BECOMING GHOSTS / TE BAJAO
A dance surrendering to darkness and otherworldly realms.
This is a horror dance — a push and pull of pain and pleasure, mutating into something non-human, beyond human, or even godly...
In becoming ghosts, Te Bajao draws from horror and folklore to confront the things they both fear and revere. A dancer, voguer, and all-round queer icon known around Naarm for their striking performances, becoming ghosts is Te’s full-length solo debut — and it will be premiering at Melbourne Fringe tonight, then showing this October 10-14th.
This show certainly isn’t for the fainthearted. You’ll experience deep cries of grief, an entrancing soundscape, and grotesque configurations. It pays homage and surrenders to the supernatural, drawing influence from creatures in Filipino folklore such as Aswang, as well as iconic psychological thriller and horror films such as Suspiria and The Grudge. Dark and discomforting, becoming ghosts is sure to stay with audiences long after the curtains close.
Te Bajao (AKA Ate Cheska) is a movement artist on the rise. Known for their intimate, dynamic, and high-intensity stage presence, Te has performed at premier arts festivals across the continent including RISING, Dark Mofo, AsiaTOPA, Next Wave and Melbourne Music Week. They’re also a daughter of the legendary House of Juicy-Slé — Australia’s first ballroom house. Drawing from contemporary dance, street dance and Vogue Fem, Te’s wide-ranging influences inform their unique movement style.
Words by Maki Morita
Photography by Vanessa Valenzuela
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody