Staging Filipinx Migration in British Columbia

Abstract

Given the vibrant Filipinx Canadian community in British Columbia, there have been several efforts made and ongoing attempts to create artistic and performance spaces for them to showcase their migrant narratives. Highlighting theatre as a space for Filipinx migrant communities to collectively share their stories, customs, traditions, and culture on stage, this essay aims to offer a perspective on what Nina Lee Aquino calls the “museumization” of diasporic art. Complicating the ways in which Filipinx cultural knowledge and tradition can be distilled as artifact in theatre productions in the process of museumization, this paper examines the ways Filipinx migration in Vancouver has been staged in ways that are tailored for a dominant white foreign audience. I turn to the devised community-based theatrical production buto/buto: bones are seeds (2022) to show the importance of transformative efforts that work against museumization. This paper examines selected fragments of the production and its process that demonstrate and employ alternative ways of staging migrant narratives, enabling a reparative reimagining that confronts the burden of representation and critiques existing societal imaginaries imposed on the Filipinx immigrant body. Ultimately, this essay addresses the challenges of representational politics, recognizing that not only what stories and whose stories are told in theatre are at stake, but also how and why they are told.