Eisa Jocson

Eisa Jocson explores representations of the body that dances for a living in the voyeurism industry. She exposes the social and political dimensions of body exploitation in the Philippines along with the construction of gender identity.

She was born in the Philippines and has studied both classical ballet and the visual arts. She learned how to pole dance by accident, but the experience would end up playing a key role in making her the artist she is. Through a series of residencies at cultural institutions in Belgium, she developed the artistic practice with which she challenges the pole dancer stereotype and interrogates the context in which it operates.

Her solo “Death of the Pole Dancer” was commissioned by the In Transit 2011 festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. It would subsequently tour internationally. At the same time, she was learning Macho dancing in order to create her next solo, which premièred in 2013 at the Beurrshouwburg in Brussels. In the years that followed, she toured extensively with both solos, which she often dances as two halves of a single program. The third work in her trilogy, Host, premièred in 2015.

In 2017, she embarked on a new series of works entitled “Happyland”. The first part, “Princess”, is a duet with the performance artist Russ Ligtas; the second, “Your Highness”, a collaboration with five dancers from the Philippines Ballet.