Dancer Ralph Escamillan dons a dress made of packing paper in Croquis

The local artist is appearing at Dance in Vancouver with his latest piece, which requires a new garment to be made for every performance

By Gail Johnson

FakeKnot, Croquis. Photo by David Cooper

The Dance Centre presents a double bill with FakeKnot’s Croquis and Ziyian Kwan/Odd Meridian Arts’ Tendrils at Dance In Vancouver on November 21 at 8 pm at the Scotiabank Dance Centre

IN PERFORMANCE ARTIST Ralph Escamillan’s recent works, costumes have taken on a life of their own. Consider PIÑA, in which dancers wore what looked like oversize butterfly wings made out of the work’s namesake fabric, which is the national textile of the Philippines and is constructed from the leaves of pineapple plants. In HINKYPUNK, the founder of FakeKnot sported a glittery bodysuit that covered his entire face. In whip, he and Daria Mikhaylyuk wore elongated leather head coverings that rendered them unable to see for the work’s entire 60 minutes. Now, in the solo Croquis, Escamillan wears a ballgown made entirely out of packing paper.

As with those aforementioned pieces, Croquis employs the costume as a tangible object that lends thematic structure and narrative. The dress has to be made from scratch anew before every single show, a process that takes hours, and becomes ruined through the act of dancing in it.

“I was really interested in how to transform this minimalist material into something really beautiful,” Escamillan says in a phone interview with Stir in advance of FakeKnot’s Dance in Vancouver appearance on November 21. “There’s the idea of temporality because it’s so fragile, and at the same time there’s chaos in creating and destructing the beauty in all this work. We do this already in dance: we spend hours and months on choreography, then it just dissipates. I was interested in how this garment of clothing was a physicalized version of that. It’s eight hours of work being destroyed in a matter of minutes.

“There’s no glue, no tape, and no staples,” he adds. “It’s held together through the mechanisms of pleating and making our own paper thread to sew through the whole garment. It’s very meditative. It’s really simple, but in a lot of ways it’s also very complex.”

FakeKnot, Croquis. Photo by David Cooper

Croquis (pronounced crow-key) takes its name from a French word meaning a quick sketch of a fashion figure, which is often the first step toward bringing an idea into reality. Escamillan explains that there’s abundant symbolism in the ballgown itself; it evokes celebration, femininity, and pomp, as well confinement and mourning, and more.

“In the early stages of the work I was playing with idea of what the skirt meant historically, and how it protected people’s literal wombs and acted as a shield of some sort,” Escamillan says. “There’s also this powerful image now as we see it brought into the queer vernacular of clothing; it’s a symbol of antagonizing gender norms as well.”

There are other reasons Escamillan was attracted to packing paper for his latest endeavour; it’s affordable—unlike piña textiles, which are very expensive—and its colour blends with the Canadian-Filipinx artist’s skin tone. “There’s a familiarity with it, and when audiences think of this material in another way, it tickles them,” he says. “People reconstruct what we think things can be.”

Escamillan, who’s the founder of Van Vogue Jam, says the ballroom culture has a profound influence on him when it comes to creating dance works and how he thinks of himself in relation to space.

“The whole idea of ballroom is manufacturing this illusion, this fantasy, and in this piece I channel a lot of the slowness—there’s a category of ballroom called face, it’s very slow, it’s not like voguing but it’s about presence and about taking in every moment,” he says. “I really love that because it allows for the viewer to take in the whole image.” 

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