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A Sea of Stories

‘Congregation’ is conceived in this essay as ‘gathering’ and the different forms it takes in the course of journeys across the Philippines undertaken in 2015 as part of the ‘Fluid States’ dispersed conference project of Performance Studies international, in which the Philippines was one of fifteen sites across the world. Titled ‘Fluid States Philippines: On tilted earth: Performance, disaster, and resilience’, the project investigated how local communities deal with disaster as gleaned from their performative/expressive practices. We travelled and congregated, travelled and congregated, reaching fifty sites in the course of three journeys that happened in fifty-one days from the end of March to third week of July. The gatherings were conferences co-organized and hosted by local people or institutions, but the majority were performance events or festivals or meetings happening at the time we would arrive at a place. We planned to ‘chance upon’ or join these local events unannounced, like ordinary travellers, and navigated our way through a sea of stories using performance as rudder. The essay is a sharing of the experience of these gatherings and the journeys that connected them. It is also a reflexive afterword on the project as performance research and on the methodology of travel and gathering across the multiple spaces of the archipelago.