Jaclyn Reyes
ARTIST, RESEARCHER,
& CULTURAL ORGANIZER
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Self-Portrait as the Sulu Sea
Inspired by feminist thinkers who describe the body as "the first country"—a site marked by borders, migration, and reclamation—the work reflects on learning dance as a form of inquiry. It is an attempt to unlearn the posture of being seen as an outsider, a posture shaped by the quiet pressures of assimilation and the experience of being kept on the margins. Through Pangalay, I search for other ways of inhabiting a Filipino body—ways that flow, bend, and reach beyond what is expected or constrained.
Though I do not have ancestral ties to Sulu, this is not merely an act of cultural exchange but an engagement with what it means to inhabit nature itself—to move as the sea, to become porous to place. The layered imagery blurs the dancer’s form with shifting waters, suggesting an identity that is tidal, interdependent, and inseparable from the landscape it moves through.