Congratulations to GRSJ Director Dr. Nora Angeles and community partner, National Pilipino Canadian Cultural Centre Society (NPC3), on being named a recipient of UBC’s Winter 2023 Partnership Recognition and Exploration (PRE) Fund.
The project “What Happens When Theatre Migrates” situate theatre as a method of community partnership that employs performance as a lens of understanding our complex migratory histories in Canada. This UBC – National Pilipino Canadian Cultural Center (NPC3) partnership gathers Filipino and Filipino Canadian scholars and artists on a two-pronged activity that aims to critically engage the community of Filipino artists in Canada particularly those who are in the performing arts (theatre, dance, music) in tackling the current issues around settler colonialism, identity formation, and community building.
In line with this goal, a Zoom lecture-conversation, entitled, “Ha pano yun: What happens when theatre migrates?” will be organized with scholars of Philippine migration and Migration Theatre from Canada and the Philippines as speakers. This event will be followed by an in-person workshop on Philippine migration theatre. Both events will reflect on the shifting perspectives on location, identities, advocacies, and relations pertinent to the transitory and liminal migrant experiences of Filipino/a/x living in Canada.
This partnership grant will propel the current theatrical project, Ma(i)d(e) in the Philippines that reconstructs the classical play of Jean Genet’s The Maid to complicate migration through an analytic thematization of servitude, servanthood and slavery. By exploring the current migration histories of Filipinos in Canada (particularly the queer communities) and the imminent challenges post by climate crises we deploy performance as a tool for critical and creative knowledge making within the diasporic communities in Vancouver. Through the artistic leadership of Filipino theatre director and Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg, Dr. Dennis Gupa and mentorship of Boca del Lupo, this play envisions a Pan-Canadian theatrical creation and circulation within and beyond Canada.
This grant will help seed the next production activities of the project that will inform its intellectual direction. The aim is to tour this project in various cities in Canada with huge concentration of Filipino (im)migrants and in the Philippines as well as Europe and Middle East where many Filipinos work as migrants. While Filipino immigrants continue to contend with geographical dislocation, racial minoritization, and cultural disfranchisement within the professional Canadian theatre ecology, this project gives agency and voice to the Filipino Canadian artists
- Community Partner: Erie Maestro, National Pilipino Canadian Cultural Centre Society (NPC3)
- UBC Partner | Faculty: Leonora Angeles, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Faculty of Arts, UBC Vancouver
The Partnership Recognition and Exploration Fund awards up to $1,500 to bridge small resource gaps, enabling community partners to forge reciprocal relationships with the university. Since 2017, the fund has invested more than $547,000 in 361 community-university partnerships, with approximately 50% of the funding supporting IBPOC-led community organizations.
