Often, no matter how much you try to anticipate all the facets of an experience, it’s down to experiencing. Baklâ is most certainly down to the experience. As soon as Max Percy asks the audience to forget all they’ve heard, your experience is at the hands of a kaleidoscopic artist. Half English, half Filipino and wholly equipped to respond to the call of performance art.
Percy is a time traveller, seizing the past as seamlessly as he does the modern day. His body bends time and his words open portals to express the fragments of (what the description of the show calls) ‘intergenerational trauma’ and being gay in and around Filipino culture. Scenes of a conquered Philippines are not so much of a historical backdrop as they are an integral component making up the basis of beauty, power and insecurity for the decades to come.
Ingeniously subversive and excitingly unpredictable, Percy’s body, face and voice draw parallels to colonial subservience and being a slave to the pseudo-healing powers of sex in the queer world. Interspersed are hints at the trickle down effects of a filipino mind possessed by a western ideology, delivered via a toolkit of multimedia. For instance, projections of ads reflecting cultural tides.
It was first the land, bodies and freedom they conquered, but the seeds they sow leaves the mind corrupted. A poison that festers and lives on from parent to child. Percy purges the poison before us, in a fast, purposefully choppy performance that you can’t look away from.
Baklâ
13:00 @ Summerhall – Demonstration Room
Aug 8-13, 15-20, 22-27
