Brown Madonna (WIP)

Upcoming Iteration (2024):

 

Seeking to reshape fractured Filipina femininity, the work-in-process, "Brown Madonna" aims to transcend historical paradigms. Raised amid contrasting influences of devout Catholicism and the sexual iconography of Hollywood's Madonna, I aim to decolonize, empower, evoke and re-enchant ‘divinity’ through a Filipina perspective, embracing ancestral reverence, animistic roots, and a transhuman artistic practice that honors the more-than-human, and our living, natural world.

 

Advocating environmental sustainability aligns seamlessly with the Philippines’ pre-colonial ethos, mirroring our cultural reverence for nature. This commitment is especially poignant as our coastal town, La Union, where Ea Torrado lives and makes work, faces encroaching gentrification. Through Ea's practice, she advocates for environmental sustainability and regeneration, reflecting the cultural heritage of the Filipino people and connecting her community with the urgent need to protect the coastal ecosystem, fostering a dynamic dialogue about our shared past, present, and the trajectory of our collective future.

 

​

About Brown Madonna (1st work-in-process in 2018):

 

Brown Madonna is a devised dance theatre piece that mixes movement, speech, camp and revelations around growing up Filipina, Catholic and not ‘liberated’. Excavating her body’s dance history and paralleling her re-incarnations as a performing artist with the pop icon Madonna’s songs and interviews, dance artist Ea Torrado re-marries the stage, dancing and herself.

 

“I don’t want to be a significant other. I want to be a significant me.” – Ea Torrado

​

Building the performance up from the artists diaries, associated research and interviews, Brown Madonna explores creating an existential panorama through a personhood complicated by beauty standards, religion, ambition and growing up in a culture that equates a woman’s worthiness by being a significant ‘other’.

 

It is a devised dance theatre piece that investigates the complexity and elusiveness of identity as it intersects notions of marriage, loneliness and societal pressures around being ‘significant’.Brown Madonna is part of the 1SA Solo Arts Platform, a festival featuring both local and international solo artists, that gives access to solo works that enable artists to convey the realities they are confronting through their chosen medium of artistic expression.

 

With the help of The Japan Foundation and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCAA), we strive to increase visibility for these artists, new genres, and evolving traditions in contemporary arts.

 

Choreography by Ea Torrado

Performance by Ea Torrado and Daloy Dance Company

 

Music Editing by Aliana Jimenez

Costumes by Jodin and Aguilon

Lighting Design by Ninya Bedruz

Set Design by Mars Bugaoan

HMUA by Ida Ramos

Hair by Leslie Espinosa

Produced by Fringe Creatives, Pineapple Lab and Daloy Dance Company and 1SA Festival

Production set up by Jovin Lazaro and Jomari Cruz

 

Photo Credit: Hilary Ann Pabustan and Erickson Dela Cruz