Makisig Akin - As a queer transgender Filipino dance artist, I intimately locate my identity in relationship with my artistry. All of my work is inspired and contextualized by artists and authors who are queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC). My work is deeply political. Since finishing my Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography at University of California Los Angeles in 2019, I have been living and working in Berlin as a choreographer and dancer. My choreography is a platform to empower the identities of people from marginalized backgrounds and break assumptions/stereotypes from dominant culture. Collaboration is central to my work. As such, the identities and lived experiences of my collaborators matter. I have had the opportunity to work with and alongside Ishmael Houston Jones, Sara Shelton Mann, taisha paggett, Anya Cloud, Daniel Cremer, Daniel Kötter, Sarah Israel, and Ryuta Iwashita, among others.
In addition to my work as a choreographer, I am also a co-founder, with Nara Virgens, of Emerging Change Dance Festival, a new Berlin-based artist-activist platform for equity and racial justice in the field of dance. It curates queer BIPoC dance artists. Emerging Change Dance Festival has a unique emergent structural value system that deviates from dominant capitalistic practices and is inspired by adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategies.