Ulan, a first-generation Filipina immigrant, collaborates with her poetry compositions, vulnerably illustrating the complexities of growing up not Filipino enough and not American enough. She shares her hopes for collective joy through ancestral memory and self-affirmations. This is her first time co-choreographing with her mother, Anito.

Alex Ramos will weave his video art and projection mapping. Reia Earth, a Filipino-American music artist and project manager of Kamote Kamayan, will weave sonic exploration with her stepfather's guitar playing and her mother's cooking of Filipino cuisine centered on Kamote. She will sing a Visayan Kundiman to learn a new language from the 150 Indigenous languages of the Philippines. This process of reconnecting through art-making is a self-medicating personal to familial healing medicine.

The artist Killjoy will weave together her puppet installations and prints. Her Kamote puppets, created in collaboration with KitchenTable Puppet Press, ground the work in the value of emotional and spiritual sustainability amid resistance symbolized by the Kamote, a root vegetable that has crawled its nutritious magic from the lands we now call Mexico to the Pacific Islands. Puppets also have a long history in political theater, considered a "low-brow" art yet used in radicalizing theater throughout history. It has even appeared in the Philippines with protests against the Marcos regime; AniMalayaWorks will activate Killjoy's puppets through an unapologetic community dance that originated from the rural farms of Davao, Philippines, the Budots.

...Budots, Puppet Theater, and Kamote share the same frowned-upon sentiment of being considered a low-brow of its kind.

This performance installation, Kamote Kamayan, is a Sinawali(weaving) of many collaborations between families, communities, and Filipino and Mexican artists. The story is Filipino but shares ties in multiple ways with Mexican Culture. Kamote was brought to the Philippines during the Manila Galleon/Acapulco Trade and has the same name in Nahautl (Camote) and Tagalog (Kamote). This work dismantles the notion that colonialism ties us together; instead, we reclaim the truth that our connection is deeply rooted in our indigene.

Host or Publisher AniMalayaworks