Grief is a Filipino Boxing Match

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists. Photo: Argel Rojo.

In 2021, the Los Angeles-based dance artist Jay Carlon suffered a litany of losses: his brother was found dead on a Little Tokyo sidewalk; his grandmother died in the Philippines shortly after (limited by Covid travel restrictions, he and his family mourned over Facebook Live); and he broke up with his partner of 15 years. Years earlier, in 2008, his father had also died. From the grief of these losses came a series of three performances that took place over three years. The first performance, WAKE, was staged in November 2021 as part of the Flower of the Season performance series at Venice’s Electric Lodge, and the second, Novena, was performed over several nights in 2022 at REDCAT. The final version, also named WAKE, created with composer Micaela Tobin and produced in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Center for the Art of the Performance, was performed last October on the expansive dance floor at Don Quixote, a Boyle Heights quinceañera hall and nightclub.

The one-night event last autumn was structured as a nine-round boxing match in which Carlon faced off with a punching bag filled with rice—hung suspended center stage, it doubled as the physical manifestation of his grief. Performance artist láwû makuriye’nte played the part of a ring announcer and coach, while Tobin operated a DJ booth on an elevated stage. The billing for the show invited “communities born in the wake of the U.S. empire an opportunity to grieve, heal and find solace in the collective.”¹ With this framework in mind, the punching bag could also symbolize postcolonial grief—for Carlon, grief of losses from the Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines from which his parents immigrated. When Carlon punched the rice-filled bag during the performance, he was in a battle with not only himself, but his colonizer. During the seventh round, he escalated the resistance, stabbing the bag with a blade, tearing it open as its innards of calrose rice spilled over the artist and onto the dance floor.

But by the end, you got the sense that Carlon no longer had fight left in him. We saw Carlon collapse on the floor as rice from the bag poured over his body. From this vulnerable place, Carlon spoke for the first time in the hour-long performance, directly to the audience through a microphone: He asked why he felt like his survival depended on his fighting, and wondered what would happen if he stopped, whether his grief would disappear, and with it, the memory of his lost loved ones. The performance was intimate, as much of the audience, which skewed largely Asian American, Latinx, and queer, huddled around Carlon, eye-level with him. The audience, which included his mother and brother, remained engaged throughout Carlon’s dynamic performance. But it was Carlon opening himself to the crowd, spilling rice, and with it, his grief, onto the dance floor, that seemed to resonate most strongly. While showing us the limits of trying to fight grief away in isolation, the performance tapped into what happens to grief after shedding sharpness for softness and the individual for the collective.

Our current era is defined by grief, both on individual and mass scales: A global pandemic is ongoing; the state continues to murder Black and Brown people (in the streets and in prisons); the U.S. is funding genocide in Palestine; and in November, our country reelected a former president who promises to inflict harm on our immigrant and queer communities. Even while this grief is broadcast to us every day through our phones, there is an expectation of normalization that propels America’s capitalist agenda. We must return to work. Buy things. Have social lives. Fall in love. And we are instructed to cope with our losses in private, by individualized means. Writer and artist Camille Sapara Barton writes on the lack of “state-initiated” moments to grieve those who died during Covid: “To do so in public space would jeopardize the needs of the market, so hungry for us all to become productive workers and consumers again.” She asks, “How can we live in a way that serves the web of life?”²

The iterations of WAKE push against the isolation of grief. Carlon and his collaborator Tobin began to work together in 2021 after connecting over their feelings of cultural loss and estrangement in being Filipino American and their shared fight against colonialism. Carlon and Tobin are guided by Black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde who speak to the interwoven struggles of collective liberation and the Filipino concept of kapwa, or the coming together of people—another notion of radical interconnectedness. Kapwa invites you inside its home, gives you a place to sit, to tsismis (gossip) with others and share laughter. Kapwa asks, “Did you eat?” and then packs the leftovers in Ziploc bags for you to bring home. Kapwa says, “my loss is yours, and my joy is yours.” WAKE invited us inside to process our grief and joy in community, urging us toward the realization that showing up for each other’s grief is a radical act in the face of our dominant Western capitalist society that seeks to individualize. In contrast, being together is urgent and essential for survival and healing.

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The first time I saw Carlon perform was in October 2021, when he debuted the first iteration of WAKE. He began by inviting the audience onstage. We each plucked a flower stem from a white plastic bucket before setting it down to form a circle in the center of the stage. He revealed to us his compounding familial and collective losses. We helped him build an altar of grief.

I walked into that performance space with my own loss. One week earlier, my family and I had buried my grandfather. Over a meal of sinigang or pinakbet, my grandfather, a talented storyteller, would spin illustrious stories of home in northern Luzon, Philippines. With his death, I lost a bridge to a place I had never known, a Filipino culture I still fight to cling to, and a language I don’t understand. I would later learn Carlon and I share this loss. My mother tongues of Ilocano and Tagalog are foreign to me, and Carlon cannot speak his mother tongue of Visayan. At the graveside, my family and I carried out a similar flower ritual, each setting a stem atop my grandfather’s casket. The ritual embodies kapwa—the mass of flowers is the mass of community members who hold each other up. Though my loss was recent, I had already begun to bury my grief amid a new job and new relationship. Carlon’s invitation to partake in the onstage ritual also embodied this same collective grief, and it allowed me to access my own as I cried from my theater seat.

Carlon often externalizes his grief with physical objects, as if he needs to witness it outside of himself. In Moving Through: BAGGAGE, a 2021 dance film produced with Metro Art, Carlon tugs on a dozen articles of luggage fastened with string, dragging them across Los Angeles’ Union Station.³ In This Ocean is a Bridge, another dance film released in 2021, Carlon uses nature to physicalize his grief: He stands on the Santa Monica shoreline, staring out across the Pacific Ocean, calling out to his grandmother who died that year.⁴ Because Carlon chooses such public objects to embody his grief, each performance is an invitation to project and process our own. Within Carlon’s display of vulnerability, we also get to watch our grief play out in front of us.

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Images courtesy of the artists. Photos: Argel Rojo.

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Images courtesy of the artists. Photos: Argel Rojo.

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At the start of the October performance, Carlon entered with the pomp and swagger of a prizefighter. He wore a maximalist costume designed by VINTA Gallery that drew from both Catholic and precolonial Indigenous art styles, a nod to the colonial tension inherent in Filipino symbology.⁵ makuriye’nte pumped up the crowd with rousing calls to “cunts and bussies,” “baklas,” and “heterosexuals,” drawing roaring applause.

From the DJ booth, Tobin spun “Pump Up the Jam.” As Tobin distorted the club music and cut it to silence, Carlon was left to face the punching bag alone, mirroring the isolation of his grief. He weaved as the bag swung toward him, taunting it before striking it again. He performed hypermasculinity, a response to the emasculating horrors of empire. He embodied a particular rage that I found familiar—rage that began when I first learned about a history left out of most American education: the U.S. government’s violent extraction of the Philippines, our land, and our bodies, reducing us to an expendable commodity. The audience also reacted to this palpable rage, shouting affirmations like “Get ready,” “Shake it out,” and “Let’s go now.” We carry a colonial past and face a neocolonial present that tears us from each other and our histories. This makes the act of showing up for each other’s fight and grief—community, kapwa—a radical act of resistance.

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance views) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Images courtesy of the artists. Photo: Jonathan Potter.

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance views) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Images courtesy of the artists. Photo: Argel Rojo.

Eventually, Carlon stopped punching as he allowed the bag to sway around him. Tobin then played an aria from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly (1904). The opera’s protagonist is a Japanese woman awaiting the return of her lover, a white American navy officer. She kills herself upon realizing he’s abandoned her for another woman. The aria, which often features a white performer in yellowface, is from a scene in the opera where she sees her lover’s “white ship” and celebrates.⁶ At this point, Carlon embraced and danced with the bag, lifting himself off the floor to sway with it, appearing to cede control to its inertia, or the weight of colonialism. The opera was replaced by Tobin’s voice. She rewrote this section of Madama Butterfly with a different arrival in mind: the landing of Ferdinand Magellan, a settler colonialist who came to the Philippines in 1521, starting a 400-year Spanish colonial era. Tobin’s rewrite channeled Lapu-lapu, the Filipino leader who defeated Magellan in battle.⁷ Rather than the hopeful bride of Madama, Tobin subverted a narrative of Asian subservience to colonial forces into that of a prideful warrior. She sang: “When he arrives / I will strike him down / At the knees / I will not wait / To be saved / I am not afraid / Of the white ship.”

Once Carlon lowered himself to the ground, he stabbed the bag with a blade, scattering rice along the dance floor. He allowed it to rain down onto his body, crawling into a fetal position as he was consumed by whiteness. “My body like rice, devour me,” Tobin sang, now in the tender voice of a lola’s lullaby. It’s unclear whether Carlon surrendered to colonialism, sacrificed himself to its gaze, or was resting after victory. But it’s less about whether Carlon won or lost, and more about ceasing to fight. Indeed, there is a material battle against colonialism that is worth fighting. But here, Carlon performed the pointlessness of battling and suppressing grief, instead softening and processing it with others.

Toward the end of the performance, Carlon playfully lip-synced to Eartha Kitt’s rendition of “Waray-Waray” (c. 1965), a Filipino folk song about the stereotypical physical and mental strength of Waray women of the Visayas.⁸ While Carlon, with a euphoric smile, mouthed Kitt’s words, he bathed in the rice, rubbing handfuls of grains to his face and chest like soapy water. When the rice became jammed in the makeshift punching bag and the flow stopped, Carlon improvised by fingering the hole in the bag while shooting a devilish grin at the crowd.

The piece’s humor and levity were a throughline for the audience, inviting us into the performance. While humor can mask grief, within Filipino culture, it can also be a vehicle for connection. At one point during the show, Carlon was seated on a stool, as if in the corner of a boxing ring, as makuriye’nte tended to him. The pair joked and poked fun at each other—makuriye’nte spilled water on Carlon’s face, causing him to gasp, and held poppers up to his nose to sniff (community picks you up after a hard fight). At another point, makuriye’nte smelled Carlon’s shoes after removing them, reacting in disgust, shaking their head (community keeps you honest). Each joke seemed to aim at making connections with the audience. The laughter allowed us to participate in the ritual: We were showing up for Carlon and for each other. In a moment where nothing seemed right, we told each other, “It won’t always be this way.” Each smiling face is a mirror to a self that has found happiness, even if just for this moment.

Before his final October performance, Carlon told me that when he gave his father’s eulogy, he wanted to make his grieving family laugh. Tobin also recalled that after her grandfather’s funeral, her family played music, danced, and ate. I was reminded of my family’s gathering after my own grandfather’s funeral, where we let our stoicism dissolve into partying hard—we drank heavily and laughed fully, as if attempting to match the largeness of our loss.

“In Filipino culture when you talk about grief, the other side of grief,” Tobin said, “there’s always laughter.”

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists. Photo: Argel Rojo.