‘The Room of Diaspora’ is a transnational performance-installation open-ended project. It was borne out of the collaborative efforts of four Filipino scholars/artists who are in diaspora themselves at the time of conception.

(See collaborators profile below)

 ‘The Room of Diaspora’ at its core is a  devise performance-installation that explores how to address the “alienation, needs, gains, and negotiations associated with economic, cultural and refugee migration/diaspora.”  It revolves around a performance-installation-specifically designed/constructed white room. The room has a two- part schema of sensorial experience of the migrant experience: Departure and Arrival that both engages the audience members and turn them as witnesses and participants of the imagined zones of migratory experiences. Through the schema, the audience becomes an immediate part of the creating/creation of the performance. As the witnesses it engages them as spectators rehearsing the acts of knowing migrating within the re/created “sensorial experience” of the migrants. By doing this it attempts to understand what Augosto Boal introduced the “spect-actor” by allowing the witnesses goes through the processes of engaging with a foreign physicalized/embodied experience. The room becomes a baptismal pool of memories and narratives for those who have not experienced working/migrating/immigrating in a foreign land.

‘The Room of Diaspora’ project is interested in the below dramaturgical inquiries:

a.   How can the project engage in Apparudai’s proposed multiple modernities -- That identities are imagined and its different manifestations can be constructed, reconstructed, deconstructed?

 b.  How is identity construction done? What are the processes? How is diaspora constructed around this?

 c.  What are other means of constructing identity? What other means of identity construction happens when one is outside the time and space location of his/her assumed spatial identitarian construct?

d.  Is diaspora a singular construction or like post/transnational phenomenon - is this also porous?

e.   What process/es can be used in engaging these dramaturgical inquiries?

f.   (Though messianic,) How does art intervene? What kind of intervention can be done? Is intervention necessary to begin with? 

g.  What theoretical models can be used in questioning the processes? Are there cultural solutions to these processes?

The project received the 2019 NYUAD Arts & Humanities Research/Creative grant which brought all collaborators to do preliminary workshops/discussions in NYUAD.

The original dramaturgical inquiry concept paper of the project was first presented  to the Performance Studies International # 18 Culture & Industry International Conference at the University of Leeds in Leeds, United Kingdom on June 27th -July 1st, 2012.

Collaborators Profiles

Chris Gozum

Gozum is a multi-awarded filmmaker, cultural worker,and arts educator based in his hometown of Bayambang, Pangasinan Philippines.  He studied Film at the University of the Philippines and is an alumnus of the Asian Film Academy (South Korea). Gozum’s films have been curated and programmed at international film festivals, contemporary art museums, and new media art platforms  in the Philippines and abroad. He participated in the 2nd Southeast Asian Film Lab and the Berlinale Talents. He was also the recipient of the Seoul Film Commission’s Screenplay Development Support.  Gozum worked in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from 2007 to 2015.His latest creative documentary film “Dapol Tan Payawar Na Tayug 1931” (The Ashes and Ghosts of Tayug 1931) will screen in the 2019 Yamagata International Documentary Film festival.

meLê  yamomo

meLê lived in Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and now inhabits Amsterdam and Berlin studying, teaching, and creating performance/theatre and sound/music. He is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance, and Sound Studies (University of Amsterdam), the author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and laureate of the  Veni Innovation Grant  (2017-2021) for his project, Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings. Yamomo is also a fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Center and an artist-in-residence at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where he recently created the piece, Echoing Europe: Postcolonial Reverberations  and sonus—the sound within us . In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of global performance histories, sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies. 

Dennis Gupa

Dennis is a doctoral candidate in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research explores how ritual performances and human settlements are affected by the onslaught of modernities and colonialism that are entangled with climate crisis. He obtained an MFA Theatre (Directing) degree from the University of British Columbia and an MA Theatre Arts at the University of the Philippines. His intercultural theatre works were exhibited in North America and Southeast Asia.

Among of his theatre projects are the works of Euripides, Brian Friel, John Millington Synge, Frank Wedekind, Jose Rizal, Aurelio Tolentino, and Reagan Maiquez. He received a scholarship from the Indonesian government to study Seni theatre and traditional mask dance (topeng) at Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (STSI) in Bandung. The Asian Cultural Council's Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded him a fellowship to undertake a director-in-residence program in New York City, where he participated in and observed contemporary theatre directing process with Ma-Yi Theatre Co., National Asian American Theatre Co., and The Juilliard Drama School. Dennis is also a Fellow of The Philippines' 21, awarded by the Asia Society. He received grant support from the World Bank/Australian Agency for International Development, the Canada Council for the Arts, ASEAN Center for Biodiversity, University of the Philippines, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and various local government agencies in the Philippines. He is an artistic associate of the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society (SEACHS). In 2016, he was included as one of the laureates of Performance Studies international’s Dwight Conquergood Award and the following year he was awarded the Ada Slaight Drama-in-Education Award of the Young People’s Theatre Toronto and the The Slaight Family Foundation. Dennis is profiled in The Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Arts (Theatre, Second Volume) for his contribution to as a theatre director to the Philippines theatre.

Dennis is a Vanier Scholar.