2024 Out-FRONT! Festival – Paz Tanjuaquio / TOPAZ ARTS Dance Productions

Pioneers Go East Collective presents the second edition of the Out-FRONT! Festival. Centering LGBTQ and feminist voices, the festival features the work of artists exploring bold new performance modes for a lively exchange of art and culture.

Paz Tanjuaquio / TOPAZ ARTS Dance Productions

Silweta (World Premiere)

TOPAZ ARTS Dance Productions will premiere an evening-length dance, Silweta, choreographed and performed by Paz Tanjuaquio with a trio of guest performers, and created in collaboration with sound and visual artist Todd B. Richmond. With Silweta, based on silhouette images of traditional dance forms of the Philippines, Tanjuaquio traces a distant dance in her ongoing process of creating new movement. Behind the silhouettes, Tanjuaquio explores cultural connections, migration, and displacement. Inspired by various texts, including Dead Stars, a short story by her namesake Paz Márquez-Benítez, in which the idea that light from dead stars still shine can be a metaphor for lives lost and a presence of culture that resonates within our bodies. Silweta brings to light edges of a distant dance, tracing the outer limits of our connected lives. The work includes Petroglyph by Indigenous composer Brent Michael Davids, a digital dance of silhouettes made with Onome Ekeh will also be incorporated within the performance.