Artists and choreographers Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and Venuri Perera (Sri Lanka) may both hail from the same continent, but it took both of them being at a residency in Switzerland to finally properly befriend and begin working together.

“We’ve met here and there in various places over the years, and I’ve been a fan of Eisa for some time now,” says Venuri. “But it was only in 2020 when we were both in a residency together at Basel that we struck upon the idea of working together.”

“We realised our artistic thinking aligned quite a lot, especially when it came to reflecting on our positions as female, Asian artists primarily working in Europe, and where we wanted to go,” says Eisa. “We share this strange commonality of having weak passports, and a similar struggle in getting to where we are now, and aligned with how we wanted to see how we could become more active conduits of resources and networking, to establish roots and be more present in communities and context back home.”

Eisa also mentions them as being almost ‘border beings’, like witches flying about from place to place on broomsticks, nimbly navigating us to the main topic at hand – their new work Magic Maids, which finds an unexpected intersection between domestic workers and witchcraft. Playing as part of the Esplanade’s 2024 edition of Connect Asia Now (CAN), the idea for Magic Maids actually originated in Switzerland, when Eisa and Venuri visited the Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History and realised a surprising absence of women featured in the museum.

“We kept asking ‘where are the women?’, in this museum we realised was run by men who ran corporations and companies. Eventually we found this tiny plaque commemorating them on a bridge you cross to get to the museum,” says Eisa. “But it was ironic how that bridge was also a place where people were often accused of witchcraft were thrown into rivers to drown. That led us down this wormhole to researching witch hunts in medieval Europe, leading us to discover that the last witch executed in Switzerland – Anna Göldi, who was also a housemaid.”

That discovery led them down further still into their research, with finds that included how Göldi had a museum, and even films dedicated to her, and was now considered a feminist icon. And because of her position as a housemaid, that naturally led Eisa and Venuri to think about the many female domestic workers exported from their respective countries, and perhaps, if they too had any ‘witchy’ dealings themselves.

“Our research led us into learning about the ritual practices that witches did, while also thinking about how domestic workers sometimes brought their own indigenous practices with them to their new workplaces,” says Venuri. “So as much as witch hunts were outlawed, there were still modern versions where such women are being persecuted for supposedly performing black magic. And it all made sense that us, as a Filipina and a Sri Lankan artist, should be able to make commentary on it through our own practice.”

Magic Maids is thus a bodily response to their grappling with these complex entanglements, calling upon practices of incantation and intention, using their bodies to traverse multiple territories: physical, conceptual, transnational, emotional, and gendered. “There are a lot of deep entanglement between witchcraft and domestic workers. These deeply animist practices of our cultures continue in the form of herbal or prayer practices, with a whole pantheon of deities being worshipped. In the Philippines, there’s a kind of syncretism of beliefs, where people simply believe or pray to whatever is closest to them, unlike in some other countries,” says Eisa. “But that isn’t the case in other countries. So say you’re in Singapore, and your employer finds this tiny altar in the house for your own practices, they may not understand and fear it’s black magic. All of that fear of the unknown feeds into what we believe as ‘witchcraft’, and leads towards the invalidation of the Other.”

“In some countries, it could even be used for accusing the housemaid of something or justifying abuse of her, saying that she deserves it because she has placed a curse on the whole family. That ties back to accusations of witchcraft, always a scapegoat where we blame the woman living on the fringes of the village for a bad harvest, the most vulnerable person, and no one will come to her defence,” she adds. “In the case of a domestic worker, despite living under the same roof, it is still the presence of a foreign ‘other’ in an intimate space, vulnerable yet giving her access to the most secret aspects of family and home life, allowed to watch over the children, to clean and care for all your personal belongings.”

The magic a domestic worker performs then, is one of enchantment and seduction, in turn linked back to an inherent misogyny or fear of women’s ability to charm men, or even women into being nice to them. “Southeast Asia’s idea of magic is often born out of a need for self-preservation, to protect the self from calamity and harm from bad people. Being a foreigner in a foreign land, you feel vulnerable and so you do feel a need to have all these kinds of securities, even a prayer spoken every night that could be mistaken as a spell,” says Eisa. “This is also partially born out of class differences – the upper classes have a lot of economic power or status in society, and so have no need for such powers. But the lower class hold onto them as their own form of invisible power, and by holding onto that, the upper classes might fear it invalidates their own positions, and so poses a threat.”

On how to translate that to the stage, Venuri and Eisa explain the importance of the audience feeling that sense of power and magic come out in the performance itself. “We’ve had a lot of conversations surrounding how much we should expose or speak about in the piece itself and how much to reveal in the physical, how all this research and knowledge ends up manifested in the body, and how we deal with the subject,” says Venuri. “It does need to be said, and we decided the best way of doing that is via the practice itself, including things like magical texts and spells and incantations and voice and song to best represent it.”

“Performance is something that is experienced, and we don’t expect the audience to fully understand what we present physically onstage due to how dense the subject is. However, we do end up trying to give the audience access points, such as ideas found in the collective cultural consciousness that still speaks to the spirit of the piece,” says Eisa. “We hijack these common cultural references and use it to penetrate the materiality of this other layer. I believe that audiences will come out not knowing everything, but to be affected in a way that the piece stays and grows with them and haunts them.”

Equipped with a broom, both a tool for cleaning and associated with witches flying through the sky, Eisa and Venuri engage in the ritual act of sweeping, and produces an opportunity to inquire into questions of representation, political subjecthood and histories of oppression. “We discovered the broom quite early on while exploring the concept of cleaning items in the performance. And then it all made sense once we decided on it, and layered onto it, with the movement language evolving from our relationship with the object, and seeing what it can bring out, complicating it based on the way we each had our own energy or interpretation of the movements,” says Venuri.

“We’d already had the sense that we’d discovered the main structure and physicality of the piece in the beginning, and simply enriched and nourished it with the research from different places,” says Eisa. “The brooms really do form a part of everything, relating to witches, to maids, and our own movement vocabulary, which was developed through play and a lot of fooling around. The hardest part is editing everything together into a single piece, because of how dense the subject matter is, while having the pressure of showing a performance that is readable enough.”

It’s not all dark and dreary though – Magic Maids promises plenty of tongue-in-cheek humour, as has come to be expected of Eisa’s work, yet also powerful enough at subverting our expectations and societal norms. “We’re working with the ritual frame, like how ritual deals with these deep-seated psych things through humour, at least in Sri Lanka,” says Venuri. “Performance ritual doesn’t need to take itself seriously all the time, and humour and this sense of play are necessary to handle the subject matter. Sometimes they delve into the most painful things, but people use humour to laugh at themselves, acknowledging that it is an issue that has multiple layers to it.”

“And that’s why the piece we’re working on now feels so aligned with our ethos. It’s not just about the content—the themes of witchcraft, domestic labor, and the intersections of power and vulnerability—but also about how we perform it, how we embody these ideas and bring them into the space,” says Eisa. “The work is layered and dense, yes, but it’s also playful and accessible. It has to be, because these are ideas that exist within all of us, even if we don’t always recognize them. By invoking figures like Britney Spears, by using brooms and domestic objects, we’re grounding the work in something familiar, something that people can latch onto, even if they don’t fully understand all the layers at first.”

“And that’s the magic of it, right? That’s where the witchcraft comes in—not just in the content but in the process of how we weave all these elements together, how we invite the audience to be part of the spell,” adds Venuri.” It’s not about delivering a message in a didactic way; it’s about creating an experience that lingers, that haunts, that stays with you long after the performance is over. That’s the beauty of working with these kinds of materials and themes. There’s always something more to discover, both for us as artists and for the audience. It’s an ongoing process of learning, unlearning, and relearning, and that’s what keeps the work alive and evolving.”

“Exactly. And that’s what we hope—that the work doesn’t just exist in the moment of the performance but continues to unravel in the minds and bodies of the audience afterward. That’s the power of this kind of work, I think—it’s not about immediate understanding or clarity, but about creating a space for reflection, for feeling, for something deeper to emerge,” adds Eisa.

As two women who work primarily in Europe and export their work out of their home country, both Eisa and Venuri have a vested interest in representation and spreading their work as widely as possible. “We’ve been keeping the piece light, mobile, and adaptable. The more we can reduce our dependency on heavy technical setups or institutional support, the more accessible our work becomes,” says Eisa. “We can bring it into living rooms, into unconventional spaces, and still have it resonate. It’s a different way of engaging with audiences—more intimate, more direct. And because we’re not constrained by the institutional frameworks, we can respond more fluidly to the needs and energies of the spaces we’re in. The energy exchange, like you said earlier, becomes mutual. We give something to the audience, and in return, they give us something back. It’s a different economy—an economy of care, of reciprocity.”

Coming to Singapore as part of the Esplanade’s Connect Asia Now initiative, which aims to be key platform for professionals to connect and further develop Asia’s contemporary performance scene, both Eisa and Venuri see it as a prime opportunity to connect with Asian artists and audiences. “It’s important to create a kind of network or platform where we can see each other, share the work, and critique the work without the need for it to be framed within a Western gaze. It’s necessary to have these exchanges within our regions, within Asia, to create more self-sustaining ecosystems of practice,” says Eisa. “A lot of the time, we are looking to Europe or North America for validation or opportunities, but the truth is, we have a wealth of knowledge, history, and aesthetics that we can cultivate in our own communities. When we see more Asian bodies and works in conversation with each other, it’s liberating. It allows us to unlearn some of the hierarchies imposed by colonial histories and global capitalism. We’re not bound to operate within their structures; we can create our own forms of support and critique.”

“Yes, and there’s something empowering about shifting the gaze inward—toward our local communities and regional networks. It’s about reclaiming that space and recognizing that our work has inherent value, whether or not it fits within these global standards,” adds Venuri. “In Sri Lanka the scene is small, but there’s potential. And even though it’s slow, you can feel the seeds being planted, something growing. It’s not just about being “seen” by the global arts market, but about truly being understood and supported within our own contexts. That’s where the real work lies. It’s a balance, of course—working within both local and global spheres—but the more we invest in building these networks at home, the less reliant we are on external validation.”

With Magic Maids making its Asian premiere this week, both Eisa and Venuri are excited to see how an Asian audience will receive it, after touring Europe. “I think this work is a return to a more communal way of making and sharing art, where the boundaries between performer and audience are blurred. And I think, as artists from these post-colonial contexts, we’re naturally drawn to this kind of work,” says Venuri. “It’s how art has traditionally been experienced in many of our cultures. It’s only with the introduction of Western-style proscenium stages and ticketed events that this division between artist and audience became so rigid. But there’s so much potential in breaking down those barriers again, in making art a shared experience rather than something that’s consumed passively.”

“Having programmes like Connect Asia Now is important. Venuri and I developed our friendship through the European context and circuit, where we stumble upon each other over and over. But if this could happen in Asia, a certain aesthetic and discourse specific to the context of the place, then those connections and friendships can emerge more strongly,” says Eisa. “I’ve experienced a lot of that in Singapore, like Dance Nucleus’ residencies, or Melati’s studio in Solo, Indonesia, and this kind of resource sharing is very vital and quite productive.”

“Going to Europe is incredibly resource-draining, so if there are Asian spaces for these gatherings, well I think it becomes easier for all of us. I’ve been seeing more festivals and residencies popping up, scattered yet growing, and you know, even something as simple as not needing a visa to travel to places like Singapore eases up a lot of the logistical issues for travelling and practicing,” says Venuri. “I sense a shift happening, and this desire to move away from Europe and turning the focus instead to collaboration and friendships.”

“There are no standard ways of doing residencies, and I’m excited to discover more. It is high time for the performing arts to have more spaces and places to host different people, more people, and provide more resources,” says Eisa. “The greatest takeaway lies in how there is this invisible energetic exchange that cannot be monetised. It is increasingly more precarious to operate in the performing arts, and hopefully as time goes by and we keep at what we do, it benefits the region and its development.”

“Just as Eisa and I, as two Asian women collaborators and artists, are in a way part of this conversation. We don’t live in the same place, so collaboration hasn’t been easy,” concludes Venuri. “Yet we insist on it, and continue to support things happening in our homes, not just artistic work, but also the future of living as artists in the Asian context, and continue to try to provide or create spaces and opportunities where we can see each other and talk to each other. That is what we hope continues, as the scene grows.”

Photo Credits: National Gallery Singapore

Magic Maids plays from 4th to 6th October 2024 at the Esplanade Annexe Studio. Tickets available here

da:ns focus – Connect Asia Now (CAN) 2024 runs from 4th to 6th October 2024 at the Esplanade. Tickets and full programme available here