Collaborator Highlights: Tricia Ong and Lisa Suguitan Melnick
Proud to introduce Agasan’s collaborators in sound and movement.
A R T I S T B I O:
Tricia Ong is a dancer and arts educator based in Oakland. She has studied Filipino traditional dance and contemporary forms and enjoys sharing the love of moving with people of all ages.
A G A S A N T E S T I M O N I A L:
Leading the Agasan project movement workshops last summer was an experience that fortified my desire to pursue truth- the truths of my own body and of the bodies of those in my community. I had never led a group of adults, unknown to me, in the Filipinx community through a movement workshop, so I was nervous. But as people began to move, I soon felt the familiar buzz of bodies in motion- everyone’s vibrations swirling around me. But my doubts persisted, “I think they hate this! What am i doing? Do they think I’m crazy?” I had to check in. I brought the activity to a pause, called a water break and invited everyone to circle up.
One of the first comments from a participant alluded to becoming unlocked. Someone else said something about the importance of collective healing. I was floored and I thought, “They’re already feeling this?!” and I remember looking to Rachel, thinking, “OMG, it's working! It’s going as planned!” I exhaled. I looked around at all of the strong beautiful Brown bodies, vessels of fierce spirits and knew that something had been invoked. I inhaled and dove back in, moving with the group for the rest of the session. In “giving medicine”~agasan~ I was receiving the gifts of their creative power in motion.
Six months later, shelter in place was ordered and we had our first Agasan Project zoom meeting. What a strange, awkward moment. Everyone was new to this, and staring at the squares of brown faces like a misfit brady bunch on my laptop, I think my body was saying, “There’s no way this is going to work. People moving in space together, that is what the medicine is!!!” But another part of me had to go along with the idea to “pivot” to the online platform. We didn’t know what this was going to be, but I believe we all put faith and trust in the creative process and in the integrity of each collaborator’s artistic skills.
Creating with all of the collaborators has become the needed medicine for these times. The twice weekly meetings, at first awkward, has become refuge for me. I have felt myself open to the practice of checking in and gave myself permission to be real, raw with the people I was seeing onscreen. Because of the project at hand, realness is needed. We’ve had meetings where everyone was frustrated, and nothing seemed to work. We’ve had some where silliness has taken over. We’ve had many others where all of us were just spent, and the zoom-ing all day was making us stiff, cross-eyed and cranky. But I always feel better at the end of our meetings, sharing smiles and laughs. I am filled with gratitude for how we show up and hold each other with so much care.
There is an uprising happening in our country. The outrage at the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Toni McDade and Ahmaud Arbery by police (and former police), and locally Sean Monterossa and Erik Salgado, is bringing hundreds of thousands of people out to the streets to protest the injustices of American racist systems, particularly against Black people. On the streets it feels like the tides are changing- that this surge in activity is strengthening the social justice movements that our ancestors worldwide, and now we, have been persistently working toward for centuries.
Individually and collectively we have everything we need to create a better future for us. But do we have the ability to truly work together to achieve this? A safer world for everyone? I'm not sure. This is where faith has to come in. We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And as long as we continue to put work behind these righteous dreams, I believe we are moving in the right direction. In the future when I am asked how I spent my time during SIP and the uprising of 2020, the community created through the Agasan Project will be named as one of my main anchors. Our strength and resilience are our greatest gifts, we are here against all odds, our spirits fighting, thriving, and loving.
A R T I S T B I O:
Lisa Suguitan Melnick, third generation Filipinx-American of Ilokano and Cebuano roots, leads meridian-opening sessions emphasizing stretching, meditative breathing postures, and energy awareness/restoration. Also a Sound and Music Practitioner certified by the California Institute of Integral Studies, she utilizes sound to promote relaxation and refreshment during her meridian sessions.
A G A S A N T E S T I M O N I A L:
Agasan holds-- carries-- a place of wonder and expansion. For those of us who have chosen to offer our gifts in this powerful collaborative community, along the way we have each, in our own ways, also learned how to receive. For me, the most fulfilling occurrence for a healer is when the line between healer and receiver melds into a synchronous harmony. The Agasan Team experiences this blending of energies seamlessly expressed in Movement, in Sound, in Visual Expression.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic which within a week’s time, caused the entire planet to immediately Shelter-in-Place, we had been working intensely on our face-to-face culminating presentation to the public at the Brava Theatre. The memory of that one meeting via Zoom, when the Team collectively decided to migrate Agasan to an online format is still quite vivid: it was a tough meeting, feeling as if we were starting again, from a place unfamiliar to us. How do our gifts of Sound, Movement, Visual Expression transcend each frame? How may we engage our audience—cohorts in the Agasan vision? How do we come back to Ourselves? How many ways may we meld the lines between our Zoom frames? And yet, we continue to show up, unaltered. Ready. For me one of the most uncomfortable ironies Sheltering in Place has presented is the resulting transparency. Not long ago, I might have called it exposure--a container implying vulnerability. Yet it is this very aspect-- transparent vulnerability-- which will open up the frames to make way for impactful co-creation. My intention is to hold space for we participants to experience our frames as containers. For we begin the Agasan journey by first coming back to ourselves.
Register now for tomorrow’s event at 8pm PST.