The co-founders of Langgam Performance Troupe from Manila spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2025, developing the auto/biographical performance “The Inheritance of Taste”.
About the Artists
Jenny Logico-Cruz is a contemporary performance-maker, educator, and cultural worker. Her works have been featured locally and abroad including Manila, New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco, and London. She has also collaborated with notable arts organizations and cultural institutions such as The Cultural Center of the Philippines, St. Scholastica’s College of Music, The National Asian American Theater Company, The New York International Fringe Festival, The V&A Museum- Theatre and Performance Department, and Goethe-Institut Philippinen. Jenny holds a BA in Literature at De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines, and a Master’s degree in London’s Theatre and Performance (Viewing, Making, Writing) at the University of Roehampton (London, UK) where she received a Distinction Award. She also taught at the Theater Arts Department of De La Salle- College of St. Benilde (Manila, Philippines), with research interests focusing on contemporary practices and performance theories.
For the past 10 years, she is the co-founder and artistic director of Langgam Performance Troupe, a contemporary performance company focusing on experimental, process-based, interdisciplinary approaches, and practice-as-research works. Under her and Blonski Cruz’s (company manager) leadership, Langgam Performance Troupe has gained significant cultural notoriety in the independent theater landscape, becoming known as a producer for bold and innovative underground performance works. Her directing credits include: SOMEWHERE ELSE INSTEAD (2019-2020), SANA DEL MUNDO (OR HOPEFULLY OF THE WORLD (2020), [KOSMOS] (2021), THREAD/WARP (2021), and her most notable to date, PANGULONG BANGAW (2023), a one-man adaptation of William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES. As of 2025, she is an artist-of-residence for Goethe Institut Philippines’ Performance Ecologies, and Rimbun Dahan’s Southeast Asian Residency in Malaysia.
FB: https://www.facebook.com/jenny.logico
IG: @logicocruz
Blonski Cruz is a dramaturg, producer, filmmaker, and photographer based in the Philippines. He is a Production Design graduate from the De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde. He was a recipient of production grants with the Goethe Institut, National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), and Cinema One Film Originals. He has also partnered with heritage institutions such as Fundacion Santiago and the Emilio Aguinaldo Shrine in Kawit, Cavite to create interactive historical tour.
Blonski co-founded Langgam Performance Troupe with professional/personal partner Jenny Logico-Cruz. He operates as the resident dramaturg and company manager. His collaborations with Langgam were featured in the Lacuna Festivals (Spain), BST Journal (UK), the Singapore Biennale, and XSCENA Festival (Manila). Blonski recently finished a training program called Psychological First Aid organized by the Mekong Cultural Hub (Taiwan/UK). This program aimed to equipped cultural workers with the basic tools in establishing safe spaces and support systems for their respectively fields of practice. Currently, he is an artist-in-residence in Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia) for an auto/biographical performance titled “Inheritance of Taste”.
FB: https://www.facebook.com/blonskicruz
IG: @raygcruz
An Inheritance of Taste
An Inheritance of Taste is an auto/biographical performance project that explores the intersections of food, memory, grief and longing, and the reflection of one’s family legacy and its impact on one’s identity. Utilizing an old family recipe book as the main text for performance, An Inheritance of Taste embarks on a performative dialogue between the past and the present. The past: a deceased matriarch (performed by Jenny Logico-Cruz) whose voice remains in the faded pages of a generational recipe book of Filipino dishes she once composed and compiled for her family before her passing. And the present: a daughter (also performed by Jenny Logico-Cruz) who decides to revisit the dishes of her childhood through the same recipe book, after more than 20 years ago since her mother died.
The central action of this dialogue between past and present is the very act and process of cooking—as dictated by the family recipe book itself. The performance aims to tackle the cooking process as a form of seánce that reconnects ancestors and descendants into the familiar reunion taste and smells, as well as create further discourse and communion between the subjective narrative of the performer (cook) and the objective experience of the audience (diners).
During the residency at Rimbun Dahan, and immersed in the backdrop of Kuang’s slow-paced, leisurely nature, artists are finally afforded the time and space to dive deep into these heirloom recipes with invested attention into their time-intensive, laborious cooking process—which otherwise would have been unmanageable if conducted in the artists’ home city (fast-paced Metro Manila). Apart from committing to the recipes’ element of traditionally durational process, the artists further investigate on the notion of “taste memory,” as asserted by Jenny Logico-Cruz’s mother, as the only powerful “secret ingredient” in recreating these inherited dishes. The artist’s mother notes in her letter dated September 17, 2003: “The secret is this […] you have to remember how you have tasted the dish.” Taking up on this challenge, the artists explore on how such recipes can still maintain the same flavor profile despite being uprooted from their original Philippine locality and transposed using locally available produce in Malaysia. The challenge transforms, beyond just a mere exercise on cooking, but more so as an exercise on memory—memory as a potent muscle that intersects intuition, communal/personal history, and intangible inheritance; memory as the unquantifiable yet ultimate ingredient that navigates and instructs a dish together, transcending limitations and differences in cultural produce.
More info about Langgam Performance Troupe:
Website: www.langgamperformancetroupe.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/LanggamPT
IG: @langgampt