Eisa Jocson
Wednesday, December 4, 2019 | 7 PM – 10 PM
Bellas Artes Projects
Bellas Artes Outpost, 2/F The Alley at Karrivin, 2316 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati
This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP: http://bit.ly/manilazooBAP
In Disney’s empire of manufacturing “happiness,” animals and objects are anthropomorphized, formatted with US-American values and ways of being. Wherein lions are kings; monkey, cricket and fish are sidekicks to humans; teapot is a matriarchal surrogate; and zoos are utopias—all brightly constructed to keep humans self-centeredly entertained and within the empire’s global reach.
In Hong Kong Disneyland, Filipinos are the favorite entertainment labor force. They are employed as highly skilled, energetic, world-class happiness-machines and fabricated as experts in performing anything effectively entertaining.
“Manila Zoo” is a new work as the third part of Jocson’s Happyland Series, tentatively titled Manila Zoo. In “Happyland 1: Princess,” two Filipino performers hijacked the figure of Snow White. Happyland 2: “Your Highness,” a group of ballet dancers unpacks their formatted ideal bodies made to enter the Disney workforce. This tertiary stage pushes Filipino performativity to transform from anthropomorphic happy animals in the Disneyland park into actual animals captured in the zoo, performing the labor of zoo animals.
Biography
Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines, trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet. She has been commissioned by and toured extensively in major contemporary festival with her solo triptych: “Death of the Pole Dancer” (2011), “Macho Dancer” (2013) and “Host” (2015). “Macho Dancer” won the prestigious Zurcher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize at the Zurich Theater Spektakel in 2013. Her new series HAPPYLAND (2017) is a study on Disney Princess and the production of fantasy within the ‘happiness empire’. She is a recipient of 2018 Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards and 2019 Hugo Boss Art Asia Award for Emerging Asian Artists.
