Gestures of Ambiguity: A Queer Filipinx-American Choreographic Strategy

There is intentional vagueness in Filipinx-American culture—and not just in the form of tsismis.¹ There is also strategic malicious vagueness in Filipinx politics past and present, especially in their documentation, but in this article, I focus on familial ambiguity. For example, in the program notes for my dance work hallow hollow, I detail my mother's tendency to be vague in her shared recipes. "When I asked my mom for a halo-halo recipe to serve before the show tonight, she gave me a list of ingredients. I asked if she knew the best brands to buy. She said, 'No, not really. Any brand is good.' It took until gathering the vague recipe instructions to realize why my mom keeps things incomplete. She leaves room."² I interpret this act of vagueness as a way of protecting the recipe and also as a strategy to leave room for change. Halo-halo is a Filipina/o/x dessert with many varieties and combinations of as many as thirteen ingredients. And so, I wonder if the vagueness and ambiguity of both my mother's recipes and varieties of halo-halo ingredients can translate to movement as a choreographic approach in order to leave room for the ancestry that brought me to where I am now. I wonder this while hoping to move past a romantic notion of ancestry, hoping to move past a documenting of histories not yet documented and that might never be documented. Instead, I queerly desire to make meaning of potentially new relationships, to write a history of now for others to create work in the present. If I can imagine moving with the past, I do so not to re/create a past, despite how powerful and necessary it might be to correct the master narratives of history. This work, this queer imagining through choreography, strives to make real what most anti- and postcolonial historical projects aim towards—a better and more generous present and future. I do this not only for my biological and chosen family but also for family not known. In other words, queerly imagining kinship and family through choreography is an act of generosity in intentional moments of vagueness and ambiguity.

In hallow hallow I literally move with the past. On a sixty-foot projection screen are multiple VHS tapes of family gatherings while I dance with past selves and family members. I consider this a queer choreographic strategy. Queer imagination is about potential, especially when considered alongside an embodied practice like dance. Movement repeated in a particular context, in this case alongside old family videos, creates a physical opportunity for me to move with the past again, although never the same way. Dance-making creates spaces of connection not only to the performing body but also to a performance's cultural signifiers, limits, and projections.³ My choreographic practice, as a queer Filipinx-American, plays with these imagined limits; in particular, the span of time my choreographed movement can work alongside in performance. Does my choreography reach towards this VHS past and can it reach towards an unknown past or is that too far-reaching?

Moving with queer Filipinx-American history aims to advance queer generosity by embodying Gayatri Gopinath's observations in her book Unruly Visions, "just as my own act of queer curation seeks to juxtapose incommensurate texts in order to enable new ways of seeing the relation between archives, regions, and affect, the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora rearrange and emplace us, as viewers and readers, in a different relation to space and time, history and memory."⁴ Gopinath's argument that a queer looking back reorients viewers and readers in the present can further physical practitioners by thinking through these relations. Likewise, I use a diasporic Filipinx-American framework alongside a critical queer imagination to choreograph not only the order of movement but the potential order of movement. Gopinath's queer turn toward history as a curatorial method parallels my choreographic approach when it creates a new relationship to colonial pasts not dominated by hegemonic gazes. Through performance I hope to...