SETTING THE TONE

Suleman Anaya: How did you arrive at a 40-minute performance about the birth of a baby god?

Joshua Serafin: While my work is fully multi-media now, I started acting when I was twelve-years-old, and I was also trained in dance for twelve years. So there are video elements in my recent pieces, but the focus is on choreography and performance. After finishing high school I went straight into contemporary dance, first in Hong Kong then in Belgium. Then I studied fine arts [at KASK in Gent]. So what people see now in my work is a mix of all of these mediums I’ve previously explored and combined to create my own performance-based practice. My aim is to create the totality of an experience.

Void is part of a trilogy. What is it about?

It’s called Cosmological Gangbang. It started from a desire to go back in time and find ancestral bodies; the idea is to speculatively rewrite history. What kind of future deities can we conceive based on pre-colonial belief systems? Like in many indigenous cultures, in the Philippines, it is ingrained in certain pagan practices that our shamans, both tribal healer-chiefs and warrior-protectors who are considered divine beings who can communicate with deities, have complex gender structures. Only when the Western colonizers came did it become binary. My collaborators and I visited a tribe in the mountains of Mindanao, a large island that’s part of the Philippine archipelago, to create the video portion of Void. The people of the island were able to protect their practices when the nation of the Philippines formed. This tribes’ ideology — in which gender, spirituality, the physical body, nature, and ecology are one integrated entity — informed Void, which is premised on my belief that queers are today’s shamans, or the ‘other’ that goes against binary structures, refuse to be put into this or that box, question systems, and have the capacity to heal society. To me, queerness is not just about representation — it’s about a state of being undefinable. Consequently, Void is everything and nothing at the same time; it’s about wanting to be de-represented (post-race, post-body, post-gender) but at the same time to be seen as something bigger that’s beyond all those labels — the body as an energetic power source.

What are the various elements that make up last night’s piece and what do they represent?

Void is part of the trilogy’s second part. In the beginning, Calvin plays guitar on top of a pre-recorded soundscape while I dance. Next, you have a video element in which three divine beings become human for a number of eons. They are called back to this space of in-betweenness to create the new god of the new millennium: Void. It’s a birthing. Void came from a place of pain — it was the dance that I made when I was very heartbroken. Pain, to me, can be a space of creation. There is a universal understanding of what pain is, but the type and the source of the pain can be very different for everyone, just as people heal from their pain differently. Void resonates with a large audience because we all know the emotions it’s addressing; the piece connects to the void that exists in each spectator, whether you call it darkness, emptiness, or trauma.

Is the eponymous main character in Void angry?

It’s in a lot of pain. Void is an alter ego I made based on all the traumas that I’ve accumulated. It is embodying global contemporary pain, coming out of dark things like sexual abuse, but also from the question: What would the god of the darkrooms or other taboo spaces of gay subcultures be? It surpasses time, and the black liquidity allows the body to disappear, in a way, and become an energetic force. All of us have our own little void inside; the question is how much you tap into it. Void gives this demon a space to dance — to express rather than repress.

You utter deranged-sounding things while you perform. What are you saying, or hissing, exactly?

I am mostly just cursing. The way I visualize it, spirits are talking to me and tapping me, and I respond to that.

How was performing Void at the Cárcamo de Dolores different than staging it in other spaces?

Void had been performed in Hong Kong, Belgium, Germany, Finland, and Singapore. The Berlin performance, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, was special because it was also outdoors and engaged with the architecture. Berliners know the [1950s] building we used as the “Giant Oyster,” but it also looks like a giant spaceship. So I thought, let’s play with that; we designed the stage to balance that specific environment. For the TONO performance, the venue was confirmed the day before I flew here, so it was all very last minute. The site is obviously amazing, not just because of its history and architecture, but because I’d never performed in what is sometimes called the Global South. As a brown maker, this was very important to me — a dream, so to speak. And of course you have the synchronicity of this massive architecture of a god in relation to Void, who is trying to become a God. My dance manifests all the emotions of the three deities that birthed Void, an accumulation of anger, love, pain, carnality, and sadness over millennia. How do you understand centuries of human history? How do you make a dance out of it? That’s why it has this tentative quality. Even a just-formed god can’t make sense out of the inequality, wars, and uncertainty of our world. It was uncanny to have a massive god lying down in a fountain right behind all this unfolding. I made an offering to Tlaloc before the show, affirming it’s his space and asking for permission to ask questions he might already have the answers to: Were you me? Are you my reincarnation? How does one become a god? Let’s not forget humanity and civilization created its gods. In the end, my goal is that when future archaeologists dig up the remnants of my work, the gods they find are trans queer bodies, and they’re Filipino, with Filipino standing for any community whose narratives have remained unheard.

Did you make any changes for the piece’s performance in Mexico City?

We added a part at the end, a recording of a text. In previous performances, Void dies as the music ends, closing the cycle. This time, we wanted to add something that invited the audience to engage, asking them why they came — was it for salvation, liberation, or confrontation?

What's the relation of your work to space, whether built or empty?

I think that dance is architecture, in a way. In this piece’s dance in particular, there’s an element of transient architecture in the morphing liquidity (The inky substance Serafin refers to as “primordial mud” seems to shift magically from a shining watery sheet to the sensuous shape of a Félix Candela shell dome.) The liquid transforms from a protective shield into a glistening flowing fabric, but it can become anything, really. The liquid opens possibilities for my character, it allows me to transform into something at once undefinable and spectacular, unexpected. It erases Josh, and turns me into an exorcism of a different body.

Tell me about the trilogy’s last part. How does the narrative of Void progress?

We just premiered the last and third part: Pearls. It has aspects of Void, but with a different color scheme and more of a black-box situation, which we’re performing in Berlin soon. We’re also in discussions with Amant [the Brooklyn arts organization designed by SO-IL], to bring the work to New York in July.

Have you been to New York before?

Never. I am very excited. It’s going to be special because both Calvin and Alex, the musicians who scored the film and the performances, will be playing simultaneously for the first time. The structure of the piece will be the same, but with saxophone and guitar in a Brooklyn parking lot, it will read differently. The varying context gives the piece a new life each time — here you have a god, in Berlin you had a concrete spaceship, and in New York you’ll have a late-capitalist, post-industrial space. Void exists differently in every realm. Can a natural, embodied spirituality even exist in a hyper-commercial urban landscape? This apparent contradiction will only make it more interesting.

Aside from performance and venue, how do you experience the different urban spaces and built landscapes that you move through?

Moving as much as I do, space itself becomes somewhat undifferentiated. The people I meet matter more to me now, as do the stories that they carry within those cities. I don’t visit places as much as I visit stories. It also depends on the mode I’m in; if I’m in touring modality, my days are geared towards the show. But if I come in a research mode, my senses are heightened to understand and absorb and I go see cultural things and talk to people. One mode allows for processing and digesting, while the other is all outputting.

You’ve been to Mexico City more than once, not always in touring mode. What’s your favorite thing about it?

I really enjoy that it’s like the Philippines but in Latin America. I feel like I am in Manila — the space, climate, people, temperament, and economic contrasts are all similar. There’s this long-gone familiarity of an intergenerational Austronesian relationship — thousands of years of shared, inter-cultural ancestry. It’s pre-colonial, primordial.