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inflammations. My brother won Young Citizen of the Year for the region. Mom won the senior version. We were the perfect migrants. As siblings we sang four part harmonies at the senior citizens’ village. In public we spoke English. With mum we spoke Cebuano. Everyone spoke English if Dad was in the room. When Pauline Hanson arrived in our public consciousness, Dad welcomed her. I loved my step-father. I write, speak and think in English. My Cebuano is tolerable. My Tagalog is horrific for those who speak it. Spanish is a cloying spectre that I’d love to master. Sometimes I believe that theatre without scripted text is the future and that language really does get in the way of telling the truth. I enjoy dramaturgy for dance. Though dance has become obsessed with being theatre. Strangely enough the older I get the more affinity I feel for my Cebuano ethnicity – it probably has to do with burying ones parents… In Manila I feel like an impostor. In Cebu I am a child looking for his footsteps. In Ceduna my Filipina mother and my Australian step-father are buried facing the sea, witnessing the sands claim the landscape. I write because it’s like an act of excavation. At university I failed archaeology. My worldly possessions are my white goods, my bed, a few suitcases full of drawings and words. I own my language. Excerpt from Border Language first published in Performance Space’s Translab Dialogues publication. Sydney, Australia. May 2016. Paschal Daantos Berry is performance maker, writer and dramaturg whose practice is focused on interdisciplinary, cross cultural and collaborative processes. He wrote the critically acclaimed The Folding Wife, a co-production which received a national Mobile States Tour through Performing Lines in 2010. With Deborah Pollard he created Within and Without, presented by Performance Space in partnership with Blacktown Arts Centre in 2011. His 10-year collaboration with Manila-based company Anino Shadowplay Collective has yielded multiple projects including a current work, Arkipelago: Intima-sea, which played the Pesta Boneka Biennale in Jogjakarta in December 2014. Paschal was an inaugural member of Australia Council’s Youth Panel. He is currently the Performance Curator at Blacktown Arts Centre.