Jennae Santos
(they/she) + short bio here
is an interdisciplinary artist casting tactile mythos through music, sound, performance, and ceremony.
Jennae lives in Brooklyn, they were born and raised in the Bay Area, and they trace their bloodlines across the Philippines archipelago. These varied coastlines— urban & queer, powerful & dramatic, vibrant & earthy compose the space from which their art spills forth.
Santos’ work is fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, plant medicine, foodways, and land-sea ecologies poeticized through the lens of genderqueer fluidity, decolonization, dreaming, and pleasure. Their work spans chamber prog ensemble, liberation dance music, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, communal ritual, social practice, video, sound sculpture and other intermedia incarnations generated through 3 containers: gushes, Eternal Oyster, and Tree+Oyster.
gushes
is a progressive performance art-rock project for which Santos composes, directs, play guitars, and sings. A tapestry of interlocking polyrhythmic, ambient, and textural guitar loops form a foundation for lyrical songcraft, lovesong, sensorial ritual, and epic performance. Energized by friends and supporting artists, gushes music is arranged for chamber prog ensemble, rock band, movement cycle, sound installation, and drone.
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. Since then, Santos has led over 20 iterations of gushes productions encompassing commissions and collaborations for theatre, video, and social justice projects.
Eternal Oyster
is an earth body research-response container for ecopoetics, earth shapes, and animal architecture grounded in landback, and food and climate justice.
Tree+Oyster
(Ana Vásquez and Jennae Santos) is a sensory installation partnership and co-creation ritual for cross-cultural intimacy. With the aim to cultivate collective trust and dreaming, Tree+Oyster facilitate non-verbal communication and play to shed anthropocentric perspective and language barriers for emergent ritual. The project builds immersive, site-specific happenings fed by intersectional decolonization practices, communal feasting, land-to-sea ecologies, plant and animal kinship and architectures, campfire jams, and archipelagic Indigenous mythologies from the Dominican Republic and the Philippines to stoke embodied memory, resist erasure, and generate shared mythmaking.
Santos has shared the stage with Karen O, Money Mark, Yuka Honda, Satomi Matsuzaki, and Arone Dyer. They have performed in theaters, clubs, and DIY spaces across the US and Australia including The Sydney Opera House, Performance Space New York, The Public Theater, St. Anne’s Warehouse, National Sawdust, Trans Pecos, Union Pool, Judson Church, Basilica Hudson, The Vulcan, Thee Stork Club, and Coaxial Arts.
HIGHLIGHTS
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.