((( O ))) stages Secret Garden at FIFTH WALL Fest. Photographed by Dom Pamatmat
FIFTH WALL Edition V was a house party of sorts, where movement meets meaning. Here are highlights across the dance-filled weekend on the festival’s fifth year running.
“People are always asking me what Fifth Wall is,” Madge Reyes says, in the weeks building up to the festival. “Even I don’t know how to exactly describe it; it’s always changing.”
It has been five years since FIFTH WALL Fest has launched and still, it escapes a singular definition. What began as a dance film festival born from Reyes’ passions has become an unconventional venue for all forms of art that explore movement. As the executive and artistic director, Reyes curates a selection of films, installations, and performances that revolve around a particular theme each year.
“The body is home” is the undercurrent for FIFTH WALL Edition V, with the likes of Wawi Navarozza, Corinne de San Jose, Aze Ong, Micaela Benedicto, Carl Jan Cruz, and many more contemplating what that message means to them. Their pieces accompany dance films by Samantha Shay, Apa Agbayani, Tarzeer Pictures, and a host of others presented in collaboration with Nowness Asia.
This year’s festival iteration was concentrated on a single weekend and in a single venue. Set in the historic residence of Narcisa ‘Doña Sisang’ V. Buencamino-de Leon of LVN Pictures, Madge ditches giving away maps or floorplans and plunges the home’s visitors to trust in what their senses can discover: to follow the trailing scent of burning incense or draw closer to a distant, hypnotizing beat and see what they can find.
1. Dose of Pleasure by Alvin Collantes
The courtyard became a Berlin club in Alvin Collantes’ “Dose of Pleasure” dance floor activation. Inspired by the German capital’s nightlife culture, Collantes, with the help of DJ Hideki Ito, brought people of all dance backgrounds to celebrate their individualities through movement.
For Collantes, dance is an act of coming home. Staging his workshop in the Philippines for the very first time, he was interested in how migration, queerness and cultural resilience intersect through the body, beginning with an emotional solo piece expressing his own story.


Eventually, he invites the crowd to join. First, to breathe in. Then, to breathe out. And to shake their whole bodies from head to toe to release tension. As if on cue, a light shower of rain comes, and Collantes asks everyone to pay attention to each drop of water falling on their body. For the rest of the 2-hour workshop, the participants break off into pairs, and groups, and join together into a tide of bodies that Collantes joyfully ushers to and fro.
It’s magic, really. By the end of the workshop, between the heat of the bodies and the cold night air, steam was rising from the dancers’ shoulders, all smiles. “Dance is important for me to share as it is a gentle reminder that we can always come back home into the body. […] The warmth in everyone’s eyes is an image that I will very much carry with me in Berlin,” Collantes says.
2. Rebirth by Lyle Sacris
If the body is home, then what happens as that body ages? Greeting all the guests who step inside the mansion is a tall column of LCD screens for film director Lyle Nemenzo Sacris’ moving image installation, “Rebirth.” In 2004, it was first staged in a book launch at a Makati bar, and now it finds itself in a movement festival in New Manila—reconceived, renamed, and reaccompanied by a score from composer Malek Lopez in collaboration with producer and curator Erwin Romulo.

“Part of [why we chose to stage “Rebirth”] is showing this audience, this community at Fifth Wall, what it was back then, and where it came from; it’s a lineage that you’re part of,” Romulo says.
The work, while new again in theory, makes use of the original footage that Sacris and his team had filmed twenty years ago: dancers filmed vertically running towards a ceiling, or in this case, the edge of the screen they’re contained in, interspersed with flashing lights and a variety of clips from medical scans.


The source footage has aged and collected visual blemishes when played. In fact, it must be barely younger than many of the festival visitors who got to see it, which is what Sacris and Romulo were hoping to explore.
Sacris explains that multi-channel work like what he had created might be strange to this generation now, but it was even stranger to the general public back then. Instead of contemplating on the messages of the film and its medium, Sacris shares that before, people questioned if it even was art in the first place. Now sitting in the halls of the mansion, guests are able to come up with new questions of their own.

The two artists acknowledge that the piece is part of a continuum. The past is still very much alive in this restaging. It might be staged again someday with a completely different audience, and when it does, surely other ideas might emerge as the source material and our bodies continue to age.
3. Anok by Mark Salvatus
The dining area, naturally, would be the belly of the festival. It was the venue for Sofia Padilla of Fiasfud’s gastronomic showcase on the first day. And on the second, it was a puppet stage for Mark Salvatus’ “Anok” performance co-produced by FIFTH WALL, where he explores his memories of the Pahiyas fiesta in his hometown.


Salvatus invites his audience to the dining table to celebrate what nourishes our bodies. Painting a picture of an ordinary day at the market, puppeteers from the Teatrong Mulat ng Pilipinas begin inspecting a table of produce: knocking on a hefty squash, squeezing the red bell pepper’s skin, and feeling through ropes of string beans. Then, it becomes fantastical–slowly, the Anok comes to life when the squash becomes a face with a pair of calamansi as its eyes and a long chili as its friendly smile.
“The Anok is like a dummy or scarecrow that represents the farmer. [They are there] not to scare the birds, but it represents farmers, laborers who use readily available materials,” he explains. “[The performance] is a representation of being alive.”

Performers who were watching with the audience bring out spoons and forks as the Anok gains its limbs and starts playing with the children in the crowd. (Like in Salvatus’ memories of the Pahiyas festival, neighbors are welcome to eat at each other’s houses; sharing what they have with each other.) As the guests prepare to eat, one by one the Anok disassembles, returning to its original form on the dining table. An older woman, seemingly unaware of what had just happened, walks in, picks up the Anok’s head, and brings it to the kitchen to begin cooking.
4. Secret Garden by ((( O )))
The artist known as ((( O ))) dropped her latest album, ((( 5 ))), a day before the festival. And so, at the “Secret Garden” set, she played tracks that were never before heard live on FIFTH WALL’s fifth year running.

In the “Secret Garden,” she dances to her own music and asks the crowd to do calls and yells that she could loop on the spot. Then, she asks everyone to copy her movements and for a song, asks again for people to pair up and look into each other’s eyes, to be present in the moment, without words.
It’s been a while since she’s performed live like this, Marieezy confessed to her crowd. However, call it muscle memory or sheer talent, she still felt her way through the decks with ease.


The body gets better at performing only with practice. With her new album finally out, Marieezy considers intimate sets like this as a way to practice, too. And as she showed, practice is easier when it feels more like play.
5. Ballet Positions by Renzo Navarro
By the end of the festival’s last day, before the egress crew sets down and wraps photographer Renzo Navarro’s installation in bubble wrap for storage, Reyes makes sure she finds time to pose for a portrait, right by the print that represents ballet’s fifth and final position.
There is some sentimentality for Reyes, who started out as a classical ballet dancer, now seeing those prints in the living room at the festival she has curated. It was during FIFTH WALL’s first iteration as a virtual dance film festival when Reyes first found Navarro online and asked him to create works based on that year’s prompt, “Movement in Focus®.” And because things could only be virtual back then, only now in the festival’s fifth year have the prints been hung for the public to see: Unfinished origami paper planes on a piece of plywood—perched outdoors as if ready for flight but still, not quite.

That they resemble ballet dancers was a later realization, Navarro shares. For all its fluidity in motion, one must remember that classical ballet is also concerned with clean lines and angles, justifying the unfinished planes’ resemblance to the five basic ballet positions.
“To me, it felt so validating to have someone interpret Fifth Wall so accurately and intelligently, and with such ease and grace,” Reyes says. While the festival is tricky to singularly define, Navarro captured Reyes’ intentions as early as its first year.

While FIFTH WALL Fest is always changing, there has to be something that stays the same, doesn’t it? What is at its core? I asked Reyes before the festival. “Well, me!” Madge laughs. “I guess Fifth Wall is an extension of myself.”
As Reyes processes Edition V, she still has no strong feelings towards what the next edition will be about just yet: “All I know is that I move forward with much gratitude to my team, our collaborators and supporters, and to the art form.”