In this panel, we bring together six Filipino/a/x artists and scholars in the global north to discuss their aesthetic practices in dance, theatre, and performance studies. The curated discussion aims to focus on exploring our respective aesthetic practices as choreographing our orientations in examining our diasporic cultural identities as first- and second-generation artists. Using interdisciplinary lenses from dance studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and critical Filipinx studies, we aim to address the proximity of performance-making and meaning-making from/to the Philippines and Canada. In so doing, we aim to touch on diasporic intimacy, belonging, and representation as geopolitical concerns confronted by performing bodies who have treated Canada as a new stage for cultural identity formation and expression. In light of this, paraphrasing Filipinx American historian Catherine Choy, we critically reflect: to what extent can we imagine Canada as an extension of the Philippines? Without attempting to reify its colonial forms, this panel reflects “performing back” from and on Canada as a space of resistance and ambiguity, situating the artists of varying commitment in performing our “mixing-and-matching” identities (Tiatco).

This panel argues that these worldly encounters of identities captivate, cultivate, and emancipate us as artists in our queer feminist anticolonial creative strategies in performance-making. With the rising awareness of equity, inclusivity, diversity, and social justice as the theoretical framework for artistic inquiry, this panel engages with new methods of decolonial performance research that gesture critical, embodied, and autoethnographic inquiry. For the first paper, Gupa fleshes out his self-reflexivity in the pedagogical and ethical implications of appropriation when teaching a Philippine performance form folk dance to white-dominated non-Filipinx/a/o university students. Next, Escamillan looks at his contemporary dance piece as a liminal toggle between the Philippines and Canada, using the piña fabric not just as a metaphor but as a form of dancing with the colonial and cultural encounters imposed on the second-generation immigrant body. Third is Gamboa’s examination of her exploratory dance piece "dama," where she treats the cultural body as an archive of a fluid, affective, and empowered diasporic identity after feeling spatially torn by existing between two homes: Manila and Vancouver. In the final paper, Mijares looks at how dancing bodies from the Victoria Filipino Canadian Association’s Sampaguita Dance Group reconcile the idea of multiple homes in one performing body. In closing, Burns synthesizes and interweaves the four papers not just as mere aesthetic case studies but as “worldly encounters,” where this panel serves as an invitation “to participate in a new order of creative collaboration, moving the Filipinx body from spaces of familiar trespass to the stages of intercultural movement” (Burns 332). Hence, this panel is invested in the notion of dancing through the emerging intersections and entanglements of queer racialized identity, sexuality, geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in the world of art-making in the colonial white performing liminal stages between Canada and the Philippines.