Filipino story told through dance, film
Kularts’ multimedia performance focuses on Manong immigrants
For decades, choreographer Alleluia Panis strove to keep rising within the white-dominated mainstream institutional arts world. Then in 1998 she watched the Bay Area Filipino American community mark the centennial of Spain ceding the Philippines to the United States, and her strategy shifted.
“How can we celebrate this (ceding of the Philippines) when it was only a changing of the masters?” Panis said, sitting outside the entrance to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on a warm fall day. “I thought, there is something wrong with the community not knowing this history. And so I literally turned away from the arts community I had been trying to chase, and hunkered down here. Because I was drawn to the notion that if we don’t know who we are, how can we grow or heal from centuries of colonization?”
The “here” where Panis hunkered down is South of Market, home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Filipino Americans. Five years ago the neighborhood, where Panis founded the Kularts collective of Filipino artists in 1985, was recognized as the Filipino Cultural Heritage District by the city of San Francisco and subsequently named SoMa Pilipinas, a cultural district recognized by the California Arts Council and granted National Endowment for the Arts funding.
Now Panis is seeing breakthroughs in her dance-making career too. In 2018, the Gerbode Foundation in partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded Panis $50,000 to create her new dance, “Man@ng Is Deity.” After a long and enriching pandemic journey, the final work — part film screening, part live dance performance — premieres Friday, Dec. 3, at ODC Theater.
Featuring a diversely skilled cast trained in hip-hop, contemporary and traditional Filipino dance styles, the multimedia production brings audiences into the lives of the Manong generation of Filipino immigrants, who primarily worked as agricultural laborers from the 1910s to 1940s. Viewers unfamiliar with the Manong will learn a history not often taught in U.S. schools: that Filipino men were allowed to immigrate to work the fields, but very few women could come with them; that miscegenation laws were used to villainize and oppress them; that Manong workers played a large role in the farmworker movement. Those who already know this history will see a depiction of it full of cinematic splendor (the film was shot partly in Hawaii and features a score by Joshua Icban) and nuance.
“In our community, there’s a dichotomy of the Manong being party boys in fancy suits on the one hand and empowered farmworkers on the other,” explained Panis, who personally interviewed many of the Manong generation when she was a San Francisco
State student conducting research at the International Hotel, a singleroom-occupancy building that housed many Filipino immigrants, in the 1970s. “I wanted to break those tropes, talk more about the personal stories, humanize them.”
For instance, one of the main characters, Benito, flirts with both women and a fellow male Manong worker before meeting violence at the hands of a white man. To virtuosic hip-hop dancer Johnny Huy Nguyen, a first-generation Vietnamese American who worked with Kularts specifically for the project, it’s important that this character doesn’t fit any stereotype.
“He’s a free spirit,” said Nguyen, who met Panis when he was dancing in a show about Asian immigration through Angel Island and, though they hail from distinct cultures, share a desire to break up the Asian “model minority” stereotype.
“Benito is a player and very charismatic, and there’s a truthfulness about him that’s threatening for other people.”
Developing this story line and others, Panis said she was emboldened by the work of fellow Filipino artists like Lysley Tenorio, whose short stories were adapted into a pairing of one-act plays at American Conservatory Theater. Now Panis appears on the brink of bringing her dance work to a similar prominence. Dance/USA named her a 2019-20 artist fellow; the San Francisco Arts Commission recognized her as a legacy artist in 2017; and last year the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions funded her next work, “Nursing These Wounds,” exploring the history of Filipino caregivers.
Gerbode Foundation program director Olivia Malabuyo Tablante has known Panis for more than two decades and says these breakthroughs testify to a life of tireless persistence.
“Alleluia is a legacy bearer and a living treasure,” Tablante said. “She’s constantly bridging things and people, but there were years when she wasn’t necessarily doing a lot of choreography. All the support tumbled in finally, and that was so satisfying to watch.”