Alleluia “Manai” Panis has been awarded the prestigious SFAC Artist Legacy, Gerbode Special Artist Award, Dance USA Artist Fellow, and Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. She has received the California Arts Council Choreographer Award, Dancers Group’s Dancers Choice Award and was a fellow at the James P. Shannon Leadership Institute and at Rockwood Leadership Institute.
Her choreography has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, SF Arts Commission, MAP Fund, and Creative Work Fund. Her work has been presented on tour at Dance Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center-NY, and Kennedy Center-WADC, Guadalupe Arts Center-San Antonio and at various festivals including Singapore Arts-Singapore, Verona Jazz-Italy, CanAsian Dance-Canada, Bumpershoot-Seattle, among others.
The following evening length dance productions by Alleluia Panis Dance Theatre, alongside a selection of community engagement activities are now available for touring.
BURDEN OF PROOF
Burden of Proof, is an immersive multimedia dance performance set in the near future. Inspired by a true story, it delves into the generational trauma inflicted by the American justice system and how traumatic experiences blur the line between memory and nightmare, told through the lens of the fictional Calinao immigrant family. Original sound score by Joshua Icban features text drawn from the diary of Leonora Magabo Perez* and the writings of her son, Jason Magabo Perez, 2024 San Diego Poet Laureate.
*Pilipina Nurses, Leonora Perez and Filipina Narciso, were convicted in the 1975 unexplained deaths at the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They were incarcerated, until a judge ordered their release due to prosecutors’ “overwhelming prejudice” against the nurses
World Premiere: Spring 2026
Total Run Time: 60 Minutes
Available to tour excerpts and or full evening length production.
Click here to learn more about “Burden of Proof”
View downloadable tour deck: Burden of Proof Tour Deck
“The media set the scene so well, the sounds added exposition, and the dancers did their jobs beautifully, evoking emotions and demonstrating their joys, their fears, and their angers.”
NURSING THESE WOUNDS
Nursing These Wounds, a multimedia dance performance for 6-8 dance artists investigates the impact of colonization on health and caregiving through the lens of Pilipinx nurses’ history--whose experiences with Westernized medical education and subsequent migrations shaped the US medical field and the on-going global export of Pilipino labor.
Combining film, song, dance, history and ritual, in Nursing These Wounds Panis makes visible the hidden lives of immigrant nurses, the fragility of their American dream, and the need for camaraderie and faith in spirituality to cope with the ever-present dangers of hospital work.
World Premiere: October 21-23 2022
Total Run Time: 60 Minutes
Available to tour excerpts and or full evening length production.
Click here to learn more about “Nursing These Wounds”
View downloadable tour deck: Tour Deck
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
MAN@NG IS DEITY
Man@ng is Deity pays tribute to the lives of the 'manong' generation—the first wave of cheap imported Pilipinx laborers who powered the ever expanding needs of the developing United States empire. Inspired by real-life accounts of Pilipinx Americans between the 1910-1940s, this performance and film draws from public and personal narratives of their 8,000-mile immigration journey to America.
World Premiere: December 3-5, 2021
Total Run Time: 60 Minutes
Available to tour excerpts.
ANTINGANTING
AntingAnting builds upon community dialogues and convenings to examine American museum’s collections of Pilipino contemporary and Philippine tribal artworks, the spotty provenance of those works, and the implications of keeping them away from their homeland—or local diasporic contexts. This project resulted in igniting the process of repatriation of two burial urns back to the Philippines currently in Asian Art Museum’s possession.
World Premiere: January 27-28, 2024
Total Run Time: 50 Minutes
Available to tour excerpts and or full evening length production.
Click here to learn more about “AntingAnting”
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
“My immersive, multidisciplinary work explores what it means to be a diasporic Pilipinx creator. I consider my ongoing development of contemporary dance and visual language as a creative tactic for collective cultural survival and spiritual reclamation. Through dance and storytelling, I examine the relationships between the self and our physical, social, and spiritual environments, in order to tear apart the constricting narratives imposed by external forces and create space for the complex and nuanced existence of those who have been marginalized by our society.”