WAKE
CREATED & PERFORMED BY JAY CARLON
W. MICAELA TOBIN
OCTOBER 11, 2024 | DON QUIXOTE NIGHTCLUB
THE DANCE FLOOR WILL HEAL YOU
In this necessary ritual toward liberation, Filipino American dancer and choreographer JAY CARLON combines performance and queer nightlife for a one-night-only immersive club experience in Los Angeles. Created in collaboration with a coalition of experimental AAPI creatives, including sound artist MICAELA TOBIN (WHITE BOY SCREAM), Los Angeles nightlife collectives QNA and SEND NOODZ, and rebel Filipiniana fashion house VINTA GALLERY, WAKE excavates identity, ancestry, and the complexities of the diaspora. This ritual performance provides communities born in the wake of the U.S. empire an opportunity to grieve, heal, and find solace in the collective.
Co-produced by Standard Stages and INTERIM Corporation, in partnership with CAP UCLA and its Mapping Los Angeles series.
WAKE is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
WAKE was developed in part with support from residency at WAREHOUSE at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
MAPPING LOS ANGELES
Celebrating the vibrant multiplicity of communities across the city, Mapping Los Angeles is envisioned as a practice of “urban acupuncture,” as inspired by artist Faustin Linyekula’s choreographic work. Mapping Los Angeles is a series of relationship-building collaborations and new, artist-led engagements across the city that expands CAP UCLA’s cultural production in creative entrepreneurial activities.
Jay has been at the intersection of dance-making, experimentation, and community, having a history of site-specific work that is revelatory as it relates to the place and space and community it exists within. Jay’s work makes room for what has not been centered, calling in, his contemporary and ancestral queer Filipino American existence that reveals itself in an amalgamation of performance, engagement, and deep community care for a proposed future that is embracing many.
– Edgar Miramontes, Executive & Artistic Director CAP UCLA
DIRECTOR/PERFORMER, Jay Carlon
COMPOSER/PERFORMER, Micaela Tobin
PERFORMER, láwû makuriye’nte
COSTUME DESIGN, Caroline Mangosing (Creative Director of Vinta Gallery and Regalo Studios)
LIGHTING DESIGN, Josephine Pu-Sheng Wang
ASSISTANT LIGHTING DESIGN, Dylan Phillips
SOUND ENGINEERING & DESIGN, Cordey Lopez
VIDEO DESIGN, Angeline Meitzler
STAGE MANAGER, Morgan Johnson
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER, Jaspa Ureña
PRODUCERS, Brian Sea (STANDARD STAGES) & Candace Feldman (INTERIM CORPORATION)
TECHNICAL PRODUCTION, Preston Productions
ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES FROM DJ Hey Aswang and SEND NOODZ: Bibi Discoteca, Miss Shu Mai, Skirt Cocaine, Goddess Yuki
VISUALS & SOUNDS BY QNA
QUEER MANIFESTO, JAY CARLON
I can’t seem to shake off this feeling of shame. Is there more to shame than humiliation? Can we decolonize it? What if we privileged the community over our individual needs? Does that change the ways in which we show love, empathy? To quote Mama Ru, "if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love anybody else?" Amen? Or should it be, “if you can’t love your community, how in the hell can you love yourself?” I’m at an intersection where East meets West: an internal battle. I’m exhausted. Immigrant longing is a masterclass in restraint. Virtuosity withheld. What happens if we stop fighting?
There’s an expression in the Philippines — Walang Hiya? It means have you no shame? It’s often used when Filipino parents are upset at their kids for not choosing a career in the medical field, or perhaps living a queer life. It wasn’t always like this. Queerness in pre-colonial Philippines was an integral pillar of the community and way of life, in fact the leaders of the community were often trans female shamans. Did the West’s impact on the Philippines shift the meaning of shame? How does this impact my queerness?
Not queer as in who I sleep with, but queer as in free Palestine.
Not queer as in if I’m a top or a bottom, but queer as in why TF are we still allowing settler colonialism to prevail?
Not queer as in do I have a boyfriend, but queer as in I was built to be a MF warrior on the fringes of society.
Queer as in Filipino.
My ancestors are no strangers to fighting for their livelihood, and on their own land. Our queerness is our survival. After relentless occupations, wars, missions, massacres and genocides, I find our survival miraculous. My family found its way to the colonizers land in the U.S. and made a home for a “better life.”
I am a trojan horse ready to infiltrate the institution from within.
My queer ass mantra is: IMAGINATION IS REAL. Let’s imagine a world that doesn’t exist [yet] and embody belonging in a place that wasn’t made for us. We fragment and cut ourselves into little pieces to make this place habitable, yet queerness always finds a home to survive, and often thrive. Some call it bravery. Some call it delusion. And to me, that’s queer AF.
I made WAKE to fight, grapple, wrestle, and — to co-opt colonial language — conquer the harms of the institution… to reflect the ways in which I, a queer brown child of immigrants, am constantly at war with and benefiting from capitalism and settler colonialism. WAKE is a performance ritual that imagines queer liberation and belonging. It provides love for and embraces the feeling of being “othered” in all its complexities — and posits the question: what happens if we stop fighting?
James Baldwin once wrote, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” For me, the history and the colonial turmoils of the Filipinx experience is as heavy as a sack of rice. Rice has weight, ask any Asian or POC. Rice as cultural identity. Rice as sustenance. Rice as canvas.
White rice. Brown body.
Queer AF
BIOGRAPHIES
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. His work facilitates shared healing and the exploration of post-colonial identity, ancestry, and the complex queer and Filipinx experience in relationship to site and space. The youngest of 12 in a Filipino Catholic migrant family, Carlon connects a global network of Filipinx creatives, organizing community around art and food. Carlon’s continued work with these collectives spans opera, dance, and installation.
Carlon’s 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, homeLA, The Broad Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, and more, along with performances with Makini, The Industry Opera, and Oguri. In New York, they have presented work at 92ndY and The CURRENT SESSIONS, and performed with the Metropolitan Opera and Bill T. Jones. Carlon also researches and develops work internationally and in his ancestral family’s home in Bohol, Philippines.
As teacher and facilitator, Carlon has spoken and led workshops on decolonizing the body and reclaiming space at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, University of the Arts, USC, School of the Art Institute Chicago, and Asians @ Google, among others.
Carlon’s commercial work empowers black and brown artists with agency and autonomy; including choreography for Mndsgn and Kanye West and performance with Solange Knowles and Rodrigo y Gabriela. As associate director and aerial performer with Australian spectacle theater company Sway, they have choreographed for Lincoln Center and performed at the Olympics and the Super Bowl.
Carlon is a recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Production Grant, California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship, and named Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”
Composer and sound artist Micaela Tobin wields her soprano voice against the confines of convention, specializing in experimental and contemporary realms of opera and noise. From her Los Angeles homebase, Micaela focuses on building connections between the physical voice and one’s "inner" voice as a means of empowerment, challenging colonial stories and systems. Integrating voice with electronics, ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism, she weaves dynamic music that is at once alluring and demanding.
With her primary project, White Boy Scream, Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through hardware, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and sound walls. Here, she explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Her most recent full length album BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc) includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, The New Yorker asserts, “Opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire. Her upcoming album, APOLAKI, continues this thread, already declared by Passion of the Weiss as “a brilliant showcase in the evolution of her art [that] pushes her alchemized sound to its absolute limits.”
As a composer and director, Micaela presented her cinematic debut at REDCAT in May 2021, titled BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons, as an adaptation of the synonymous album. Continuing her series incorporating the precolonial mythology of the Philippines, Micaela premiered her second opera in July 2023, APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth, at the historic Zorthian Ranch. She performed as the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, SWEET LAND (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun.) Her talents were also displayed in The Industry’s groundbreaking piece, Hopscotch Opera, A Mobile Opera for 24 Cars (dir. Yuval Sharon); as principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, Gifts the Spirit; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play Medea at UCLALive.
Micaela is the proud recipient of the 2021 MAP Fund, the 2022 NPN Creation & Development Fund, and was most recently awarded the 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, where she began composing her next opera.
Beyond her own creative output, Micaela fosters young and new talent as a voice teacher on faculty at the California Institute for the Arts as well as through her private studio, HOWL SPACE, based in Los Angeles.
láwû makuriye’nte (it/its) solders infernal dissonance, experimental music, live performance, and video art together to encrypt their instinctual bloodcurdling resurgences. it is currently ululating across europe and amerikkka touring their debut album, “LABUAD MEKLOOQ, live biohacking transmutation biome “LAMAN HAYWAN”, and mixed-reality films “PRIMALDIAL MAMGA_ZYGMUTROPHOOZE” and “EARTHBODY(S)_BIOME(TRICS)” as part of the duo mirrored fatality. mirrored fatality is an interdependent, underground, and self-managed tr@nsbinary multidisciplinary two-headed beast who has self-booked diy international tours across turtle island (united states of amerikkka), europe, united kingdom, mexico, and thailand. its live biohacking and transmutation ritual installation performances activate the duo as a multispecies of creatures, terratoids, and transhumans. it uploads their transmedia lore to encode a global warrior community responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land justice, and prison abolition to terminate the usa war machine.
from fall - winter 2024, it is going to be an artist-in-residence at donations project in bilbao, pais vasco and at outsider fest in austin, texas. in spring 2025, it is going to be a farmer and artist-in-residence at star route farm and completing their fellowship with earthlodge center for transformation.
láwû has completed residencies with philadelphia community farm, postcrypt gallery, efa project space, dead bedland, earthlodge center for transformation, star route farm, esalen institute, isis oasis sanctuary, aadk spain, calafou, baesianz x hatezine at set woolwich, university of the underground, tour de moon, nelly ben hayoun studios, the uhuru dreamhouse, fancyland, habitable spaces, prattsville art center, outsider art festival (finland), xi20, konvent puntzero, calafou, macgown art retreat and studio, boss witch productions, betalevel, and outsider festival (austin, texas).
láwû has taught performance lectures & workshops at university of california los angeles, university of california berkeley, california state university of long beach, university of arizona, university of california riverside, university of kansas, university of illinois, university of texas at austin, cal state la, mississippi state university, university of the underground, and columbia university.
láwû has performed at queer/trans and bipoc-led festivals: 143rd dimension, aklasan fest, outsider fest, queer movement fest, and new red order’s the gathering and the notable diy galleries and venues: cone shape top, nett nett radio, la mutinerie, sala trinchera, rubber gloves denton rehearsal studios, and coaxial.
láwû has cocurated their own qtbipoc festivals across california, new york, london, and new orleans including: makibaka for azaadi, biomimicry, cloudburst, unsacrificed terrains, solstice, and ruins.
its music has been included on compilations to directly sustain freedom fighters supporting the movements for the weelaunee forest (stop cop city), mindanao (liyang network), farmers in south asia (sahaita), and gaza (medical aid for palestinians).
Josephine Pu-Sheng Wang (b. 1992, Taipei) is an artist, designer, and technologist who plays with light, sculpture, and electronics in installation and performance art. Josephine uses visual mechanisms, technology, and interactivity to examine the universality of human experiences, with recent work centering around the perseverance of diasporic identities.
Josephine has presented work at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2022 ~ 2023), Taoyuan Technology Performing Arts Awards (2022), Waveform, CultureHub LA (2019), California Institute of the Arts (2018), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2017), and Fabrica de Arte Cubano (2017). Josephine was a recipient of the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Grant (2021) and the LIT Lighting Design Awards: Interactive Lighting Project (2018).
As a lighting designer and creative coder, Josephine collaborates with queer, women, BIPOC, and immigrant artists on exhibition, public art, performance, and corporate commission projects across the United States. Josephine received an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University - Tisch in 2023, a BFA in Lighting Design from California Institute of the Arts in 2018, and a BS in Computer Science / Information Engineering from National Central University, Taiwan in 2015.
Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a writer and animator from the Detroit Metro. She is the 2nd daughter of a Filipino nurse and a German-American scientist. Her work and research utilize fiction and myth to deconstruct how power, race and colonialism are entangled in political and personal narratives of worth and value. Her chapbook, A Drop of Sun, received special mention for the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize, Digging Press, and was published in 2023 by Fauxmoir Lit Press. Her films and multimedia work have been exhibited and screened at festivals and venues including the 46th Asian American International Film Festival, CAAMFest, The Wrong Biennale, NOW Gallery, Singapore Biennial, Anonymous Gallery, Feminist Media Studio, among others. Her debut 3D animated short film, The Roaring of the Carabao (2023), supported by New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), received Honorable Mention from San Diego Filipino Film Festival and Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival. Her work has been awarded fellowships and supported by Asian Cultural Council Individual Fellowship (2024), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2023-2025), Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) (2024), The Studios of Mass MoCA Fellowship (2023) and Harvestworks (2022). She received her MFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Scholar.
Brian Sea is a creative producer of dance, opera, and music performance. Drawn to projects with an independent spirit, he specializes in site-responsive work and non-traditional environments for performance. From grassroots to rooftops, he has presented work with Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), homeLA, Metro Arts, Los Angeles Performance Practice, and 2220 Arts and Archives.
Brian is the Production Director for the contemporary music ensemble Wild Up. He also produces independently with choreographer Jay Carlon and composer Micaela Tobin, including the 2023 premiere of APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth at the historic Zorthian Ranch. He has produced projects and public programs with the experimental opera company The Industry, including the premiere of Yuval Sharon's The Comet / Poppea, Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade's STAR CHOIR at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and LAB Festival. Brian received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
CANDACE FELDMAN [QUEEN] is the daughter of a Zimbabwean Father & Native Hawaiian mother, with 2 decades of experience as a creative alchemist. She mothers INTERIM Corporation, a boutique management consortium co-envisioned with Jerron Herman, for disabled artists that includes Herman, Molly Joyce and Christopher Unpezverde Nunez. Previously she was the Managing Director at Kinetic Light, disability arts ensemble. First Black Director of Programming at UA Presents in Tucson, Arizona. Producing Director at 651 ARTS in Brooklyn, NY, Stage Producer at CBS Corporation in Los Angeles, CA, and Concert Operations at The Juilliard School in New York, NY. Candace holds a B.S. in Theatre Studies Kansas State University, M.B.A. University of Arizona, Cert. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace University of South Florida, and alumnae of the American Express Leadership Academy. She is a recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts National Theater Project Creation & Touring Grant, Joey-Lee Garman Award for Social Justice, Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Gold Medallion Award for Excellence in Theatre.