"promises are made to be broken" - promise

Today, was a slow and easy day. It was also the only day that we could get everyone who would otherwise have been unavailable together. so with this single day that this holiday has given us, I tried to gather my cast for my upcoming intervention at Lumiere gallery, "Promises are made to be broken." And there I was at Makati, drinking wine at 11:30 am, brainstorming and also clearing details of how we shall approach our new adventure. I am excited with the prospect of having to work with such exciting artists. I am happy that time has allowed to bring Jay, Red, Tess and Diego together to do a performance/improvisation project at Lumiere. I know that each one has the capability if not the drive to bare themselves and narrate their stories through their bodies. not only through their bodies but also in space. a dance and performance is not merely exploration of the body but also a design in space, a composition and intervention in space and time.

in this new venture, we try to create and find ways of realizing how to expose the embedded politics of performer and audience. how do we create a transaction, necessitating a contract, an exchange of what? of expectations? of illusion? a promise of breaking the monotony of our everyday habits and life. how to expose the sociology of spectacle through actual real expriences on stage? with this morning's meeting, having seen how much each invited artist expressed their interest in creating a collective work/experience togther is a good indication that despite the dearth of discursive spaces for contemporary dance in manila, there is a small group of voices who would rather create such interventions and accept the fact that in the end our experiment may fail...

watch out for upcoming performance and more process-stories soon!
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Promises are made to be broken (adventure in performance)
November 9 & 11 / 9pm
Lumiere Gallery, Makati City
Donna Miranda with Dancing Wounded and Diego Maranan.


The smoke of lonesome cigarettes paints the sampaguita-scented melancholia of sweet and painful resolves. Our warm bodies share the proximity and tenuous space defining the ambivalent nature of desiring to be desired. Like secrets waiting to be discovered we trace the border of inapproachable space, a nuance waiting to be crossed and overcome. Acrobats of love, cynical and vulnerable at the same time, six warm bodies seek to tell the stories of their bodies by evoking frustration of attention, interrupting choreographic-driven material with improvisation.

A performance is like an adventure, to drop out of the continuity of life, cutting out a piece of endless continuous sequences of perceived experience, detaching it from all connectives and giving it self-sufficient form (thank you Georg Simmel). Offering glimpses into brief episodes of challenged reality, broken continuities and unabridged circumstances. In this adventure, Donna Miranda invites independent dance artists (adventure advocates) Jay Cruz, Red Lasam, Tess Jamias, Mae Bayot and Diego Maranan to temporarily disrupt the sociology of a café environment. Using spoken word, text, gestures and movement, the artists are enjoined to paint the grotesque of seduction and frustration, much like the idea of performing before an audience. How to “install” our bodies in the gallery/café space and allow a narrative to take shape? What happens when we heighten the ordinary under artificial conditions, prolonging the pregnant glances and risk to move beyond the accepted?