A Crowning Ritual for ‘Living Ancestors’ Comes to San Francisco
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A new generation of APDT dancers, Jenelle Gaerlan, Johan Casal and Jessica De Franco, perform with an ensemble of master artist musicians (Photo by Alyssa Cortez)
"Living ancestors" is not a figure of speech here. It's the production's organizing idea and its title. Rather than treat elders as figures of the past, Tubong insists on their presence in the room: the men and women being honored are still working, still teaching, still performing, still shaping what Filipino and Pan Asian American arts practice looks like today. Between them, the legacy artists honored across the three nights represent, by Panis's own conservative estimate, roughly five hundred years of combined artistic practice.
The production unfolds across three distinct threads. New choreographic works created for the occasion accompany restaged excerpts drawn from KULARTS productions of the 1980s and 1990s, danced by a new generation of company artists performing in the presence of the very artists who originated the material decades earlier.
A street procession, launching from 24th Street, carries the ceremony out of the theater and into the neighborhood itself, a gesture consistent with Panis' own long history of treating the Mission as an extension of the stage–from her years as a teaching artist at the Mission Cultural Center and at Dance Mission before it carried that name, through her later tenures at ODC Theater and Brava Theater.
An archival image from the Kulintang Arts Ensemble with Alleluia Panis and Marcella Pabros-Clark.
(Photo from the KULARTS Archive)
Music runs through all three nights under the direction of John Calloway, the Latin jazz multi-instrumentalist and longtime KULARTS collaborator, joined by saxophonist Francis Wong, bassist Chris Trinidad, and kulintang ensemble members Conrad Benedicto and Jinji Saysa.
Wong and Calloway are themselves among the evening's honorees, a doubling that reflects how tightly KULARTS' artistic and institutional history are woven together. Wong co-founded Asian Improv aRts in 1987 and has spent decades mentoring younger Asian American jazz artists. Calloway's four-decade career bridging Latin jazz and Filipino American music culminated in works like Buffalo Soldiers and the Philippine American War: A Crisis of Conscience."
John Calloway, music director for Tubong to Living Ancestors. (Photo by Bob Hsiang)
Francis Wong, saxophonist and longtime KULARTS collaborator. (Photo from the KULARTS Archive)
The honorees span disciplines. Poet and educator Oscar Peñaranda, a Leyte-born writer anthologized in the landmark collection Aiiieeeee!, reads on the second night. Genny Lim, San Francisco's ninth Poet Laureate and a longtime collaborator with Bay Area jazz musicians, appears on opening night.
Pianist and composer Jon Jang, another of the evening's legacy artists, will be represented in performance with his Butterfly Lovers Song. Dance figures include Jesselito Bie, an early member of the Alleluia Panis Dance Theatre who helped define the company's early repertoire in the 1990s. He later founded STEAMROLLER Dance Company, alongside original Kulintang Arts Ensemble members whose work from that same era rounds out a roster that reflects nearly four decades of KULARTS' own institutional history.
A live restaging of 1990 Sun & Moon, performed by Johan Casal and Jenelle Gaerlan, a new generation of company dancers. (Photo by Alyssa Cortez)
Tubong also marks a milestone for SOMA Pilipinas, the South of Market cultural heritage district, which co-sponsors the production as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations. The partnership situates the evening within a broader moment of institutional recognition for Filipino cultural infrastructure in San Francisco, one that KULARTS, itself approaching four decades of continuous programming, has helped build from the ground up.
At its core, Tubong hopes to demonstrate the breadth of artistic creation by Filipino and Asian Americans in the diaspora. The works being restaged and performed were not chosen simply for their history. Panis and the artists involved consider them excellent enough to belong on a list of classic works by Filipino and Asian Americans in the diaspora, a canon the community is naming and claiming for itself.
For Panis, the production is also personal. Many of the artists being honored are collaborators and contemporaries she has worked alongside since KULARTS' earliest years, some of them her own teachers and creative partners. The restaging of decades-old material is not an act of nostalgia, but a way of keeping a living lineage visible: proof that the work these artists began continues, danced now by hands that learned it from them directly.
Tubong to Living Ancestors runs October 9 through 11 at Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets and full program details are available via Dance Mission Theater.
Three of the original Kulintang Arts Ensemble members, Frances Cachapero, Anna Sun-Foo, and June Messina Oulette reunite on stage to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of KULARTS in 2025 (Photo by Alyssa Cortez)
Priscilla "Pia" Cortez is a Filipino American writer and digital communications strategist whose work spans culture, community and climate justice. Raised in Pampanga and shaped by San Francisco, she now splits her time between the Bay Area and Bohol, telling stories rooted in identity, place and the Filipino experience.
