Work in Progress: WAKE

Part requiem, part reckoning, WAKE is a performance ritual toward liberation. Combining the languages of queer nightlife, Catholicism, and combat, Jay Carlon’s choreography and Micaela Tobin’s live vocal performance demand space for release, remembrance, and reclamation. Grounded in kapwa—a Filipino concept of shared identity and interconnectedness—WAKE invites participants to confront one of life’s most difficult realities—death—and to gather in celebration of each other and our ancestors, past and future.   

Carlon steps into the boxing ring of memory to confront a grief that is at once personal and inherited. WAKE was created through a period of profound personal loss, including the deaths of loved ones whose memories and spirits move through the work, and through the disorientation of mourning across oceans and borders. But WAKE extends beyond autobiography. 

Through movement, sound, and collective experience, WAKE brings the larger conditions that shape diasporic life—colonialism, cultural displacement, inherited trauma—into an ongoing search for resistance, transformation, and belonging. What begins as a solo unfolds into a shared rite, dissolving the boundary between stage and public: a prayer, a provocation, a party.  
  
Join us for an excerpt from WAKE, followed by a conversation with the artistic team, and encounter the work as it evolves toward its revival as part of Corpus Festival 2027. For a deeper dive, attend a workshop and meal with the artists on Wednesday, September 23 at 5PM at the Sanctuary for Independent Media.