Lyzah

alger ji-liang

Alyssa Favero, aka Lyzah, is a street/club dancer who pours energy into the wh/aacking scene through teaching, battling, and producing. As a performer, they thrive in creative spaces that value street/club dancers’ spontaneity: We All Fall Down (Montreal), Compagnie KHOR / Khoudia Touré (Senegal/France), Simran Sachar (Vancouver). They also facilitate safe(r) spaces of expression and growth through workshops at Parquette (Montreal), What Lab (Vancouver), Galaw.Co Dance Theater (Philippines), and Open Circle (Singapore).

Their choreographic work has been supported by organizations including Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique (Montreal), Studio dB (Berlin), and Odd Meridian Arts (Vancouver). A lifelong student, Lyzah has taken workshops with OGs from house, wh/aacking, and hip hop cultures, and has ongoing mentorships with Marie-Reine “Mqueen” Kabasha in wh/aacking and Victor Vân Tran & Samuelle Auclair in hustle.

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pound

pound is, at its essence, a ceremony integrating wh/aacking and sound-based practices to explore the body’s newest and oldest memories. This choreographic work honours ancestral wisdom and the inherent power of spirit within performance. The title is both a subversion and a sonic invitation: an ode to the cycle of harvesting rice.

Through collaborative wh/aacking — a street and club dance form that emerged from Punking in the 1970s underground gay club scenes of Los Angeles, shaped by Asian, Latine, and African diasporic communities — and through sound-based practices integrating looped voice, poetry, rap, and expressions of grief and joy, pound creates embodied spaces where intergenerational knowledge, the sacred, the sacrilegious, and the sensual can coexist.

Lyzah’s research is rooted in teachings received directly from Mamerto Lagitan Tindogan, an eighth-generation Mumbaki, shaman, healer, and rice farmer of the Ifugao people in the Cordillera mountains of northern Philippines. Through this exchange, Lyzah learned rice-farming patterns and grounding techniques whose principles of repetition, breath, land-based knowledge, and connection to the unseen form the foundation of the work.

Working with five artists from the Asian diaspora, Lyzah investigates how movement and sound can transform performers into vessels of ancestral knowing, at times accessing rage and ecstatic joy. Here, storytelling becomes a practice of liberation in honour of past generations and those yet to come.

©Alger Ji-liang

CREDITS

Team

Creation, Choreography, Performance and Production
Alyssa Favero aka Lyzah

Sound Design and Performance
Kimmortal

Collaboration and Performance
Fran Chudnoff aka Francesca
Franz
Franny

Collaboration and Performance
Rinre

Collaboration and Performance
Eric Leong aka Komodo

Mentorship and Outside Eye
Marie-Reine Kabasha aka Mqueen

Mentorship
Emily Gual

Production Support
Allison Lang

Previous collaborators
Rhythm
Reed
Paolo Askia
Lamont
Josh Ongcol
Rua Inak
Ana Sosa
Katie Leblanc
Caitlin McCormick