What happens when we revert to a language, a culture and a way of living – before the world was divided into strict gender roles and hierarchies?

A collective of dance artists from the Filipino diaspora invite us into a space between worlds – a place for questions, memories and opportunities: What traces do we carry from an era and a culture that we never got to know? In SIYA, the artists are looking for the world of ambiguity – and for new ways of being and of relating.

In the Filipino language, there are no gender pronouns. The word ‘siya’ encompasses everyone, a word that both includes and exceeds. This gives rise to the question: what other traces of queerness, femininity and spiritual complexity existed in the Philippines before the colonial era?

One such trace is Babaylan – the pre-colonial spiritual leaders, the healers, the midwives, the custodians of divine knowledge. Those who stood between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Those who lived outside the Western norms of gender, and who carried the force of the ambiguous.

In SIYA, these forces start moving. Mysterious but recognisable figures are formed, and disappear again. A body turns into a bird, then a hungry apparition that stares at you. Friendly and threatening. Playful and serious. Seductive and repellent – at the same time.