Back in November 2019, the Rockbund Art Museum and HUGO BOSS announced Filipino artist Eisa Jocson as the winner of the 2019 HUGO BOSS ASIA Art Award for Emerging Asian Artists. Her works Corponomy and Super Woman KTV were on show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai alongside that of her fellow shortlisted artists – Hao Jingban (Mainland China), Hsu Che-Yu (Taiwan) and Thảo-Nguyên Phan (Vietnam). The winner received a stipend of RMB300,000, aimed at supporting the development of her practice.
Eisa Jocson and the Filipino body
Eisa Jocson was born in 1986 in Manila, and trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet. She is a choreographer, dancer and visual artist whose work focuses on public performance as a key concern. Jocson looks at the international Filipino stereotype, which identifies with the service industry and labour. However, instead of looking at the usual ones, such as domestic workers and caretakers, the artist shifts her focus to the entertainment industry, to shed light on the role that Filipinos play in it.
Jocson creates representations of the Philippine body by exploring its ability to be manipulated and transformed, adapting and responding to different social environments and economic relationships. The artist, furthermore, digs into the effects that social conventions and labour have on the body, and what limitations and conditions they impose on it. Her choreographies attempt to show such differences and transformations, as expressed by widely different social groups of Filipino origins.
Her nominator for the HUGO BOSS ASIA Art Award, Taiwan- and Singapore-based independent researcher and curator Hsu Fang-Tze, said of her practice:
Eisa Jocson examines the malleability of what the Filipino body stands for in both the physical and the socio-economic sense. With her artist approach, Jocson translates disciplinary movements found in different labor conditions into choreographic forms that reflect the way society affects our body.
Her web profile explains how she engages with migrant work in the entertainment industry undertaken by Filipinos at home and abroad, and how it affects the body:
She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of Philippines through migrant work. In all her creations – from pole to macho dancing and hostess to Disney princess studies – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies.
Dance and the sex industry
Jocson’s interest in the body, and specifically the Filipino, focuses on the nature of migrant work in the entertainment industry, and the role of Filipinos in it, but is not limited to the international context, as seen in her pivotal tryptich. The artist is also fascinated by how sex, gender and gender roles, power and violence influence performance, and how all these elements come into play in the way performers shape their act, and the audience looks at it.
Jocson has toured many festivals with her series of three works Death of the Pole Dancer (2011), Macho Dancer (2013) and Host (2015). Macho Dancer won her the Zurcher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize at the Zurich Theater Spektakel in 2013. In Death of the Pole Dancer, she interrogates “the way we look at what we think we look at”. During the performance, the audience is pushed to reflect on what they are looking at: a woman in the act of pole dancing. By transforming the act into an artwork, and placing it in a new context, the work renegotiates notions such as voyeurism and restrain, vulnerability and violence, sexuality and power.
Macho Dancing is a unique phenomenon in the Philippines, in which men dance for men and women in night clubs, using specific movements and body language. As Rolando B. Tolentino writes in “Macho Dancing, the Feminization of Labor, and Neoliberalism in the Philippines”, Macho Dancing is “an economically-motivated language of seduction that employs masculinity as body capital”. In Macho Dancer, it is a woman who performs the typically-male dance, thus challenging our perception of sexuality and questioning gender as a tool for social mobility. By enacting a macho dancer, the woman thus embodies the figure of a strong male, while also transgressing gender and climbing to a higher social status. However, at the same time, she remains female, thus maintaining the status of an objectified woman. It is this “gender loop” that exposes the constructed body, and the fragility of it.
The third performance in the tryptich, Host, is a “one-woman-entertainment-service-machine”. The work explores what goes on in the hostess clubs of Tokyo, where Filipino female and transgender hostesses engage in ‘affective labour’ by performing a version of femininity that caters to Japanese salary men. The hostesses use mimetic strategies and embody hybrid identities. Host reflects on how entertainment strategies create different forms of feminine image, through labour and body politics.
Dance for happiness: the Filipino body in the entertainment industry
In 2017 Jocson made a new series, HAPPYLAND, composed of three parts. Part 1: Princess is a duet with Filipino performance artist Russ Ligtas, while Part 2: Your Highness is a collaboration with five dancers from Ballet Philippines. The third part is set to premiere in Summer 2020.
‘Happyland’ refers to the ‘happiest place on earth’, a slogan used by Disney for its theme parks. Happyland also happens to be the name of a notorious, densely populated slum in Manila. As Jocson writes, her series HAPPYLAND “examines the labour and performance of happiness in the overall production of fantasy within the context of a globalized entertainment industry”. The work looks into the “chain supply of Filipino performers” that reaches entertainment parks such as Dineyland Hong Kong. Dancers from the Philippines are employed in the theme park to perform ‘happiness’, which, as Jocson points out, seems to come easily due to the entrenched American culture in Filipino society.
Princess responds to this phenomenon by hijacking the white-skinned, blonde princess image. The archetypal model is thus enacted by the Filipino dancers, who corrupt it with their foreign bodies, while re-envisioning new narratives of identity-formation.
Part two, Your Highness, continues on Jocson’s investigation into the relation between princess figures, collective and individual fantasy and mobility, by collaborating with five dancers of Ballet Philippines. The dance company, founded in 1969, has become the major source of performers for Disneyland Hong Kong, losing half of its prima dancers in the last decade. The main reason for the exodus is a survival away from a country in economic and political impasse. Your Highness is “a concert that prefigures their potential transition into the industry of happiness”, as the artist writes. The work explores “the colonial narrative and embodiment of the Prince/ss archetype, which hosts and re/produces contemporary Filipino servility and mobility within the global empire”.
In 2018, Princess was selected as one of the outstanding contemporary productions for the 2018 edition of Tanzplattform, Germany. In the same year, Jocson also became a recipient of the 2018 Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Award.
Overseas Filipino Musicians
At SB14, the Sharjah Biennial 2019, Jocson premiered a new commission for the biennale entitled The Filipino Superwoman Band, a work that looks into the affective labour of Overseas Filipino Musicians, who join the service world of Filipinos around the world. The Filipino Superwoman Band is an all female ensemble from the Philippines performing a sonic choreography that revolves around the song Superwoman by Karyn White. Jocson explains in her work statement:
The song’s narrative of a woman’s affective labour is expanded and mirrored with the care work by Filipino migrant workers at large. Through live performance, The Filipino Superwoman Band unpacks the colonial formation and socioeconomic conditions in which Filipino show bands operate in.
The Filipino body at the HUGO BOSS ASIA Art Award
At the 2019 HUGO BOSS ASIA Art Award exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, Jocson presented her recent works Corponomy and Super Woman KTV. In Corponomy, Jocson remixes different performances from her practice into a new presentation that reflects on archival material from her diverse oeuvre. The piece comprises an intertextual installation of dance sequences, a karaoke video and a live performance with her troupe. Jocson uses the term “corponomy” to describe the body as it adapts to different economic situations, as well as the relationship between marginalised communities and mass culture. Jocson’s body “shape-shifts” into different worlds, creating a space for reflection on the migrant Filipino body and what it stands for.
Super Woman KTV is a room with a karaoke video combining song and dance performances inspired by folk rituals, oral traditions and contemporary pop songs. All of these references represent collective notions of femininity to different generations in the Philippines. Jocson employs influences from rituals of the pre-colonial era to create a trajectory that connects tradition to the contemporary empowerment of the feminine.
Eisa Jocson’s practice goes beyond fixed notions of feminity, body, gender and migration, to explore their relationship specific to Filipino society, and to uncover connections that investigate contemporary mobility and migration. Larys Frogier, Director of RAM, said in the occasion of her nomination for the HUGO BOSS ASIA Art Award:
As a female artist conceiving stunning and always unexpected art projects from performance to sound and visual installations, Eisa Jocson has already a unique position in the contemporary art scenes in Asia and globally. The artist creates multilayered images, revisiting the vocabularies of dance and music, as well as infiltrating local popular references and contemporary visual art formats. It is with great intelligence that Eisa Jocson engages today’s life and art, always repositioning her own practice into the unknown, going beyond fixed identities, genders and frontiers.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia