Manila ManPepe Dayaw & Danilo Timm

(DE)

Performance, Meal, migration, history, territory, decolonial perspectives

Sometime in the 18th century, a group of seamen serving the Spanish galleon boats that traveled from Manila to Acapulco jumped ship and began to walk eastward. Eventually they found themselves in a bayou (now New Orleans) and decided to stay and build huts by the water. The place turned into a fishing village called Sinmalo and the people were simply called Manila Men. They belonged to no country. They were simply survivors. In 2017, seven years after traveling from Manila to Europe, after having lived in more houses than his age, and after overcoming a struggle for a right to stay, Pepe decided to build his life in Berlin. Spice Routes is as much an ongoing ethnography of unfinished migrations as it is a live delicate fiction of what they have become: memories of encounters and serendipities. Tapping into his embodied folklores and working with improvisation, Pepe choreographs a ritual of services and storytelling that involves fun in cooking and performing with music and dance, just like many other nomadic Manila Men before him. He performs this fluid tale anywhere and assumes the shape and desire of its found context. As a space to constantly ruminate (his) past into more digestible forms, he creates a feast where he cooks his leftovers anew.

Pepe Dayaw

Nowhere Kitchen

Pepe is a “work in progress”. His work is based on a mixture of folklore, precarious technologies and funky improvisations the mission of which is to research and choreograph our society. Having attended several art schools around the world such as the University of Amsterdam, of Warwick and the Kaloob Ministry of Dance and Music in the Philippines, Pepe performs with delight in different disciplines such as pangalay and butoh, techo , contemporary dance and self-taught chef cuisine.

Born in Manila, he grew up everywhere. Pepe renews himself each time he performs. He has started cooking out of nostalgia for his homeland and has since been using this technique as a tool for researching and questioning our world and our identity. Through Nowhere Kitchen, he explores our relationships with food but also our relationships as a human beings, parents, children or citizens.

Danilo Timm

Nowhere Kitchen

Born in Brasilia - Brazil, Danilo started singing before he could even talk. His strong interest in music and dance, enhanced by lessons and trainings, led him on the stage, to the theater, to private events or on top of a table in the middle of his school. His love for singing grew stronger and at the age of 18 he started giving his first singing lessons.

After a few years as actor and director of musicals such as "Hair", "Spring Awakening", “Xanadu”, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” , “Grey Gardens” and “Elis, a Musical”, he was awarded for the best supporting role as Lennie Dale in 2014. He moved soon after to Berlin and became interested in cooking and performance.

A collaboration and friendship arose from the encounter with Pepe Dayaw, thus connecting music and dance with improvised cooking. They have since evolved within the Nowhere Kitchen collective.

Based in Berlin, Danilo directs Re.Choir - a choir focused on vocal technique and human exchanges; he gives private singing lessons and vocal workshops for groups, he is also part of the Maracujà collective and is the singer of the group Passiflora. He is also a composer and currently working on the production of his first solo album.