Tag: MonoVlog

monologue x vlog by Layeta and Olive

PSi Jakarta 2026: Madam Tseter: A Podcast-Séance (Performance)

Performance Brief

MADAM TSETER’S DIGITAL SÉANCE: A PODCAST FROM THE ARCHIPELAGO

Do you remember the sounds of the pandemic?

The Zoom notification. Dogs barking during meetings. Neighbors arguing through thin walls. Electric fans humming beside laptops. Frozen screens. Buffering circles. “You’re muted.” “Can you hear me?” “Please log out and rejoin.”

As theatres closed and gatherings became impossible, these sounds became part of our performance ecology. At the same time, podcasts flourished. Horror stories, true crime investigations, self-help programs, educational channels, and theatre podcasts accompanied people through isolation. Voices continued to travel even when bodies could not.

Madam Tseter’s Digital Séance draws inspiration from two practices: podcasting and sapi. While Western artistic traditions often invoke the muse as a source of inspiration, many Southeast Asian cultures understand creativity through possession, visitation, and embodiment. In sapi, the body becomes a vessel through which another presence may speak. Rather than waiting for inspiration to arrive, the artist allows themselves to be entered by voices, memories, and energies beyond the self. In this performance, Madam Tseter does not merely cite artists from the archive. She embodies them.

This performance is a work-in-progress and the third installment in an ongoing series of digital artistic research projects that investigate solo performance as embodied inquiry. The first installment, 3-in-One Body Problem, explored the fragmented body across physical, digital, and imagined dimensions. The second installment, PolyVlog Anatomica, drew inspiration from the anatomy theatre, transforming the performance space into a site of examination where multiple digital selves, organs, memories, and identities could be dissected, displayed, and reassembled through networked performance. Madam Tseter’s Digital Séance extends this inquiry into archives, memory, and transmission, asking how voices from the past may be reactivated through the performer’s body in the present. Together, the works move from the fragmented body, to the dissected and multiplied body, to the possessed and archival body.

Set in the year 2100, Madam Tseter, a teacher-artist-scholar-medium, revisits voices from the Tawid sa Harbour podcast archive and summons pandemic performers through a live podcast-séance. Part keynote, part performance lecture, part spirit communication ritual, the work explores how artists survived through digital creation, remote collaboration, community theatre, livestreaming, and artistic experimentation under precarious conditions.

Audience members become members of a Digital Séance Circle, channeling spirits, and contributing play money whenever advertisement ghosts interrupt the proceedings. These ads humorously expose the economies of conferences, publishing, mobility, and artistic labor. To restore the signal, participants must collectively fund the séance.

Madam Tseter wears a costume inspired by the aesthetics of pambahay—the domestic clothing of lockdown life. Emerging from the MonoVlog, where performers appeared in house clothes with towels wrapped around their heads, the costume evolves into an ensemble built from the Southeast Asian Good Morning Towel. Found across homes, markets, ports, and communities throughout the region, the towel becomes a material metaphor for archipelagic flow: ordinary, mobile, adaptable, and shared across islands. She appears in the clothing of pandemic survival. For the podcast-séance, the pambahay can signify that the spirits are not being summoned into a grand occult chamber. They are being invited into the domestic spaces where people actually survived the pandemic.

Through voices, glitches, spirits, and stories, the performance asks what survives when theatre disappears. The answer is neither theatre alive nor theatre dead, but a new creature continuing to travel through the currents of the archipelago.

Abstract

In the podcast-séance, Madam Tseter problematizes the Philippine theatre debate during the pandemic: is theatre dead or alive? Borrowing from Schrödinger’s cat quantum thought experiment, Madam Tseter reframes pandemic performances as a state of superposition where the stage exists between planes: presence+absence, stage+digital stream, ritual+recording.

Drawing from the state of Filipino digital performances featured in the 2021 Tawid sa Harbour podcast, the performance traces how practitioners (Layeta Bucoy, Aldo Vencilao, Sining Banwa, MC BLCK, James Harvey Estrada, Rain Matienzo, Janna Cortes, Zheg Arban, Ela Figura) cultivated an ecology of survival by creating, distributing, and consuming digital performance as a way to feed themselves, sustain their creative work in the academe, and serve their communities in the time of a global pandemic. These practitioners responded to the summon of Madam Tseter to transform crisis to connection, forming archipelagic digital crossings across the Philippines.

As Madam Tseter once again stages a ritual of summoning through sound, voice, and silence, the work calls for the spirits of pandemic performances. The podcast-séance becomes a dramaturgical metaphor–an invitation to the voices of practitioners to the ghosts of theatre, and to the static in-betweens.

Madam Tseter proposes an aural laboratory of whispers of stories, knocks of creative labor, and vibrations of agency featuring an archipelagic creature, alive in code and embodied in performances. The performance summons listeners to join the circle and witness the quantum ontology of theatre amid the shifting tides of technology, crisis and innovation.

*Performance Studies international (PSi) and the Critical Island Studies Consortium (CIS) 2026 Joint Annual Conference, 15-18 July 2026 | Universitas Kristen Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia.

IFTR World Congress Melbourne 2026: The Gloriously Unmarketable Adventures of Madam Tseter

The Gloriously Unmarketable Adventures of Madam Tseter follows the migration of Madam Tseter (theatre personified) into the galaxies of the Filipino livestreaming app Kumu after the 2020 shutdown of physical stages. A search for refuge becomes an unfolding artistic experiment. Each stream becomes a rehearsal; each glitch a provocation; each viewer a co-creator in real-time.

The thirteen-part series Ang Paglalakbay ni Madam Tseter sa Kumuniverse (Madam Tseter’s Journey in Kumuniverse), created by Olive Nieto streamed through the Ampalaya Monologues’ channel, reveals how performance mutates under digital pressure. Roughness turns into method–a rejection of polish in favor of malleability and responsiveness. Inside this digital economy where visibility is currency and the coveted “blue check” tempts and blocks, Madam Tseter embraces “failure” as a dramaturgical engine. This friction produces new practices such as selfie-acting, manananggal (half-body) acting, and the chaotic generosity of budol (playful teasing to send gifts) engagements.

Madam Tseter’s shifting personas map the possibilities and limits of performance inside an algorithmic machine. The livestream rewards improvisation, hyper-presence, and the ability to swim through waves of comments. Madam Tseter emerges as a figure of survival through constant mutation. Like the virus, she transforms to resist neoliberal digital optimization by refusing to be streamlined.

Ang Paglalakbay ni Madam Tseter sa Kumuniverse insists on new co-presences, creating a space where spectators act as co-dramaturgs rather than consumers. Performance creates a new home for the actor-livestreamer where virtuosity means staying unpredictable, relational, and gloriously unmarketable.

*The International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) World Congress 2026, 6-10 July, University of Melbourne, Australia

3-in-1 Body Problem – PSi BRAZIL

I will be performing at the Performance Studies International PSi#30 XXX – CRUZO, CRUISING, CROSSROADS, Fortaleza, Brazil!

3-in-1 Body Problem: El Traje dela Cuerpo Conquistada (for synopses of the trilogy) a.k.a. Olive as the Embodied Junction of Belongingness and Shifting Practices is a performance-installation tracing a performer’s navigation of theatre’s rupture during the pandemic. Panchang appears first in a series of improvised tableaux—unfinished costumes, found objects, and an anywhere-stage revealing the scramble for new forms. Maria Clara follows, fragmented and reclaimed inside a digital frame that exposes the seams of her colonial construction. Finally, Olive becomes the MonoVlogger-Madam Tseter, confronting the ephemerality of digital performance as platforms erase their own archives. Across these shifting bodies and screens, the trilogy argues for theatrical transformation, creative labor, and embodied survival in crisis.

a.k.a.

Just a Homeless MonoVlogger performing “live” livestreaming in Instituto de Cultura e Arte. Muita merda (“lots of shit,” Portuguese break a leg hahaha)!

Performance flow (15 minutes running time):

My performer’s body’s journey since the 2020 pandemic: theatre is “dead” > MonoVlog via Facebook Live > MonoVlog via Zoom > MonoVlog via Kumu Livestreaming app > MonoVlog via podcast > MonoVlog in PSi Hunger 2022 online > Trilogy of digital performances and MonoVlog under the University of the Philippines ECWRG grant > theatre is “back” (to what) > MonoVlog in PSi#30 XXX – CRUZO, CRUISING, CROSSROADS, Fortaleza, Brazil.

  1. MonoVlog – Read the synopses of the trilogy of digital performances here.
  2. Video with in-person performance – Self-reflexive account of my creative process as performer-dramaturg-and-all-the-roles-in-theatre by focusing on the aesthetics of flaw in El Cuerpo, and the microscopic-fragmented bodies in Fantasma
  3. MonoVlog – now that theatre is “back” (to what?!), what happens to the performer’s body? Is in-person MonoVlogging the way to go?

3-in-1 Body Problem in Variations

The Magdalena Project Feature: The Performer’s Body Since the Pandemic

The International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) 2024 Manila performance-lecture:

Learn more about the MonoVlog

MonoVlog portfolio

Serquiña, Oscar T. 2023. “Emotional Weather Reports: Online Performance as Affective Practice in the MonoVlogs of Layeta Bucoy and Olivia Kristine Nieto.” Performance Research 28 (5): 14–22. doi:10.1080/13528165.2023.2321056.

El Traje Dela Cuerpo Conquistada

El Traje Dela Cuerpo Conquistada (The Trail/Gown of the Conquered Body)

Trilogy:

El Cuerpo (Noli Me Tangere’s Kabanata 26: Bisperas ng Piyesta)
Fantasma (Noli Me Tangere’s Epilogo)
Secreta Vida (MonoVlog)

The performance is funded by the University of the Philippines’ Enhanced Creative Work and Research Grant.

El Traje is a work in progress. We have 3 scholars reviewing the work this October to give comments and recommendations to our team. We are still looking for additional funds to translate and place captions in English, and to adapt the digital performance to an on-site performance (as originally envisioned in 2020).

*Special thanks to Ige Ramos and Michael Bernal for your brains and generosity. 

Synopses

El Cuerpo is a solo digital performance centered on Panchang, a veil maker and performer in religious plays whose life is bound to the annual fiesta honoring the town’s patron saint. Sponsored by the gobernadorcillo, Panchang’s ritual performance has long been believed to sustain communal faith and invoke miracles. As a new theatre troupe—Komedya ng Tundo, trained by foreigners and favored for its novelty—rises in popularity, Panchang confronts the possible erasure of her labor, her body, and her tradition.

Staged during the pandemic, the performance parallels Panchang’s displacement with the performer’s own experience of shifting from stage-based theatre to online performance. Scenes unfold through fragmented digital tableaux, dramatic and staged readings, and close-up gestures framed by the camera. Incomplete costumes, found household objects, and improvised spaces function not as substitutions but as dramaturgical agents, exposing the labor and precarity behind performance-making.

As Panchang insists on repetition—performing not for innovation but for continuity—El Cuerpo interrogates what theatre is allowed to become in moments of rupture. The piece positions the performer’s body as a crossroads of ritual, failure, and adaptation, revealing how tradition and experimentation coexist within a changing performance ecology.

Fantasma is a solo digital performance adapted from the epilogue of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, reimagined through the isolation of the pandemic and the politics of women’s visibility. On a stormy night, Maria Clara appears on the roof of the convent, crying out against the violence of hypocrisy that has enclosed her life. Long venerated as the ideal Filipina—pure, silent, and saintly—Maria Clara is stripped of her pedestal and reinhabited as a fractured, speaking body.

Performed through digital frames and fragmented lighting, Fantasma uses a handheld flashlight as a moving spotlight to reveal and conceal parts of the body, questioning who decides what of a woman’s body is shown, hidden, or sanctified. The performer’s brown body disrupts the colonial image of Maria Clara, exposing the labor and repression beneath her polished archetype.

The performance mirrors the solitude of pandemic-era digital theatre and foregrounds solo performance as both necessity and resistance. Fantasma asks whose stories are legible in digital space and reframes haunting as an act of reclamation—where the ghost refuses silence and insists on presence.

Secreta Vida is a solo digital performance staged as a MonoVlog—a hybrid of performance-lecture and rant vlog—that exposes the hidden labor, pressures, and contradictions of creating theatre during the pandemic. Addressing the audience directly as co-thinkers, the performer reflects on the artistic research behind El Cuerpo and Fantasma, unfolding her process in a scripted–improvised monologue shaped by the aesthetics of online confession and critique.

Blending personal narrative with academic reflection, the performance reveals the demands of multi-hyphenated creation: performer, dramaturg, director, designer, and digital technician. The camera becomes both witness and judge as the performer navigates institutional expectations, platform precarity, and the emotional toll of continuous adaptation. As digital performances vanish under shifting social media policies, Secreta Vida questions authorship, legitimacy, and ephemerality in online theatre.

The work culminates in a self-reflexive acceptance of uncertainty, affirming performance as an evolving practice shaped by failure, iteration, and care for unseen audiences.

3-in-1 Body Problem: El Traje dela Cuerpo Conquistada a.k.a. Olive as the Embodied Junction of Belongingness and Shifting Practices goes to the 2025 Performance Studies International PSi#30 XXX – CRUZO, CRUISING, CROSSROADS, Fortaleza, Brazil!