“Bibingka” premiered in Sophiensaele’s 30th Anniversary of Tanztage Berlin, a project co-produced by Sophiensæle and Künster*innenhaus Mousonturm. With the kind support of Goethe Institut Philippinen Performance Ecologies.
Named after the resilient Filipino rice cake and the artist’s drag persona, Bibingka blends drag spectacle, sanctuary, and service to question who is being entertained — and at what cost. Drawing parallels between Filipino migrant workers and drag performers, the work reveals the forces of labour underneath the performance of care in the so-called West. As drag becomes increasingly commodified for mainstream consumption, survival itself becomes performance: the stage transforms into a temporary home, glamour becomes armour, and the body learns to endure.
Through Filipino OPM love songs and novelty dances, artist Alvin and alter ego Bibingka move between tenderness and exhaustion, queering colonial histories while deconstructing canons of beauty. Navigating tensions between Kapwa — a Filipino sense of shared self — and Western individualism, the performance drifts through memory, migration, labour, and desire.
When the heels come off, what remains?
Password: 2004.0426
“Bibingka” toured with Goethe Institute Southeast Asia as part of Dealing in Distance Mini Traveling Festival for Southeast Asian artists based in Germany. The festival travelled to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali and Manila.
CONTEXT & MOTIVATION:
The Filipino diaspora is one of the largest diasporas in the world. Filipinos are known for their warmth, hospitality and over giving / sacrificial nature. In the global service economies, Filipinos are ranked to be one of the largest in labour exports when it comes hospitality, health care and entertainment.
Filipino migrant workers not only contribute to the economy of which they work, they also contribute 9% of the Philippine GDP. And with that, our migrant workers spend most of their life caring for others while remaining unseen themselves. How, by touring this work we can make that labour visible —
their sacrifices, their efforts, their hard work, their celebrations, their loneliness, their assimilation, their contributions
I see Bibingka not only as a performance but an ecological practice.
A practice of creating space for their stories to be heard, celebrated and seen.
Join us in being a part of this ecology and let’s tour this work together!
Key Topics: Filipino Migration, Diaspora Drag, Contemporary Dance, Cost of Care Work, Post-Colonial Critique, Service Labour
Running Time: 60 minutes
Genre: Contemporary Dance, Live Video, Story Telling & Drag
We are currently looking for venue partners and festival programmers to tour the work internationally