BIOGRAPHY
Alvin William Collantes (b. 1989, New Jersey) is a Filipino-Canadian drag artist, dance educator, and performance maker based in Berlin. Working across performance, digital media, and sculptural objects, their practice explores ambivalence as an affective methodology, examining how inherited forms of care, obligation, and relationality within Filipino migrant consciousness encounter queer processes of self-making and kinship.
Drawing from drag, nightlife, ritual, and embodied archives, Collantes creates performance activations that bring objects, memory, and social relations into conversation. Through sonic atmospheres, participatory encounters, and sculptural installations, they cultivate spaces of intimacy that negotiate the tensions between devotion and autonomy, belonging and self-determination, care and self-erasure. Their work approaches the Third Space as a contested site of ongoing negotiation, where identification and disidentification coexist in productive tension.
Collantes is currently an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, supported by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion.
As a drag performer, Alvin embodies "Bibingka," a character deeply rooted in their Filipino heritage and a bridge between their cultural past and the Western landscapes they now inhabits. Bibingka is a love letter to her heritage, weaving a legacy of dance, drag, and cultural memory into a powerful celebration of identity and queer possibilities.
You can see her live her life in Horse Meat Disco, Lunchbox Candy, Dissident, BRENN, and Pyramid Party, as well as festivals like WHOLE Queer United Festival, Garbicz, and Bucht Der Träumer. Bibingka is a member of Queens Against Borders, uplifting refugee and migrant drag artists, and Slaysians, an all-Asian drag collective reclaiming space in the global scene.
Alvin Collantes is the creator of Dose of Pleasure, a transformative dancefloor activation practice that promotes body liberation, community empowerment, and social sustainability. Featured in media outlets such as ARTE TV and Vice Germany, this practice transcends traditional boundaries, fostering spaces of diversity, inclusion, and collective care. Alvin has shared Dose of Pleasure at festivals like WHOLE United Queer Festival, Amsterdam Dance Event, Corona Culture Exhibition, Bucht Der Traumer Festival and Grabicz Festival.
