Hidden in Plain Sight: A Self-Portrait through Movement / Ma Allyana Antonio (2025)

This research explores how movement-based self-portraiture can be used to embody and express identity, memory, and cultural hybridity. The study uses a practice-based research and methodology, integrating choreography, improvisation, and somatic exploration to investigate the body as an archive of artistic and personal memory, all within the context of my lived experiences as a Filipino dance artist in the UK. In order to create movement expressions that represent both the convergence of these movement languages and my individuality, the study shows how improvisation allows inherited vocabularies and training to be reinterpreted and modified. It also suggests that movement material can frame “home” as a bodily and personal feeling rather than a set location, and the vulnerability and subtlety in performance reshape the audience’s role by moving them from spectatorship to witnessing. Negotiating the dynamics between different movement languages, the subjectivity of embodied archives, and the ambiguity of audience reaction were among the challenges encountered during this exploration. Nonetheless, the study broadens our understanding by presenting movement as a critical approach to examining identity, diaspora, and individuality and by establishing the body as a site of memory, culture, and identity.