Joshua Serafin

'Void' is a conversation between performer Joshua Serafin and musicians Calvin Carrier and Alex Zhang Hungtai. In the performance, we see the god(dess) Void on an island installation blending into its environment. Two light pillars that extend to the sky create a portal that connects the spiritual and mortal realms. 'Void' converses with the soundscape and the ecological and meta-realm landscape surrounding them. Their dance creates a ritual of birth, and rebirth, collecting global sadness and its beauty. It is an embodiment of our current society.

Embodied movement and choreography express the pain and struggle that the genderless deity VOID receives and collects. Personified by Joshua Serafin, they propose a new speculative cosmology based on the spiritual and colonial history of the Philippines and their own personal biography, and shift into an embodied narrator of survival. For Serafin, the creation of these new possibilities via ritual become corporeally intrinsic to healing both individual and collective trauma. Bodily carnality, anthropomorphised in VOID, becomes the new deity of the decolonised imaginary, and mimics the antagonisms and tensions present in current society. On their island surrounded by smoke and light pillars connecting mortal and spiritual realms complemented by a soundscape by musicians Calvin Carrier and Alex Zhang Hungtai, VOID performs their ritual in the midst of darkness and tension to transform pain into beauty, dirt and debris into their final form: pearls.