Filipino choreographer Eisa Jocson and Sri Lankan artist Venuri Perera fuse dance, magic, and combat in their first collaboration, Magic Maids, coming to Trafo House of Contemporary Arts (Trafó) on March 13–14. A broom takes center stage—not as a prop but as a cheeky feminist emblem—while the duo confronts the realities of contemporary domestic labor, especially for workers migrating from the Global South.
What begins as performance turns into a cleansing ritual, a deliberate unspelling of the hierarchies that keep care work invisible and undervalued. Their stage language shifts from ritualistic gestures to spellcasting and sly subversion, making visible the grind, grace, and guerrilla tactics of those who clean up after everyone else. Jocson and Perera don’t just depict the system—they agitate it, sweeping across the stage like a strike line that refuses to be quiet.
Ritual, resistance, reckoning
As part of Trafó’s interdisciplinary focus, Magic Maids reframes the maid’s toolkit as instruments of power, recoding domestic space into a battleground where bodies, brooms, and belief clash—and cleanse.
