Eventually, the creatures emerge from the darkness. Performers Joshua Serafin, Lukresia Quismundo, and Bunny Cadag slowly fill the stage with their movements and haunting songs while a spotlight shines upon them like the sun whose beam feels like benediction. The lyrics of the song are not always comprehensible, and the connection between their movements and questions—“where is home?”, “do we matter?”—not immediately evident, but we are to understand this is the language of the “undefined creatures” who move separately but in unison. The performers collectively create poetry on stage, evoking images of the ocean, nature, and the sensations from their own body.

Disturbance to the poetic world arrives, perhaps inevitably. As Quismundo recounts how the unnamed colonizers took over her world, the performers detach the fabric around their waist and slap the dance floor, the force of whose sound evokes the colonial violence against the native population. The performers are in pain—the pain of having their spirit leave their bodies, the spirit that is meant to inhabit and experience the world with its corporal counterpart. Serafin starts to wonder, first to themselves and then to the audience, “it’s hard to be kind to the world that has not been kind to us. What do you do with it?” The performers then stand together, facing the audience. They smile. They introduce themselves. They ask how everyone is doing.

In light of the brutal violence symbolically enacted on stage just a moment ago, this friendly address appears ambivalent, signaling at once a generous welcome to and a wary distance from the world that has been unkind. The audience is casually invited to chant with the performers the poem that was projected at the beginning of the show. As the performers dance to the words, the quality of their movements become more legible to the audience—and yet, this legibility is the consequence of “undefined creatures” on stage having become definite in the audience’s eyes.

“The power of Serafin’s Pearls comes from its poetry, its imagination, and the performance of Serafin, Quismundo, and Cadag, whose intentionality and intensity of movement unfold on their own unique time.”

During the ensuing interlude, a jet of viscous sap flows from a gigantic bud hanging from the ceiling, which has been introduced as “the mother pearl” that “collects everyone’s stories and makes them better for the future.” The performers return to stage and playfully manipulate the goo, to their own and the audience’s amusement. “Okay, this one is for you all,” they say, creating a gooey swirl with their hands for a second time before spraying it all over the stage. With the third reiteration, however, the performers fall to the floor, seemingly immobile, as the video returns, this time showing them not just in nature, but as part of a community, riding on a truck, watching a child play an instrument, dancing around the campfire—the world that exists beyond the set and the performance, a faraway world that nevertheless coexists with the present moment on stage. As Serafin rows a boat into the sea towards the sunset, the video fades, a visual reflection of the poem from the beginning.

© Michiel Devijver

© Michiel Devijver

The power of Serafin’s Pearls comes from its poetry, its imagination, and the performance of Serafin, Quismundo, and Cadag, whose intentionality and intensity of movement unfold on their own unique time. The final breath of the show, in which the performers are bathed in collective memory of the mother pearl from which they find joy and community, is a moving one. The larger community and Philippine traditions depicted in the video are not fully explained to the audience, and the concrete images from the video come rather suddenly to an audience that has thus far learned to follow the performers’ sensorial language. Due to this unclarity, the show’s answer to the question, “what do you do with it?”, feels incomplete. In a world where the performers must eventually stand and introduce themselves to the audience—in a world where potential for unkindness never disappears—how can one respond?

In contrast to the description provided on the VIERNULVIER website, the performers do not use the words queer or trans in their performance. Their vocabulary used in the storytelling of the relationship between the spirit, the body, and the world invites us to extend our ways of being beyond our familiar use of language. Perhaps, in face of an unkind world, they cannot wholeheartedly welcome nor reject an audience; perhaps, in face of an unkind world, they may be retreating into and simultaneously emerging from a community where they feel at home. Perhaps ambivalence can never be resolved in their answer to the question, “what do you do with it?”, when undefined creatures must sometimes appear as defined creatures. 

Pearls will be presented this week in Bruges and Brussels and later in Leuven, Kortrijk and Berlin. Click here for an overview of the performance dates.