A mind-bending, preconception-shattering experience—an assault to what we think of as order, form, grace—yields surprising rewards.

SUBURBAN Quezon City, best known for government buildings, NGO headquarters and mercantile Cubao, seems like an odd place to launch the second Contemporary Dance Map, a

week-long festival organized by the chorographers’ network of the World Dance Alliance-Philippines to celebrate International Dance Day.

From April 29 to May 12, six separate—and seemingly disparate—dance disciplines and performances wended their way through venues dotted throughout the sprawling and sometimes laid-back city.

But why not the cultured ghettoes of Makati or the hallowed halls of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and similar venues in the environs of gritty but always exciting city of Manila? Why opt for the stupor of QC?

After all, from the more traditional forms of ballet as espoused by the Halili-Cruz School of Dance, to the riveting workshop-like improvisational strangeness of “Chasing the Whale,” a multi-media lounge performance by dancers from Turkey, Japan, Afghanistan, Denmark, Thailand, Brazil and the Philippines held at the Green Papaya Art Projects wedged somewhere at Teacher’s Village in Quezon City, the festival was an exercise in beyond-edgy. Certainly not very QC.

But Mayor Sonny Belmonte was an enthusiastic supporter and most of the participating dance studios had their HQs in QC. Aside from Halili-Cruz and Green Papaya, there was Airdance Studio, Myra Beltran’s Dance Studio, RA Center for Experimental Choreography, Dance Forum Space. The exception was DWutopia: doubleutopia, a blond-wood space located at the upper floor of an American-era apartment building along Mabini Street in Manila.

Indeed, the performances were literally mapped out in a grid showing the main roads and by roads of part of Quezon City, with performance venues dotted and numbered for quick referencing.

“Giving you a map is to invite you to join our walk,” chair Basilio Estaban S. Villaruz wrote in the program notes. “It is to lead you to where we are—which is not just our physical but also our mental habitation, over transpiring (even transfiguring) experience.”

And it was. A mind-bending, preconception-shattering experience—an assault to what we think of as order, form, grace—that, ultimately, yielded a fresh if unsettling way of experiencing form and meaning.

If this sounds all too intellectual and alienating, consider the neighborhood children and tricycle drivers who trooped to the Green Papaya space to witness “Chasing the Whale,” challengingly free-form and to structured minds, devoid of linear comfort zones. The kids sprawled on the floor sat agape for at least two hours—as dancers contorted themselves with seemingly little rhyme or reason. And when the performers invited a few of the children to join them on the raised platform that served as fluid space, they willingly complied and easily mimicked the free-for-all happening onstage.

It seemed like a breakthrough. No longer elitist, the farther edges of contemporary dance seemed to have been felt and understood by the likes of, well, ordinary folk like us. Which is saying a lot, seeing that us ordinary folk live in the quiet and sleepy comfort zones of QC.