Jay Carlon (he/they) is a queer dance artist, choreographer and community organizer whose work is grounded in a collective journey toward decolonization and sustainability. Carlon grew up the youngest of 12 in a Filipino Catholic migrant family, on the Central Coast of California. His work facilitates collective healing and the exploration of post-colonial identity, ancestry, and the complex experience of queer and Filipinx communities in relationship to site and space.
Carlon connects a global network of Filipinx creatives, including Mga Tsismosa in connection with NCCAkron and Daring Dances and international collective Istorya-Istorya. He organizes community for healing around art, food, and kapwa; including events like Talaga at 2220 Arts + Archives and Bahay at Genever, both in Historic Filipinotown. Carlon’s continued work with Los Angeles-based collaborators Carlo Maghirang and Micaela Tobin spans genre and format, including experimental opera (Apolaki), concert dance, and gallery installation.
Carlon creates both within and without the institution. Their work along the West Coast engages Filipino enclaves around shared experience; through the Filipino American National Historical Society on the Central Coast, and in Los Angeles at REDCAT NOW Festival, Electric Lodge, homeLA, The Broad Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles Dance Project, and Annenberg Community Beach House in addition to performances with Makini, The Industry Opera, and Oguri. In New York, they have engaged with audiences as a choreographer at 92ndY and The CURRENT SESSIONS, and as a performer with the Metropolitan Opera and Bill T. Jones. In dialogue with the Filipinx-American experience, Carlon also researches and develops work in his ancestral family’s home in Bohol, Philippines; as well as internationally in Monterrey, Mexico at Espacio Expectante; and in Bangkok, Thailand at Creative Migration. His work often responds to site and space, excavating migration narratives and architecture; his debut dance film BAGGAGE, created with support from Metro Arts, investigates these tenets among location and locomotion within Los Angeles’ public transportation system.
As a teacher and facilitator, Carlon also leads workshops and gatherings investigating the themes seen in their work. Choreographic residencies, community conversation, and movement-based workshops like queering technique and Body as Site explore decolonizing the body, reclaiming space, and their relationship to each other. Investigating this work has included teaching engagements at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, University of the Arts, Oberlin College; and speaking engagements at Purdue University, USC, School of the Art Institute Chicago, and Asians @ Google.
Carlon’s commercial work uses these principles to empower black and brown artists with agency and comfort in their own bodies; including choreography for Mndsgn and Kanye West and performance with Solange Knowles and Rodrigo y Gabriela. As associate director and skilled aerial performer with Australian spectacle theater company Sway, they have performed at the 2014 Olympics and the 2018 Super Bowl, and choreographed a work for Lincoln Center.
Carlon is a 2023 recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Production Grant, 2023 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship, and was named Dance Magazine’s ‘25 To Watch” in 2020.