Unleashing the Brown Madonna
Around 2012, I got introduced to the Daloy Dance Company through the Sandbox Collective’s Imaginarium, a local fringe festival that featured alternative theater, dance, film, and music performances.
In particular, I was acquainted with the contemporary dance company through their founder and artistic director Ea Torrado’s choreography of Dysmorphilia, a piece where dancers dealt with body image issues while wearing prosthetics for extra limbs and body parts. It was an arresting piece; almost grotesque, but frighteningly cathartic.
I followed Daloy’s performances, from the site-specific performances of dance-as-rituals to even the contemporary dance classes I took until they moved to Erehwon Center for the Arts in Commonwealth. It has been a long while since I last caught any of their shows until I was invited to the open rehearsal of Torrado’s latest piece, Brown Madonna.
The Brown Madonna unleashed
By the time of this writing, Torrado, with her team—Arvie Santos on costume and Eaisa Jocson as dramaturge—will be in Germany, performing Brown Madonna to European audiences before it returns to the Philippines for a two-night performance on Aug. 15 and 16.
These local performances will serve as a fundraiser for the company’s upcoming participation in the World Island Exhibition in Yeosu, South Korea in September. The Daloy Dance Company will be representing the Philippines through a series of performances and cultural exchanges.
And what an apt performance to represent us, if ever. The Brown Madonna is a vastly personal and specific piece that draws upon Torrado’s own inclination toward motherhood. Developed over seven years, Brown Madonna is a devised dance theater work that combines choreography with elaborate costume and staging, whose narrative moves in three chapters, and explores the form of dance, storytelling, singing, and rapping.
While its primary focus is that of motherhood—Torrado exploring her relationship with her grandmother and her OFW mother, and her own motherhood as the head of a dance company—the most striking parts of the piece are its anti-colonial messages and how it takes our colonial mentality and subverts it in the way that we take from other countries and make it our own.
The piece opens with Torrado, completely bedecked in a gown made up of found materials—designed and produced by Leeroy New and Arvie Santos—that is both reminiscent of a Santa Cruzan but also that of a fiesta. Moving to the sounds of local fiesta music, Torrado moves across the stage, waving and smiling at the audience, and slowly taking the dress apart piece by piece.
The intricacies of the materials, the colorfulness, and even the utility of it all harkens to the sari-sari store. It’s an image Torrado really wanted to evoke. “I wanted to bring my whole barangay with me.”
By the time she’s down to the undergarments, Torrado has created three shrines in various corners of the stage where she moves into the second chapter of her performance, dancing to a remix of Madonna songs but distorted. Torrado shares the same birthday as the pop star, but she has always been told her features were too Filipino to be considered pretty.
Here, she shows off her dancing skills, physicality, and a complex emotional well. If anything, it’s a magnificent release for her and the audience.
An artistic evolution
I shared with Torrado how Brown Madonna has a lot of whimsical elements, things I never saw in her older work. She replies with, “I think I’ve aged.”
“What comes with age is an owning of one’s own sense of humor. I’m still interested in rituals, but I see rituals as part of the mundane.”
Also, in the process of creating this piece over seven years, Torrado has lost her nanay, her grandmother. “I’m still grieving,” she says. “And part of grieving is realizing the silliness of life. You become more existential when you have a loved one dying on you.”
It’s why the third chapter of the piece has such a personal effect on her. After the dancing parts, she ends Brown Madonna by telling her story and then she begins to sing. She sings songs her nanay loved. “Love songs of martyrdom,” she shares. And mixed in with the storytelling is her story of her own motherhood—of that of her dance company—of raising money to put up shows so she can pay her dancers.
It’s an act of pandering; a satire, in its own way, but one that allows Torrado to honor her nanay and to reflect on her own role as mother of a group of dancers in her dance company. The final act of rebellion? A rap song she wrote on her own that spotlights the imperialist ways seeking to oppress us.
Brown Madonna is not just wrestling with the complex emotions that come with colonial oppression but it is also an overthrow of these shackles. It’s a mesmerizing work.
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