BIBINGKA is a solo performance by Filipino drag queen and dance artist Alvin Collantes, blending personal narrative, queer resistance, and postcolonial critique. Through movement, monologue, lip-sync, and gestures, it explores the emotional and physical labor of queer Southeast Asian entertainers in the West—between joy and exhaustion, glamour and grief.
Named after a traditional Filipino rice cake cooked over fire, Bibingka symbolizes resilience and complexity of Filipino identity in diaspora. Bibingka, also the name of Alvin’s drag persona born in Berlin’s queer nightlife, uses performance as intervention for decolonial joy, radical self-acceptance and community healing.
Supported by the Goethe-Institute Philippines - Performance Ecologies
Work In Progress Showing - Orange Project, Bacolod, The Philippines (2025) - Performance Ecologies - Goethe-Institute Philippines
Work In Progress Showing - Schwules Musem Berlin (2025) - Young Birds from Strange Mountains
CONTEXT & MOTIVATION:
BIBINGKA arises from Alvin’s lived experience as a Filipino migrant worker, queer body, and cultural facilitator navigating the complex social terrain of Germany. As a drag performer in Berlin—a city celebrated for radical freedom and queer expression—Alvin accesses moments of gender euphoria through their persona “Bibingka”: a portal to the most fully realized version of self. Yet this euphoria is met with grief, rooted in Catholic guilt, familial obligation, and the fear of being ostracized by one’s own kin.
In the Philippines, family is everything—intertwined with sacrifice, duty, and collective survival. To live outside normative gender roles often means risking that tether. BIBINGKA inhabits this liminal space: between public celebration and private hesitation, between becoming and what must be left behind. Drag becomes both shield and offering—an embodied metaphor for the contradictions of diaspora, queerness, and survival.
Filipinos are known globally for their service roles, but behind this lies colonial history and trauma. BIBINGKA reveals the pain and strength behind the cheerful migrant image and critiques this transactional performance of joy while honoring the quiet resistance it requires.
The drag performer is hyper-visible yet misunderstood—both adorned and erased.
The stage becomes a site of negotiation: between Berlin’s liberation and the internalized restraints of faith, family, and displacement. It asks: What does it mean to be celebrated and feared in the same breath? What remains when joy becomes labour, and glamour a survival strategy?
Running Time: 45 minutes
Genre: Contemporary Dance & Drag Performance
Creation Residency in Linangan Residency (2025)
