Jaclyn Reyes
ARTIST, RESEARCHER,
& CULTURAL ORGANIZER
PROJECTS
Worn Worlds
Re:Generation
Pahina
Still Lives
Daing Laughing
Infinite Landings
Balik (Sa) Bayan
This Bridge Called Our Backs
We Are They
Dense Negatives
Little Manila Avenue
Redistricting Advocacy
Pamimiyesta
We Belong
Meal to Heal
Mabuhay
Bagyo
Vid-joke
Self-Portrait as the Sulu Sea
Makahiya
RESEARCH
UKAI
Tandang Sora
Snare for Birds
Minda
Landscapes of Return
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Self-Portrait as the Sulu Sea
VIDEO PERFORMANCE, 2018
Self-Portrait as the Sulu Sea
is a layered moving-image work exploring how dance can become a site of memory, identity, and embodied geography. The piece draws on movements from the Pangalay dance tradition of the Sulu region in the Philippines, a vocabulary that articulates the natural world—the sway of coconut trees, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the shifting horizon of water and wind. Through this lens, the body becomes both a vessel and a landscape, a terrain through which histories and ecologies move.
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.
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