Abstract
While conducting community health work in Tarlac in 2009, Filipino American Melissa Roxas was abducted, imprisoned, and tortured by the Philippine military. She was a victim of enforced disappearances or the disappearance of individuals suspected of being military officers by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Since the Marcos regime, there have been 1,996 known cases of enforced disappearance in the Philippines. Roxas and other political prisoners’ abduction inspired interdisciplinary artist Roselle Pineda to produce a performance piece based on political prisoner Alan Jazmines’ poem “Maliit at Malaking Piitan” (Small and Big Prison). On this account, this paper analyzes Roselle Pineda’s performance art piece “Sagot”, which she devised in 2013, and her creative vision, her exploration of space, medium, and aesthetics. Concepts from Janelle Porter’s “Dance With Camera” and Amelia Jones’ notion of “documentation as performance” were employed to analyze the piece. The video tends to respond to concerns such as the Visiting Forces Agreement between the Philippines and the United States and injustices against political prisoners. Pineda’s take on choosing “Sagot” might be another way of treating her work as a form of resolution regarding her thoughts and experiences on experimenting with an avante-garde style of video of the performance. Thus, just like “Sagot,” this essay takes readers to different departures of responding to this performance video piece.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Political prisoners, Documentation, Performance, Dance, Video, Space
