Bhenji Ra and I met in Vancouver in mid-July of 2024 while she was in town to present her newly commissioned film and first solo exhibition in Canada, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (2024), at Western Front. The film weaves together ancestral spirit and cultural dance through the ghostly lens of 16mm film transferred to 4K. It explores the history of the mythical Biraddali creature through the Pangalay, the traditional “fingernail” dance of the Tausūg people of the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines. Bhenji reinterprets the story through her own matriarchal lineages, personal histories, and lived experiences as a transfeminine person. The following text weaves together a script of our conversation on the experiences behind the imagining and creation of the film.

[Bhenji relaxes into her chair, dropping her shoulders. She sits in front of a banner with palm trees and ghostly figures dancing in the foreground, and drinks sparkly water out of a glass.]

James Albers: Hi!

Bhenji Ra: Hii booooo.

JA: Do you want to introduce yourself?

BR: Sure, I’m an artist. I’m not based anywhere right now. I spent a lot of time in Sydney, that being the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I’ve cultivated a practice from being rooted in community there. That practice has since grown, mostly to the Philippines. I’m back and forth between Manila and Sydney a lot. I grew up in this really sweet village in New South Wales, about six hours from Sydney. It’s a very small town, around 5,000 people at the time. There was always the smell of salty water, long and deep rivers, mountains, bush, eucalyptus, and a lot of green pastures and farmland.

JA: Would you say that you were a creative child?

BR: Super creative! Very inspired by everything I would touch and see. I would always grab my family’s video camera, filming something or setting up a scene with my Barbie dolls or with me and my sister. I was always directing things or performing or endlessly drawing, cartoons and characters, and working with aesthetics.

JA: I always like to hear about people’s childhoods. As I’m getting older, I find myself wanting to reintegrate play into my practice as much as possible. Would you agree for yourself?

BR: Definitely. The improvisational aspect of my work is so important to me because it refuses to be captured by a type of academia or technical aspect. My work’s always about feeling, you know?

JA: From my understanding, you’re a multimedia artist who plays around with a lot of different material, but there’s definitely narrative threads through it all, like spirituality, gender fluidity, folklore, performativity, embodiment, and play.

BR: It’s true. I always ask myself, what is the necessary form this thing needs to take in order to be fleshed out and manifested into the physical world?

JA: Is there a certain reason that you gravitated toward making films and imagery?

BR: I would say that my practice mostly has to do with the body, actually. It’s dominated most of my work and performances. I think it’s only been in the last decade that I’ve been working with film. Well, I feel film is easier to share.

JA: There’s also the ephemerality of live performance... Are there some kinds of performances that you would never want to film?

BR: I think so... Some folks that watch my live performances say, “This is not a film, it needs to stay like this,” and I trust that from my community. I would usually create a film based on the performance being a type of storyboard. I can’t really think about a film without performing it in life first. Everything has to be ritualized. I need to feel it in my body before I can know what it feels like on film. I need to be able to embody something so I know how it needs to be retrieved through the lens. That’s my way of working through this idea of the “anthropological lens,” or this colonial lens of capture that a lot of our bodies as cultural dancers have been subjected to throughout history.

JA: I was reading an interview that you did in 2018, “Bhenji Ra on embodying future forms”—there’s one part where you specifically talk about your parents. You described your mother as having an “urbanness about her that’s vibrant and longing to be somewhere else,”¹ and this was accompanied by a slight bitterness in her character. [Bhenji cries out, “Oof!”]

And you described your father as a “very soft, quiet, white-Australian man who was happy to be in a country town.”² I loved these quotes because I feel similarly about my parents. I feel that this reality challenges the typical racialized tropes and power dynamics applied to interracial marriages. Considering these descriptions of your parents, how do you see this dynamic being explored within yourself and your practice?

BR: I think we as folx of the diaspora with white dads have this relationship to the patriarchal figure standing in as symbols of colonialization and empire, but at the same time we share an intimacy with the father figure. But, I don’t have any answers to what it means for us to be in that dynamic. At times when I was younger, I felt like I had to be in opposition to what my father represented, and not be in a relationship with it. From a very young age I felt that my father opposed me, in a way that just didn’t make sense to me and what I liked. I guess he thought I was quite jarring to be around, and vice versa.

I do feel we typically use the matrilineal line to find our way back to self and back to our cultural identity. It’s a spiritual connection that we have through the womb, through our mother’s womb, our grandmother’s womb, that connective tissue that’s within our DNA, which just isn’t there in the patrilineal line.

We don’t necessarily need to hear more about Wasians; we’re often overrepresented, over-celebrated. But I feel like if we can tap into that spiritual connectedness between the two bloodlines, it can be a strategic way to think about the fall of the empire, and even to decolonize our minds, selves, and bodies.

JA: Can you expand on that?

BR: Well, now, I don’t see my father as a white-Australian man, I see him as an Irish-Scottish settler who has a history of his own, and a land and soil that he comes from. As I get older, the binary between us starts to dissolve and I’m finding more ways to be in relationship to him instead of in opposition. His blood is within my blood and I can’t ignore that. [She says with conviction.] It’s the same with my mom. For so long, she was my only window into my culture, and now I have become the door for her to come back into hers. It’s not necessarily like she’s the one teaching me about being Filipina. It’s more that I’m leading her back to decolonial space that also recognizes her as a settler in Australia.

JA: That’s a much more expansive way of thinking about race than just existing within a clear binary of “us and other.” I really resonate with that. Thank you for sharing. The first thing I encountered about your new work was the title, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, which I love. Any time a horizon is mentioned in a work about the body, queerness, or gender, I am reminded of the late José Esteban Muñoz and his book Cruising Utopia (2009). The introductory paragraph contains this gorgeous line: “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”³ The idea that queerness exists as a more desirable imagination of a future, slightly out of reach, resonated with me deeply. Do you know the quote?

BR: Yeah, I do. I feel like that quote has marked my body for such a long time. I’m always thinking about this idea of the horizon, futurity, possibility. How I came to the title comes from when I was with my family on a boat in the Sulu Sea, going back to the mainland. We had just made it through a storm and my cousin said, “Oh my god you’re gonna see the Biraddali! You’re gonna see the Biraddali in the morning!” and I was like, “What is that?” They said, “It’s a rainbow! You're gonna see the rainbow and it’s gonna be on the horizon!” I was like, “Wait, didn’t you say that the Biraddali is a mythical creature?” And they told me that it was one and the same. The Biraddali is this non-gendered feminine figure that is a bird-human hybrid from the Tausūg culture. She’s fallen from heaven and sits at the bottom of the rainbow, but she’s also called the rainbow.

After hearing this, I stared at the horizon for two days in that boat. It made me think about what it meant to be in that place: in the Sulu Sea, guided by the stars and celestial navigation. Looking out toward the horizon was a way of mapping our direction back to home. And as trans folx, we aren’t just sitting on the horizon, we’re actually dancing on it.
I see this distinction as a gesture of joy and celebration.

JA: That’s a really beautiful story. Can you share a little more about your research process?

BR: I like to give myself time with family and land, before I go and open up a book, so I wanted my research to be going back to the region where my Pangalay dance mentor was from, whom I called my auntie. Going back to this island was really important; she hasn’t been there for 49 years. It's very remote and often stereotyped as a dangerous place that tourists don't really go to.

I wanted to look for archival footage of her mother, which apparently exists but she doesn’t know who has it. When we got there, a bunch of stuff happened that I don’t want to get into, but we had to leave four hours after arriving, and that’s why we spent the next two days on the boat. That was our deepest form of research, because as a people, we are seafarers. We’ve always been seafarers. Our connection to land has been a nomadic connection, and so we spent so much time on the water following the stars and horizon back. It was there where Auntie just opened up about stories growing up on this island, about her mother. We also had these big dreams together, like we were dreaming under the same sky, under the same map...

I would say the time on the boat was more an embodiment of the research. When I got back to the mainland, I had two days to shoot the rest of the film. It was hard to say that I had a strategy, because I wanted to treat my footage as an archive, as something that I found and was uncovering, reframing. It’s ironic that we never found anything about her mother, since her name had also related back to a bird, one that’s very rare to see in the Philippines. We never saw a Biraddali either.

JA: How poetic. Do you think there should be academic writing about this?

BR: I think there should be writing about our folklore and cultural traditions, but from our own people. That would help minimize the violence of the capture. I do want to honour the refusal of the capture of the Biraddali form; maybe she isn’t meant to be found. When you academicize something, it allows anybody to access it, and then, I guess, imitate it, or feel like they can. I think that the academic approach to archiving other cultural practices can be very misguided, skewed, and extractive.

JA: I’d love to see how you’d archive these cultural practices in your own ways.

BR: I’m an artist after all, and that’s an archive in its own way. [She laughs.]

JA: I want to talk about the visual language of the film—it’s filmed completely on 16mm film, which gives it an archival feel. For me, the visuals were very blue and green. There’s a lot of overlaying, duplicate images, which also suggests a ghostly quality. Can you talk about some of these creative choices?

BR: I wanted to work with 16mm because I feel like there’s more space to collaborate with spirit when dealing with physical film as opposed to digital cameras. I was also interested in referring back to this violence of capture; the instrument used to shoot 16mm is huge and heavy to carry around the village. War films from WWII were also filmed on these cameras.

JA: Oh true, that’s a haunting thought.

BR: Yeah, and I wanted it to feel like I was given material, not that I was producing it. I told the cameraman to film and I would work with what I was given. There was even a time when I had to get the film through a small airport’s security and they had no idea what this film was. They thought it was a bomb and had to take the film into a dark room and physically touch it instead of putting it through the X-ray, which would damage the film. I was crying and pleading the whole time, but those rolls got ruined and I just decided to work with this instance. What will be will be. After that we just had to slice and dice and create a space for the footage to really be activated.

JA: I really love how you talk about the footage as something given to you, something gifted to you. That’s an interesting angle to look at your own work with.

BR: I feel like a lot of the times when I’m making a work, I get lost in all the choices of where it can start and where it can go. I guess that was my way of forcing something to just happen, giving it restrictions to let it fly elsewhere. There’s that push-and-pull of it all.

JA: What’s next for you?

BR: I think that I’m entering a time of just making things! I think it’s important for artists my age to just create so that we can sit with our bodies of work. I really want to return to that place of play that we talked about at the beginning. I want to create from that curious place of childlike wonder, instead of only creating for, you know, exhibitions that are based on funding. I want to think more strategically about how my work and life can contribute to the fall of empire and the liberation of queer and trans bodies.

JA: Like a warm horizon imbued with potentiality, or finding the end of the rainbow, right?

BR: Yeah, something like that. [Bhenji takes one last sip of her sparkly water and leaves her glass empty.]

This text was updated on December 19, 2024, with slight adjustments from the print version.