Burden of Proof (work-in-progress)

June 20, 2025 

Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco

Presented by KULARTS

Choreographer, Artistic Director, Alleluia Panis

By Kristen Cosby

KULARTS in Burden of Proof

On a bright June evening, a group of dancers baring miniature house-lanterns on long, bent poles led audience members from the sidewalks of SOMA into Bindlestiff Studio. They set the houses around an altar to the side of the room where they remained lit as the prelude to the night’s presentation, the multimedia work-in-progress by KULARTS’ director and choreographer Alleluia Panis.

Burden of Proof interprets the story of Lenora Perez, a young Phillipina nurse and mother who was falsely convicted of murdering patients at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor Michigan where she worked in 1975. She was brutally arrested and imprisoned while pregnant. 

Perez’s son, Jason Mugoba Perez, a Poet Laurent of San Diego and a Poet Laureate Fellow within the Academy of American Poets, has collaborated with Panis and the dancers of KULARTS to recreate those events as if they’d occurred in 2005 as a means of calling attention to the way in which political trauma can be inflicted upon people’s private lives – particularly, both then and now, the lives of immigrants of color.  

The piece opens with Dre ‘Poko” Devis, the dancer who plays Vee (the character based on Lenora Perez), sitting atop a table in a hot pink prison jumpsuit singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” while playing ukulele. (It is, Jason Perez said in the artist’s talk, his mother’s favorite song.) The lights drop. When we next see Vee, she’s kneeling, legs wide, atop the table screaming silently and grasping toward the ceiling while three other prisoners in jumpsuits with nylons pulled over their heads creep around her during her prison intake. The contrast is a gut punch. 

Dre ‘Poko” Devis in Burden of Proof

In almost every scene, Panis chose to project several collections of black and white graphics against the back wall of the studio which enhanced the narrative on stage.  In the second movement, the graphics transform the stage into a basketball court, where Vee’s son (Jonathan Raymoundo Casal) plays, but later the same wall-space plays and replays the moment of Vee’s arrest, and the moment of impact on her children and husband, emphasizing the spiraling nature of trauma. Much of the piece is a study of the impact of this trauma, particularly on Vee’s son. 

The contrast of familial joy and the brutality of Vee’s arrest emerge between the second and third acts. Vee’s family gathers for her birthday party. Vee’s son strides in, places his hand on the table and kicks his legs over his head in a joyous round off.  Jenelle Gaerlan, who plays Vee’s daughter, LinLin, and Francis Anthony Cailles, perform a short but stunning pas de deux that culminates in a breathtaking spin in which Francis lifts Jenelle while she places her hands on his hips and arches her back and legs scorpion-style. Friends join, crackers, and confetti launch. Vee and her husband waltz together in deep affection. This is the last moment we see this family at peace and in joy. 

By sharp contrast, the scene of Vee’s arrest occurs on an empty stage. Vee meanders through an outdoor market followed by an FBI agent who turns on aggressive perpendicular paths across the stage while tailing her until they intersect and he brings her to her knees. Three repeating frames of graphic illustrations cast upon the back wall that describe and redescribe the moment of arrest. A moment that echoes so many images we are seeing on the nightly news of the arrest and detention of friends, neighbors and beloved members of our communities as immigrants and citizens of color are targeted. 

Jess DeFranco renders the dark clown-like figure of the Kapre, a deity of the Tagalong people, who emerges in act three as a harbinger of terrible things. Whenever she appears, trouble follows. She wears a top-hat and flouncy skirt that she can disappear beneath and smokes from a long slim cigarette holder. She removes her hat only to roll over the back of another dancer, and then saucily replace it. 

Jess DeFranco in Burden of Proof

But even in this somber piece, there is resistance and joy, when the ensemble takes the stage for ‘Sulong’, the last fragment of the piece, they repeat a movement from the birthday celebration in resistance: a slow paddle-turn in which all dancers extend their arms to one side with palms flexed outward, as if to push someone or something away, whether tricky deities or the FBI. So that the very movement and freedom of their bodies becomes a testament of survival.