PERFORMANCE DATES

Friday, October 9, 2026 | 8:00 PM
Saturday, October 10, 2026 | 8:00 PM
Sunday, October 11, 2026 | 5:00 PM

Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110 

Tubong to Living Ancestors transforms the stage into an immersive sacred space, to honor seventeen diasporic Pan Asian American legacy artists and cultural leaders. Alleluia Panis Dance Theatre, John Calloway & the Kulintang Jazz Art Ensemble, and select legacy artists, join together to perform new works as well as restaged excerpts from 1990’s, “Cycles: Timeless Rituals to Ancient Icons” and “Diwata.” The event explores the intersection of indigenous ritual and contemporary performance to pay homage to our living legacy artists. 

*Tubong [too-bung], also known as “Putong” means ‘to crown’ is a communal ritual performed to honor the village elders. 

 ALLELUIA PANIS DANCE THEATRE ARTIST

Frances Sedayao

Frances Teves Sedayao is a multi-disciplinary artist who has performed both in the US and abroad for 25 years. She’s an alumna of Alvin Ailey in NY & CSUEB where she now teaches. Frances is a SF Apature Featured Artist, Art resident of NY OMI International, & a Jefferson Awards recipient.  She is currently in collaboration with Dance Brigade, Sarah Bush, Yiddish Theater Ensemble, Joe Goode Performance Project & Nina Haft Company. 

Francis Aquino

Francis Eric Cabrera Aquino (he/they) is a Filipino multidisciplinary artist in the bay area who specializes in storytelling through dance, heavily influenced by the art of Krump, Contemporary, popping, and Animation. He strives to be a voice for his ancestors who didn’t really have a chance to speak up and express their human experience in a healthy way. Through their Gender Fluidity, Francis sees dance as a way to grasp the meaning of human experience.

Jess DeFranco

Jess DeFranco grew up in the Bay Area and is a San Francisco based dancer. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University, she began working as a freelance performing artist and dance educator. Her first collaboration with KULARTS was in 2022 and 2023 with “Nursing these Wounds”, followed by the “AntingAnting Project” and presenting her choreography in “Queering Pilipinx Aesthetics” in 2024.

Jenelle Gaerlan

Jenelle Gaerlan (she/they) is a Filipinx-American dancer, teaching artist, and choreographer based in San Francisco by way of Portland, Oregon. This is their third season dancing with Alleluia Panis Dance Theater, with a perspective informed by her deep study of Jazz, Classical Concert Dance, American Vernacular Street Dance styles, and Filipino Folk and Indigenous Tribal Dances. Jenelle has also performed works by DarVejon Jones, BodyVox Dance Company, Robert Moses, Nicole Klaymoon, the San Francisco Symphony, and Emmy Award-winning choreographer Natasha Adorlee. Jenelle currently serves as the Co-Artistic Director of ODC Seeds Dance Company and has recently done work for Ailey Arts In Education & Community Programs as an AileyCamp instructor at UC Berkeley.

Johan Raymundo Casal

Johan Raymundo Casal is a multidisciplinary artist, performing internationally across the Philippines, New York, and California. He has performed in Netflix’s The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Live Experience in San Francisco, Cats at Berkeley Playhouse, Peter Pan Panto in the Presidio and has danced with Alleluia Panis Dance Theatre of KULARTS, Joe Goode Performance Group, and Megan Lowe Dances. Through his production company, Kuya Johan Productions, his independent films have screened at festivals across California, and has choreographed and directed concert dance works and musical workshops.

Marc Cunanan Chapelle 

Marc Cunanan Chappelle is a performer and choreographer who cultivates versatility across contemporary, hip-hop, house, Filipino, South Asian, and West African idioms, treating the body as a site of knowing, resistance, and connection. Marc is a company artist with PUSH Dance Company, Duniya Dance & Drum, and Embodiment Project. He recently debuted his pieces “Loretta” at Dance Mission Theater and “Exequel” at SAFEhouse Arts. Credits: AASC’s Cinderella, KULARTS’ “Lakbai Diwa,” SFBATCO’s I, Too, Sing America, and Sign My Name To Freedom, and works by Amy Lewis, amara tabor-smith, and Ronnie Reddick. He graduated from Stanford University.

Conrad Benedicto - Kulintang Ensemble 

Conrad is a teacher, author, and kulintang musician who studied with Master Danongan Kalanduyan from 1997 to 2016. Benedicto was Master Kalanduyan’s apprentice within the Alliance for California Traditional Arts’ Apprenticeship Program in 2007 and again in 2013. He teaches social studies, environmental education, and kulintang music at Balboa High School in San Francisco. In 2018, Conrad received an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to compose original kulintang music for his project called, “Kulintang Dialect.” 

Chris Trinidad - Bass 

San Francisco Bay Area based musician, teacher, and scholar Chris Trinidad has fallen into the place where everything is music. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, his relationship with music grew through his exploration of the bass guitar, the drum set, voice, songwriting, and choral conducting. Chris's formal education includes undergraduate training in Jazz Studies and Secondary Education, and graduate work in the fields of Philosophy and Sociology of Music Education, Theological and Liturgical Studies, Educational Leadership, and the Educational Philosophy and Spiritual Vision of John Baptist de La Salle. 

He currently divides his time between freelance music making with various groups and artists, trying to develop high school students into compassionate human beings, and working on defeating his addiction to improvising excessively in the saddest of all keys ... D minor. 

Francis Wong - Saxaphone 

Francis Wong is an acclaimed saxophonist, composer, and community activist praised by late jazz critic Phil Elwood as one of "the great saxophonists of his generation." Over four decades, he has performed his innovative creative music internationally alongside luminaries like Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Vijay Iyer, and Jon Jang. Featured on more than 40 album titles as a leader and sideman, Wong is equally renowned for his groundbreaking interdisciplinary collaborations and grassroots advocacy.

In 1987, Wong co-founded Asian Improv aRts, an organization pivotal in shaping a distinctive Asian American and West Coast sound in creative music. His honors include a Ford Foundation Mid-Career Visionary Artist Award, recognition as a "Jazz Hero" by the Jazz Journalists Association, a Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council.

John Calloway - Flute, Kulintang Ensemble 

Dr. John Calloway is a nationally recognized multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger who has simultaneously had a dual career in education for over 35 years. As an arranger and composer, John has written for several GRAMMY nominated recording projects with John Santos and Ritmo y Candela. Additionally, John has several recording projects of his own: “Asere Ko,” (2016), “The Code” (2007) and “Diaspora” (2001). 

He has also collaborated in works for film, theatre and multimedia projects. Most recently, John was awarded an EMMY in 2019 for his composition in the commercial “No Hay Nada Mas SF” for SFG Productions and in 2022 received a grant from the SF Arts Commission for his current project, “Buffalo Soldiers in the Philippine -American War, a Crisis of Conscience.” 

Jinji Sayson - Kulintang Ensemble 

Jinji is a Cebuana Filipina-American filmmaker based in the Bay Area, California. Her many passions include playing piano and percussion, as well as performing Kulintang music, writing essays, poetry, cultural critiques and activism. Jinji feels energized by performing with Kulintang Dialect. Her favorite quote is by James A. Baldwin: "The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see."

Jaden Baclay - Drums