Brown Madonna: Excessive, erotic, ecstatic

IT TOOK eight years of research, performance, collaboration, and personal excavation for contemporary dance artist Ea Torrado to finally stage her full-length dance theater piece Brown Madonna, which tackles the terrains of Filipina identity, motherhood, labor, class, memory, Catholic iconography, and queer sensuality.

The deeply personal work, described as “part ritual and part spectacle,” will be staged this August as a fundraiser for the Daloy Dance Company, which Ms. Torrado also heads.

“Aside from the physical and the technical aspects of doing this, it really took a lot of courage for me personally,” she told BusinessWorld after the press preview on June 13, which was the show’s last run-through before its big performances in Europe in June and July.

‘BABAENG SARI-SARI STORE’
Brown Madonna was first staged in September 2025 at Sincerely Yours, The Philippines Festival at Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany, as part of the Philippines’ cultural program as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The piece introduced German audiences to Ms. Torrado’s fusion of movement and play, refusing singular notions of beauty, holiness, or womanhood, with her own body adorned in costumes traversing the divine and the dazzling to the political and the provocative all in one.

Featuring striking costume design by artist Leeroy New, done with associate designer Arvie Santos, and loud yet also introspective dramaturgy by Eisa Jocson, Brown Madonna queers and Filipinizes two iconic divine feminine archetypes and colonial exports: the Virgin Mary and the global pop icon Madonna.

“This has had a lot of iterations,” Ms. Torrado said of the seven-year process through which the dance theater work evolved. “Noong nilapitan ko si Leeroy, nagustuhan ko ‘yong idea na dala niya ang barangay niya, na para siyang babaeng sari-sari store (When I approached Leeroy about it, I liked his idea of making her carry her whole village, so she would be like a sari-sari store woman).”

The piece sees Ms. Torrado transform on stage, donning intricate costumes one after another, from a fiesta gown to a Marian veil to seductive lingerie to beauty pageant excess, all made from humble yet colorful materials like rice sacks.

It’s a generous display of the breadth and depth of her research-based choreography. The figure of the Brown Madonna which the dance artist embodies is described as “a shape-shifting apparition moving between saint, diva, mother, laborer, drag figure, fiesta queen, and wounded body.”

SPEAKING PART
The parts of the piece where Ms. Torrado herself must speak or sing or rap are surprising and raw, generating lively reactions and interactions from the audience. These are also the biggest departures from her dance background, which began in professional ballet with Ballet Manila and Ballet Philippines.

At the preview, she told the press that the Brown Madonna, being rooted in her background and shattered by these so-called lowbrow forms of self-expression, was an aspect of the work that never changed since 2018.

“The first work-in-progress was very movement-oriented. There was just one spot where it’s less than five minutes that I told a personal story, and my knees were shaking and I think I was going to vomit,” she said of the experience of performing the work. It was presented through the 1SA Arts Solo Platform, with support from Japan Foundation Manila and Fringe Manila Festival.

“As a dancer, the very last thing I could emancipate in my body was my voice. So, I would say the seven-year process from then until now, there was the emancipation of singing, speaking, rapping. It’s still uncomfortable to be doing a sort of confessional in a dance theater piece, but still very healing for me.”

CONTEXT
The warm reception in Germany last year also led her to bring the piece back there in June, before returning home for the Philippine premiere in August.

Ms. Torrado recalled how the work was presented with context, framing her as a dancer with “a body trained in white ballet and white beauty standards and here, finally reclaiming a sense of play.”

“It’s about how I want to own my own sense of sexiness, or other queer ways that I want to present my own femininity, outside of everything that was imposed on me growing up by family or religion or artistic background,” she explained.

Before Germany in 2025, the work also received support from the UP Vargas Museum and Goethe-Institut Philippinen, though those iterations were still incomplete.

‘PAGTUTULOY LANG’
This year, Ms. Torrado introduced Brown Madonna Apparitions — excerpts and offshoots from the full-length work, transposing it to different sites, formats, and communities.

The “apparitions” have been presented at Kontempo in Circuit Makati, in Lucban, Quezon through the support of Project Space Pilipinas, and in Rizal through the support of Greenhouse Theatre and the Canada Council for the Arts.

“This is the final dance theater piece,” she said of this version. “After seven years, I said, ‘let’s stop editing this.’ We’ll just tweak it depending on the availability of lights or the space, but it’s ideally meant for a black box setting.”

Ms. Torrado drew from her relationship with her mother and grandmother to create Brown Madonna. Both were hardworking, loving Marian devotees whose lives, labor, faith, and femininity profoundly shaped her worldview.

Through the work, she was able to pay homage to them while also questioning and reimagining the inherited roles imposed upon Filipino women across generations.

More than a performance, the piece is an archive that is both personal and political, carrying traces of colonial history, working-class resilience, and feminine labor.

For Ms. Torrado it is many things at once — autobiography, mythology, performance art, and contemporary dance theater. “There are iterations with even bigger, more outrageous parts and costumes, pero marami na ring nabawas (a lot has been removed),” she said.

FUNDRAISER
What makes Brown Madonna more meaningful is how its premiere will serve as a fundraiser for Daloy Dance Company’s upcoming participation in the World Island Exhibition in Yeosu, South Korea this September, representing the Philippines through a series of performances.

“I think success is pagtutuloy lang (to keep going),” Ms. Torrado said of how she views Philippine contemporary dance — since the difficulty of keeping it alive is also tackled in the piece. “This is what I want to impart now, speaking as a mother of a dance company.”

She added that it’s a dream come true that the premiere is set to be staged at the Myra Beltran Dance Forum, an intimate and historically significant space for Ms. Torrado herself and for the entire Philippine contemporary dance community.

“Si Myra ang unang gumagawa ng ganito noong wala pang gumagawa (Myra was the first to do these kinds of pieces at a time no one else was doing them),” she said. “I think it’s good that spaces like this exist, and I hope that this serves as inspiration for us all to keep going.”

Brown Madonna will run from Aug. 15 to 16 at the Myra Beltran Dance Forum, 36 West Ave., Quezon City. Tickets, ranging in price from P1,600 to P2,500 depending on the bundle, are available via Ticket2Me. — Brontë H. Lacsamana