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FakeKnot
Artist Snapshots 3 – 03.29.2023
8am PT / 11am ET / 5pm GMT
FakeKnot is the umbrella entity for collaborative performance works that play with the complexities of identity and culture through costume, sound, technology, and movement. FakeKnot is grounded in street, commercial, and contemporary dance techniques that honours the queer, POC identity of Artistic Director, Ralph Escamillan. Collaboration as a practice of knowledge co-creation is essential for FakeKnot in the ways it can generatively bring differences together.
Artist Snapshot:
PIÑA
PIÑA is an interdisciplinary dance work that explores constructions of diasporic identity and how the body carries history and ancestry in a globalizing world. Inspired by Artistic Director Ralph Escamillan’s experience as a first-generation Canadian-born Filipino/a/x, this work considers the parallels between the physicality of this experience, and piña—a traditional and celebrated Philippine fiber made from pineapple leaves. The delicate yet resilient textile parallels the fragility and strength of contemporary diasporic people, and by investigating the many facets of this culturally embedded textile, an anthropological journey through the body is created. Incorporating traditional folk dance, history, music and costume, the political, economic and social dimensions of contemporary diaspora revealed.