La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and Kinding Sindaw to Present New Exhibition 'In Honor of the Ancestors'

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and Kinding Sindaw present a new exhibition, In Honor of the Ancestors: Indigenous Living Traditions from the Philippines in Diaspora, open now through Sunday, January 26, 2024 from 1pm - 7pm, at La MaMa Galleria, 47 Great Jones Street, NYC, 10012. Attendance is available with a suggested donation of $5-$20, with tickets available here. For more information, please visit https://www.lamama.org/shows/kinding-sindaw-in-honor-of-the-ancestors-2024.

Through the debut of twenty-five unpublished photographs by the late Asian-American activist Corky Lee in conversation with sacred heirlooms and newly commissioned documentary films, the story of Kinding Sindaw emerges by celebrating the lives of the community's hereditary and creative forebears from both Mindanao and downtown New York. Artists whose work appears in the exhibition: Corky Lee, the late Bai Labi Hadji Amina, Sultan Mamintal Dirampaten, June Maeda, Sultan Mohammad Giwan Mastura, and Ellen Stewart.

Drawing on techniques from Theater of the Oppressed, visitors are invited to take off their shoes and participate as 'spect-actors' within an immersive installation conceived as a community space for live performance and ceremony, lectures, discussions, and workshops: including beginners' classes led by master kulintang gong musicians, introductory exercises to pangalay movement healing, and betel-nut rituals, offering immersive transformational wellness and healing experiences.

The exhibition presents Kinding Sindaw's archives to the public for the first time in the three decades since its founding. Back home, traditions passed down by the ancestors weave inseparably through everyday life as dance, martial arts, chanting, and extemporaneous poetry. To preserve this aliveness, Kinding Sindaw unleashes its archives through the lens of salsilah, which to the Muslims of Mindanao can refer both to a clan's 'genealogy' as well as the recited litany of its names. From the Arabic for 'chain' or 'connection', salsilah expands understandings of archival practice by encompassing the oral, performative, and ritual dimensions of provenance and collective memory.

In collaboration with Asian American Arts Alliance, In Honor of the Ancestors will hold its closing night ceremony on Friday, January 26, 2024, starting a 6pm, honoring the life of Corky Lee (1947 - 2021) and his impact on Kinding Sindaw and the Asian American community at large. The event will held the night before the anniversary of his passing in 2021 andwill feature performances and speeches in honor of Corky and a light reception with catering that will offer the opportunity to taste foods indigenous to Mindano. Corky's photographs will encircle the space - the show will debut over 25 unpublished works from 1990-2020. New York State Senator John Liu will be in attendance. Attendees must RSVP directly to emily@kindingsindaw.org.

This event was curated by Ali Purpura, along with Margaret Guzman, Film Curator, who directed and produced the video program consisting of archival performance footage and newly commissioned documentary shorts, and Emily Goes, Programmatic Curator, who designed and produced the event series, including the closing night ceremony in honor of Corky Lee.

Through photography and community organizing, Corky Lee documented and restored the contributions of Asian American Pacific Islanders to the historical record. With an insider's lens focused intimately on his subjects and fellow comrades, Lee dedicated his career to empowering other artists. Lee approached Potri after a performance in Union Square in 1992, and photographed every Kinding Sindaw performance through 2020's Pananadem. A guiding pillar of Kinding Sindaw's Board of Directors since its founding, Lee generously shared his influence and connections to amplify and lift the voice of Filipino-Americans. As a joke, he was known to carry business cards that named him "The Undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate."

"I'd like to think that every time I take my camera out of my bag," Corky Lee told an interviewer, "it's like drawing a sword to combat indifference, injustice and discrimination, trying to get rid of stereotypes."

About the Curators

Ali Purpura (born Christopher Purpura) is a Filipinx multidisciplinary artist, writer, and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Having initially joined Kinding Sindaw five years ago as a performer, Ali returned as a guest artist in 2022 at the invitation of Potri Ranka Manis to co-direct and -choreograph performances at The Cooper Union and the company's Off-Broadway debut at the New Victory Theater-The Legend of the Monkey and Mermaid-for which Ali also led the lighting, set, and costume design. Their unorthodox dance experience includes immersion in Brooklyn's underground House and Techno music communities, and training as an initiated semazen or 'whirling dervish' in the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, with whom they have whirled in innumerable zikr ceremonies as well as special events, including at Subud New York, Deepak Chopra's HomeBase, and the opening ceremony for the 2017 NYC Dance Parade.

Formerly the Director of Research at the international design studio NO ARCHITECTURE, Ali collaborated closely with their mentor and Founding Principal Andrew Philip Heid A.I.A. to write the introduction to the 2023 monograph Glass Houses published by Phaidon; as well as a prize-winning concept for the 2019 Shenzhen Qianhai Landmark competition, which was shortlisted alongside industry leaders such as Sir Norman Foster, MVRDV, and Snohetta. Soon after graduating at the top of their class from the University of London's Bartlett School of Architecture with an MA in Architectural History, Ali's research on movement theorist Rudolf Laban won the Royal Institute of British Architects' (RIBA) Award for Outstanding Master's Degree Thesis in 2015. Prior to graduate study, Ali earned their BA in Art History from NYU and designed multiple video art exhibitions as the Curator of Projected Images for the NYC debut of the Paris-based Cutlog Contemporary Art Fair in 2013. Ali learned the process of mounting exhibitions at MoMA PS1's curatorial department, Gagosian, and the Andy Warhol Museum, which also acquired one of Ali's early works on paper for its permanent collection. As an artist, Ali explores the intersections of dance-ritual, Queer Theory, and spatial practice.

Margaret Guzman is a Filipina-American documentary filmmaker and journalist based in NYC. Upon her 2021 graduation from NYU, where she studied Critical Creative Production and Documentary Film, she has since pursued a career in video journalism as a Producer with Business Insider. She currently covers entertainment for their YouTube-first show, "How Real Is It?"

Born and raised in Manila, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 10 - and retains her mother tongue of Tagalog and Filipino upbringing in her New Jersey home. It wasn't until college, exposed to NYC's multitude of cultures and identities, that she felt a longing to explore her identity as a first-generation Filipina immigrant. Margaret first encountered Kinding Sindaw while researching her undergraduate documentary thesis, where she explored how Filipinos in diaspora use performance as a means to connect to the Philippines. The research evolved into a 73-minute documentary film, Live at Gotham, which weaves Margaret's autobiographical relationship to performance with the life of Potri Ranka Manis and history of Kinding Sindaw.

Shortly after, Margaret officially joined the dance company as a performer in the 2021 Queensboro Dance Festival. She has since danced with the company for their off-Broadway run at New Victory Theater, as well as their latest La MaMa E.T.C. production Posaka in October 2022. She currently serves as the Archivist for Kinding Sindaw and implements new systems for preserving the company's cultural heritage and collections amassed over its thirty-plus-year history of performing in NYC With her passion of archiving and documentary film, she hopes to uplift other underrepresented and diasporic communities through the framework of contemporary art and culture, social justice, and activism.

Emily Anne Goes, born and raised in East Side San Jose, is a Filipino New York-based performer and pathfinder. Emily attended New York University Tisch School of the Arts and completed her BFA in Drama in 2020. She is an interdisciplinary musical performer, NYSCA Folk Art Apprentice, company member of Kinding Sindaw Heritage Foundation and student of Tradition Bearer, Potri Ranka Manis, learning to assert and preserve Filipino indigenous traditions and reflect on the resilience and resistance of the Moro people against centuries of colonization under Spanish rule.

Dedicated to nurturing spaces that acknowledge formative histories and healing pathways forward, Emily currently co-conspires with The CRAFT Institute, founded by Dr. Monica White Ndounou, as the Director of Marketing and Communications and supports the marketing of CreateEnsemble.com and #BlackTheatreDay. In addition, under the same guidance and leadership of Dr. Ndounou, Emily is on the steering committee of The International Black Theatre Summit. Previously, she proudly served as the Operations Manager for Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and now works as a consultant for their annual Arts in Action Festival.

She was most recently seen in a developmental reading of Performing Filipina by Lianah Sta. Ana. She is represented by Shushu Entertainment. Gratefully standing on the shoulders of those before her, Emily sees and feels her family with each breath.

About Kinding Sindaw

A non-profit dance theater and resident of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, Kinding Sindaw reclaims and revitalizes the living traditions and oral histories native to the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines, and advocates for the self-determination of 63 Indigenous nations, including the Bukidnon, Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug, and T'boli. Kinding Sindaw exists to assert, preserve, reclaim, and re-create the traditions of dance, music, martial arts, storytelling, and orature of the indigenous peoples of Mindanao, Southern Philippines.

Founded by a Meranao Bai Labi, Tradition and Culture Bearer, Potri Ranka Manis, Kinding Sindaw recreates the oral traditions of ancestral art forms from Mindanao and is a resident company of La MaMa Experimental Theater Company. Our mission is to educate and enlighten communities about the history and cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Philippines. Through the use of indigenous music, dance and cultural art forms, we serve as an important educational and cultural resource in New York City. We aim to promote the advocacy for indigenous peoples, as well as increase awareness of universal themes that are part of the human experience. The range of our programs also integrates the health benefits of the ancestral movements that we show and teach to our audiences. Through these cultural art forms, we advocate for the preservation of natural resources that are the livelihood of the Indigenous peoples. Wellness and healing rituals are also embodied in the repertoire of Kinding Sindaw to increase health and healing awareness of participants and audiences.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KindingSindaw/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindingsindaw

Website: https://www.kindingsindaw.org

About La Mama Experimental Theatre Club

Founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, La MaMa is a home for artists of all identities, races, ages, and cultures. At La MaMa, artists are provided the space, support, and creative freedom to explore new forms of expression and to make new work. La MaMa builds audiences that are integral to the creative process. Our local and global community members who gather in our physical, digital, and hybrid spaces to see new work, are often the first audience for that work. The audience response helps to shape the evolution of the piece for the artist, and is an essential part of the creative ecosystem that La MaMa nurtures. La MaMa believes art is a force for change. Violence, discrimination, and systemic racism will not stop without a unified resistance. La MaMa is committed to battling bigotry and intolerance in all its forms, and to providing inclusive spaces for our local, national, and global community.

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