Body Language: Eisa Jocson
Contemporary artist Eisa Jocson is deeply attuned to the different languages of the body. Trained in ballet, Jocson’s skills in pole dancing became her entry point into the world of performing arts, where she began as a guerrilla pole dancer doing interventions on traffic lights, railings and signposts in public space, hijacking vertical landscapes and architectures of control. Although she considers her own body sculpturally, as material, her work inhabits, reflects and complicates other bodies: laboring bodies that are malleable and migratory, trying to survive.
By Nadine Khalil
The body is both the subject and location of her practice; it also becomes the site of unlearning in the ways in which Jocson trains and subjects herself to different physical regimens. Each work embeds her body’s changing sensibility and stance. For Death of the Pole Dancer, commissioned by the In Transit 2011 festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, she took on expressions of length, weightlessness and flight, where the pole became an extension of her body - she likens it to the third leg of a tripod. For Macho Dancer (2013), she built up her body to relay experiences of weight, gravity, and grounding in a constructed, idealized masculinity manifested in this popular form of dance in nightclubs across the Philippines. Both se-ductive and self-assured, her visual language adhered to the dictum "softness sells". Zoo (2020), on the other hand, had performers take on the role of animal characters, commenting on systems of spectacle in theme parks, as well as the rage that lurks beneath confinement.
Intrigued by gendered representations in the entertainment industry, Jocson moves beyond the per-formativity of masculinity and femininity to an interrogation of the biopolitics of caregiving and domestic work. Focusing on indentured, contractual bodies that move across countries, conditioned by socioeconomic circumstances, she implicates networks of flows and cultural capital through the lens of service-based econo-mies. For example, her investigations into pole dancing looked at the shift from women commissioned to perform for the male gaze in the red light district to those who are learning skills for a competitive fitness industry. Where the movement vocabulary is the same in both cases, the economic and social codes have changed.
Her latest project Bidyoke includes the performance-video Pasyoke (derived from Spanish Pasqua for Easter and Karaoke) by The Filipina Superwoman Band, which unravels as an expansion of her body of work around notions of the Filipino singing culture as a state-supported export, mimicry in the music industry, and Snow White and Superwoman as archetypes. The band is an all-female musical ensemble responding to the "Overseas Filipino Musician" (OFM) phenomenon in clubs, bars, hotels and cruise boats throughout Asia and the Middle East. A cross between contemporary dance and music video, Pasyoke merges genres, combining Pasyón, a 16th-century epic Biblical narration of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, with Bidyoke - karaoke gatherings customary in the Philippines for celebrations. The project was conceived as a research project that would have seen Eisa Jocson spending time as an artist-in-residence in Dubai. These plans were thwarted by the pandemic and the little research that was still possible was done remotely, while the production took place mostly in the Philippines instead of the UAE.
Jocson’s earlier performance, Princess (2017), marked the first time she instrumentalized the voice, mirrored by a male partner. She further articulates this in the Pasyón structure, which is part of Pabása, a hy-brid form of Catholic hymns and indigenous oral traditions about tribal heroes in pre-colonial Philippines. She draws on the Tagalog adaptation of Karyn White’s song Superwoman by Filipino singer Janine Desidario, who released it with a new title: "I am not a superwoman" (Hindii Ako si Darna) - "… I am not darna (superwoman) who is invulnerable," she sings in Tagalog (Pagka’t hindi ako si darna Na hindi tina-tablan). "Darna" in the Philippines is not only a superwoman, she is also an iconic comic book heroine.
The original song, which posits the female protagonist/narrator/singer as a symbol of domesticity decrying unrequited affections, is taken further in Jocson's all-sacrificial woman who is in states of both mourning and magic. The dance is embedded with both foreignness and familiarity - there’s something pre-religious or primordial about the artist’s contortions in nature with two other dancer This relationship be-tween the body and the earth is brought forth in the figure of Darna, who represents the feminine, laboring body that is no longer separate from the land. Jocson chose to situate her work around the Masungi Georeserve to offer a comparison between resource extraction and the nature of extractive labor - migrant bodies that can be shipped anywhere in the world. Darna thus represents the workers’ suffering overseas. She becomes a symbol of resistance against the nationalist propagandist slogan "Ang mga Bagong Bayani" (Our Modern-day Heroes), intended as an official recognition of the sacrifices and economic contributions of the Filipino migrant workers to their country.
If the karaoke motif with redacted text provides dissonance, this is intentional - it points to what is not being said or to all the different levels of meanings that can be generated with different combinations of words. And yet the aesthetic codes of this self-censorship appears manual, not digital. This was a conceit Jocson employed in her earlier installation of The Filipino Superwoman Band at the Sharjah Biennial in 2019.
The second part of the Bidyoke project is OFW Bidyoke (three short videos) with OFW representing Overseas Filipino Workers. Jocson commissioned migrant Filipino workers in Dubai to create moving im-ages to karaoke songs from pop culture that resonated with them. The results are nostalgic and shift the agency of the performer to the subject, a gesture that is present in the ethnographic nature of Jocson’s re-search. Karaoke is perceived on the one hand as part of the exploitative neoliberal structures that hire Fili-pino entertainers to sing cover versions of Western songs in nightlife venues, and on the other as supportive communal frameworks that celebrate social and familial engagements.
With a diverse repertoire of movement and affectation, Jocson draws her viewers into a world of macho dancers, female hostesses and Disney princesses, a "Corponomy," as she puts it, in which both indi-vidual and collective bodies are formed and reconditioned according to the commodification of desire and entertainment.