Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon

Description:

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (2024) was a new moving image commission and the first solo exhibition in Canada by Filipina Australian artist Bhenji Ra. The thirty-minute film featured a new musical score composed by Tati au Miel and was installed in the Grand Luxe Hall. It was accompanied by three photographic textile works displayed on the first and second floors of Western Front.

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon documents a process of ancestral and intergenerational learning. Its starting point is a ritual journey taken by Ra with her teacher and collaborator Sitti Airia Sangkula Askalani-Obeso. A Tausug elder, Obeso is a cultural bearer of pangalay, a pre-Islamic dance of the Tausug people of the Sulu Archipelago and the East Coast Bajau.

Falling into a dreamlike ancestral plane, Obeso and Ra develop and trouble the roles of student and teacher, mother and daughter. Whilst relaying the history of pangalay, Ra and Obeso explore the cultures and structures of movement practices in the Sulu Archipelago and their relationship to precolonial understandings of gender and identity, in particular the bantot or bayot, relating to a transfeminine person. A fabulation unfolds in which a celestial being resembling a winged woman of supernatural beauty, known across the archipelago as the Biraddali, reveals itself through dialogue and dreams. Translated from Tausug or other Samal languages as “angel” or “skymaiden,” the Biraddali are believed to live in the sky and possess the power to change their form. As the imaginal passage unfolds, pangalay and the Biraddali become symbolically interrelated, with Ra interpreting the Biraddali as a trans, non-human figure and the originator of the dance.

Initially appearing documentarian in style, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon unravels into its own mythology as the bond of mentorship becomes an offering that weaves bantot and Tausug genealogies together. The film foregrounds a pedagogy of decolonial choreography. It develops languages of movement that connect vocabularies of gender with past and present colonial realities in the Asia-Pacific region. This continues Ra’s ongoing work of exploring performance methods that decentre hegemonic Western dance conventions and engage critically with expressions of gender and sexual difference. 

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon was co-commissioned by Auto Italia and presented with support from the Government of Canada.

Curated by Susan Gibb and Kiel Torres.

Documents:

• Bhenji Ra: Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon exhibition brochure (2024). Essay by Kiel Torres.