Ugnayan ng mga Anak ng Bayan deeply appreciates all the participants, volunteers, performers and allies for joining us on Sunday, June 19th for Journey of a Brown Girl Performance and Workshop. The event was well attended not only by young Pinays but also by a diverse spectrum of allies who were multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-lingual and multi-gendered. With a venue brightly decorated with malongs, banners and art, the event was filled with an afternoon of activities that facilitated critical thinking on the experiences and social expectations on Filipino women as youth, students, migrants, workers, mothers and also as gender non-conforming individuals. Through a visual art installation, theater performance, participatory image theater workshop and feasting on homemade Filipino food, the event brought to light Filipino women's issues and created a momentum to continue to discuss, tackle and organize around gender-based challenges in our community.
We began the afternoon with an art installation featuring young women visual artists of Philippine ancestry. Cultural workers who exhibited their visual art include Kimberly Baglieri, Jana Lynne Umipig and Vanessa Ramalho. The themes the young cultural workers incorporated in their pieces included but were not limited to violence against women, the violent nature of body fluids and the actions that release them from our bodies, and images of proud Filipino women. While viewing the artistic works, participants ate a meal prepared by volunteers from Ugnayan’s sister organization, DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association.
Ugnayan would like to specially thank the performers for a thoughtful and creative one hour theater piece of Journey of the Brown Girl. For all your hours of dedication to memorizing and rehearsing, we give recognition to Brown Girls Krismin Inocentes, Vanessa Ramalho and Jana Lyne Umipig.
Immediately after the Journey of a Brown Girl piece, participants were encouraged to take part in small groups that enabled them to more intimately reflect on the issues highlighted in the theater performance and draw in their own experiences. In the "Pinay Box" exercise, individuals were able to visually illustrate who are Filipinas and to develop a collective understanding of messages that mold Filipinas and structure gender, systematically giving power and privilege to heterosexual men at the expense of women, especially LBTQ and gender non-conforming women. To better understand the extent the varying degrees of power and privilege in our community, a large group exercise, "Stepping in/ Stepping Out," showed solidarity among participants about their experiences with race, gender, and class discrimination. The workshop ended with another exercise on depicting theatrical images of marginalized stories of Filipino women. Participants used their bodies to create group tableaux that vividly captured women's oppression and liberation.
The Journey of a Brown Girl Performance and Workshop was a huge step forward in addressing Filipino women’s issues -- especially for the youth and workers. It also inspired Filipino men and LGBTQ participants to consider taking on a similar project to delve into exploring and organizing around specific challenges faced by them. Participants agreed that the cultural event sparked a need to collectively confront issues discussed in Journey of a Brown Girl and to organize the community.
Ugnayan organizers encouraged participants to take part in another Education for Action program later in the summer: Philippines 101. For more information and to register for the workshop series, please visit ugnayan.blogspot.com/p/phils101.html.
For more pictures, visit the Ugnayan Facebook Page.
Photos by Riya Ortiz.
For a Journey of a Brown Girl program book, [click here].
Program book design by Ana Liza Caballes.
