The Arts among the Migrants: Towards a Critical and Creative Empathy in Collaborative Art Making.

MigARTion Project

The Arts among the Migrants: Towards a Critical and Creative Empathy in Collaborative Art Making. This project was initiated by Co.ERASGA originally in partnership with Migrante BC (a community-based organization committed to the protection and promotion of the rights and welfare of Filipino immigrants and migrant workers in British Columbia, Canada).
MigARTion aims to create a critical and creative space where professional artists and the Filipino community, along with other migrant workers, and their families create art together. The artistic partners will carry out various phases of creative exchanges. The project starts with community-based research where the community participants and the artists come together to set up a shared environment of planning, integration and eventual execution of the project.

This process will give critical agency among the participants allowing their distinct voices to emerge within a space and atmosphere of free will, joyous participation and critical public engagement. The mobilization of MigARTion project is spearheaded by Co.ERASGA artistic director, choreographer/dancer Alvin E. Tolentino who has worked on this project since 2017; theatre director Dennis Gupa; revered, music and opera trained/singer Jeremiah Carag, with poet/writer Karla Comanda, Christopher Nazaire and visual artist Bert Monterona.

These are Filipino-Canadian artists whose contributions to the arts community are built around inclusive and decolonizing global art practice rooted in Philippine and Asian themes, issues and spiritualities. Their arts will be integrated to approach a series of learning and experiential exchanges within a collective process.

In this initiative, the artists and the migrant participants work together in exploring artistic practices and will integrate critical and empathic discussions on settler colonialism, history of migration, arts and the migrants and indigenous ways of knowing and being. We believe that this critical and empathic process of artistic integration between the artists and the participants is necessary among the Asian and Filipino-Canadian communities across Canada.

In the past, the Filipino-Canadian community had experienced divided political ideologies and intercultural misunderstanding that caused community and ancestral disintegration. Most recently also the growing rise of racism within the Asian community due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been alarming and disturbing. Our Asian migrant community needs to build a strong belonging and collective empowerment. We envision engaging art practices through (dancing, writing, singing and acting) as a social intervention to marginalization and intercultural alienation and a process that nurtures the everyday practice of criticality and empathy. Eventually, we wish to explore how we can fully reflect the notion of informed participation within the diverse and growing cultural, political and social landscape in Canadian communities.

Meet Our Facilitators

  • Alvin Erasga Tolentino

    Facilitator

    The artistic director of Co.ERASGA Dance renowned for its contribution as arts leader, curator, cultural programmer, teacher and advocate to the Asian diaspora in Canada spanning three decades.

  • Christopher Nasaire

    Facilitator

    A queer writer, editor, and visual artist born and raised in Mindanao. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction, with his works appearing in W49 Magazine and in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino Canadian Writing.

  • Dennis Gupa

    Facilitator

    A Ph.D. theatre director, transnational scholar and educator of intercultural theatre.

  • Jeremiah

    Jeremiah Carag

    Facilitator

    An accomplished musician and singer for stage who is also an educator passionate about immigrant adult learning and community engagement working as a learning initiatives coordinator with the University of BC.

  • Karla Comanda

    Facilitator

    A poet, editor, translator, educator and arts administrator, an MFA graduate of Creative Writing at the University of BC.

Description of Activities

Dance

Classes encourage flow and freedom of movements, play and rigour of movement investigation, stationary and across floor works lead to full body use of expression and joy.

Music

Singing through strengthened breathing. Participants learn the basic skills of sound production and will be able to apply them in various approaches to music production such as singing solo and creating harmonies collectively.

Visual Arts

Never too late to draw - understand the basic premise of drawing and explore the power of colours in a collaborative paint/draw together experience.

Creative Writing

Classes encourage flow and freedom of movements, play and rigour of movement investigation, stationary and across floor works lead to full body use of expression and joy.

Theatre

This workshop adheres in the belief that theatre is for everyone and created communally, and one must be facilitated in that state of creativity to perform their stories of their everyday experiences for social cohesion to happen.

MigARTion - A Collection

Below is an archival booklet created by Lara Maetro documenting the creation process.

Our ongoing community outreach project MigARTion is a collaborative artistic undertaking between the company and MIGRANTE BC, a grassroots organization for newcomer Filipino migrant workers and immigrants. Through workshops with professional artists in voice (Jeremiah Carag), theatre (Dennis Gupa), dance (Alvin Erasga Tolentino), and visual art (Bert Monterona), a committed group of migrant workers come together to participate in up to 14 sessions of artistic creation to express their personal stories of migration through the fine and performing arts.

MigARTion culminated with two days of events on December 18th and 19th, 2018 -- the opening night included the unveiling of the art exhibition featuring works created by the participants, various presentations, performance sharing, community dialogue, a reception, and a proclamation by the Mayor of Vancouver declaring December 18, 2018 as “International Migrants Day” in Vancouver.