Jennae Santos

(they/she) + short bio here

gushes refers to an open cry, a waterfall, blood rush, magmatic flow, orgasmic eruption, pheremonic sporulation, superbloom, and other unbound expressions of liberation.

gushes is ceremonial art-prog by Filipinx intermedia performance artist, Jennae Santos. They live in Brooklyn, they were born and raised in the California Bay Area, and they trace their bloodlines across the Philippines archipelago. These varied coastlines— urban and queer, powerful and dramatic, vibrant and reverent— compose the space from which their art spills forth. gushes’ music melds the theatrical maximalism of 1970s prog, the untethered spirit of dance punk, the sensuality of soul, the kinetic abstraction of experimental percussion, the camp of jazz noir, and Filipino kulintang in conversation with Afro-Latin rhythms. In live performance, gushes enlivens these stylistic intersections with playful yet intentional ceremony. Santos is known to bite the heads of flowers, chew petals, then burst floral confetti from their mouth on a cymbal crash. This punk gesture called “How Devastating to Bloom,” often shared with queer audience members, disrupts binary compliance and feminine demure with hilarious ferocity. 

Santos’ most vivid, somatic childhood memories are of touching plants in their grandmother’s garden— cactus needles puncturing their palm, climbing a plum tree to taste bitter fruit, finger-painting with pollen. Their teenage angst and romance found mystic solace in Northern California cliff-side beaches, tidepools, and sea caves. These sensational spaces would define their artistic world-building. Jennae moved to NYC to study theatre. They developed a penchant for movement cycles, music theatre, site-specific performance, and experimental dance, performing 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, Karen O’s psycho opera, Stop the Virgens, directed by Adam Rapp, featuring members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Raconteurs, Money Mark, actor Lili Taylor, with art direction by KK Barrett was a catalyzing project for Santos which plucked them from college and prompted them to start a band with bold production concepts.

Simultaneous to artistic pursuit, Santos worked in NYC’s service industry, waiting tables on the Upper West Side and dog-walking in Chelsea. They also volunteered at their community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This combined experience stoked class consciousness as they interfaced with New York’s affluent clientele contrasted with undocumented immigrants and neighbors living in low-income housing. Under Covid quarantine, they dove into online Filipinx decolonization, transformative justice, and Indigenous combat education groups. Inspired by the Babaylan, Indigenous Filipino community healers trained in combat and plant medicine, Santos studied herbalism, Kali as a feminist fighting system, and reoriented their art practice towards liberation. 

They contributed art and music for political campaigns to support Indigenous landback and food sovereignty movements in New York, the Bay Area, and the Philippines. Santos’ Loops for Bedroom Dancers, a 2020 Bagri Foundation commission, explores the personal-to-political meaning of the word “movement.” The video art series features dance, guitar loops, and beats sampled from toppled colonizer statues during worldwide 2020 protests. Seeking further embodied avenues of resistance, Jennae cultivated kinship with food justice project Star Route Farm in 2021. They produced a benefit show for the farm at Trans Pecos in 2023 with Mirrored Fatality and OHYUNG, where gushes presented a new choreographic song cycle, Game One / CUT. Supported by JACK Arts, Jennae further developed this piece with a tea ceremony connecting land liberation movements from Palestine to the Philippines for Radical Acts Fest 2023. In 2024, gushes performed The Stars Made the Soil, an eco-sensory ritual within quori theodor’s Gnaw installation at Performance Space New York, featuring poetry, live music, and their signature feral floral gesture with queer farmers for the Spring Launch of Asian food sovereignty cooperative, Choy Commons. That summer, Santos presented a community soundscape-event score for Emily Johnson’s Kinstillatory Fire at Abrons Art Center. gushes’ Moon Drone, a lunar phase-specific drone score for concert bass drums, 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. The festival highlighted international artists from countries touching the Atlantic Ocean, and engaged communities in building cooperative structures for independent music. 

Fed by Jennae’s lifelong sensorial history with the land, gushes work converges music with ceremony. 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, these activations cast new tactile mythologies, entwining the ancient with the subconscious, bombast with intimacy, romance with resistance, and power with liberation.

HIGHLIGHTS

Breaking the industry formula, and embracing DIY ethos, gushes embarked on a 6-month album release cycle for their debut LP, Delicious Collision.

The first single Yo banana boY (April 2025), a piece on cycles of life/growth and death/decomposition, released with two events serving food sovereignty and public gardens. For Asian food sovereignty project, Choy Commons' Spring Fundraiser, gushes x Jess Tsang presented Rice Music, an abstracted version of Yo banana boY with tactile feedback percussion, diasporic folk music collage about rice harvest, and a political tea ceremony. gushes produced an ambient drone installation version of Yo banana boY for Bryce Peterson's The Hanging Gardens of Brooklyn in Herbert Von King Park, a public sculpture featuring native plants and soundsystem.

The second single, Stick Figures (July 2025), a nonbinary birthing spell set in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York, emerged as a music video directed, shot, and edited by Santos, their cinematographic debut. Foxy Digitalis writes, “Santos directs the video with ceremonial precision, transforming the Catskills into a ritual space where bodies become portals.” The video premiered as a living room gathering and third space, presented by PTP, inviting other artists to share and discuss their work and the music video format.

For the third single, Game One, gushes performed a multimedia dance piece with choreographic direction by Jas Lin (Mitski, Hana Vu, Jamila Woods), and live visuals and audience-generated drone ceremony SWOONFEST25 at the Dimenna Center, NYC, presented by TAK Ensemble in September 2025.

Concluding the album release cycle, gushes presented two special events in October 2025 in NYC. On October 3rd, PTP hosted a listening party at Lichen, featuring the album in its entirety and unreleased music from PTP Collective and Switch Hit Records played through Deborah Garcia's RECORDAR sound tower. Their album release followed on October 20th at TV Eye featuring gushes' 9-piece live band, plus supporting acts Lou Tides, KAYE, and ALYXÅNDRA.

gushes released their debut EP, GUSHING (2018) on Floordoor Records under their former moniker, WSABI Fox, preceded by 2 music videos— Yes Ma’am, a gnarling prog anthem warped with kaleidoscopic psychedelia directed by Santos, and Flamingo, an ethereal love song with partnered choreography, produced with ThrdCoast.

In 2019, The Culprits theatre company commissioned LENORE, a composition for dancers, as part of {POE} at S. Oxford Space in Brooklyn.

gushes, formerly billed as WSABI Fox, played Resonator Arts Festival 2019 at National Sawdust in collaboration with Bronx-based rapper, Dizzy SenZe.

As part of the virtual program At Home in the World (2020), The Bagri Foundation (UK) commissioned Loops for Bedroom Dancers, a 3-part movement/music video series.

gushes performed in choreographer Emma R Brown’s Temporary Frames (2022) at Movement Research, NYC.

In 2022, Santos led a new gushes performance ensemble, Rhythm Nation, featuring a 3-drummer spectacle for a special show at TV Eye in Queens, along with Tigue an Sarah Galdes.

gushes’ Moon Drone, a lunar phase-specific score for tactile feedback drums and flowers, debuted at 24-HOUR DRONE 2023 at Basilica Hudson, NY. They performed Moon Drone II later that year for Flux Factory’s Ornaphonism on Governor’s Island, NY.

Santos produced and performed a benefit show for Star Route Farm, a BIPOC-led food justice project, alongside Mirrored Fatality and OHYUNG. They performed a new solo movement cycle, Game One / CUT, to unreleased tracks off their forthcoming debut album, Delicious Collision. The piece was further developed with commission and production support from JACK Arts for Radical Acts Fest 2023.

In 2024, gushes partnered with Asian food sovereignty collective, Choy Commons, for their Spring Opening at Performance Space New York and performed The Stars Made the Soil, a music, poetry, and tea ceremony piece within a flower installation.

Jennae Santos’ other professional work includes Karen O’s (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) psycho opera Stop the Virgens at St Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and The Sydney Opera House directed by Adam Rapp, Spooky Death Ride Sister Wives band with Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto), Satomi Matsuzaki (Deerhoof), Jen Goma, and Noga Shefi, Dronechoir by Arone Dyer (Buke & Gase) at Basilica Hudson, Wave Hill, and O+ Festival, repairing permissions by Mariangela Lopez with Accidental Movement at Gibney Dance Center, and Life and Times: Episodes 1-4 with Nature Theater of Oklahoma at The Public Theater (NYC).