Regie Cabico : Filipino shuffle

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project is an effort of several Cafe founders to preserve the immense history of the famed cafe and to cement its importance as a foundational scene of poetry and artistic creation in New York's Lower East Side or Loisaida. Founded in 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe began as a living room salon in the East Village apartment of writer and poet Miguel Algarín, along with other playwrights, poets, and musicians of color whose work was not accepted by the mainstream academic, entertainment or publishing industries. As time passed, the signature style of performance poetry became a central fixture of urban Latino and African-American culture, leading to the purchase of a former tenement building at 236 East 3rd Street, where the Cafe continues to reside. A historical and cultural landmark for nearly 50 years, the Cafe has launched numerous careers and supports a wide range of artistic endeavors such as plays, workshops, training sessions, and more.

Regie Cabico hilariously confronts forces such as Catholicism, queer sexuality and desire, and tropes of Asian male identity in his performance Filipino Shuffle. Taking as material the films Monster's Ball and Hollywood Shuffle, as well as the mini-series The Thorn Birds, Cabico employs a queer Filipino imaginary in order to both address conventional Hollywood stereotypes of "the other" and to assert the need for queer Filipino narratives such as his own