gushes

Bio

gushes is ceremonial art-prog by Filipinx intermedia performance artist Jennae Santos, who was born and raised in the California Bay Area, lives in Brooklyn, and traces their bloodlines across the Philippines archipelago. gushes’ music is fed by these urban and queer, powerful and dramatic, vibrant and reverent coastlines. Their sound converges Filipino kulintang with Afro-Latin rhythms, 1970s prog theatrics, dance-punk, experimental percussion, and jazz noir camp. In live performance, gushes imbues these stylistic intersections with playful, intentional ceremony, often biting the heads of flowers, chewing the petals, then bursting floral confetti from their mouth on a cymbal crash. This punk gesture, which they call “How Devastating to Bloom,” disrupts feminine binary compliance with hilarious ferocity. 

Santos’ penchant for movement cycles, music theatre, site-specific performance, and experimental dance has led them to perform at cultural institutions like the Sydney Opera House, The Public Theater, Movement Research at Judson Church, Gibney Dance, and St. Anne’s Warehouse. At age 21, they were cast in a principal role in Karen O’s Stop the Virgens, a psycho-opera directed by Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Rapp, which featured members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Raconteurs, Money Mark, actor Lili Taylor and art direction by KK Barrett (production designer to Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola).

Santos’ art practice is inseparable from their liberatory research in decolonization, transformative justice, and Indigenous culture. They made Bagri Foundation-commissioned video art exploring personal-to-political movements. They produced and performed in food justice benefit shows alongside Mirrored Fatality and OHYUNG (composer to Julio Torres’ Fantasmas and Problemista). gushes developed tea ceremonies and eco-sensory rituals connecting land liberation movements from Palestine to the Philippines for JACK Arts’ Radical Acts Fest, and within quori theodor’s Gnaw installation at Performance Space New York. Santos offered a community soundscape for Emily Johnson’s Kinstillatory Fire at Abrons Art Center. gushes’ Moon Drone, a lunar phase-specific drone score premiered at 24-Hour DRONE alongside sets by Raven Chacon, Yuka Honda, and Laraaji. This remarkable performance prompted Basilica Hudson to curate gushes for the inaugural SQUARE Festival 2025 in Portugal. Supported in part by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, gushes performed at SQUARE as part of their 2025 Portugal tour. 

gushes refers to an open cry, a waterfall, blood rush, magmatic flow, orgasmic eruption, pheremonic sporulation, superbloom, and other unbound expressions of liberation. Whether recorded or performed live, their ceremonial activations spin new tactile mythologies, entwining the ancient with the subconscious, bombast with intimacy, romance with resistance, and power with pleasure. 

Photo by Steve Mangum.