ALAY: A Mourning Ritual Performance

ALAY is a durational mourning ritual performance by Dorothea Gloria, rooted in Ilocano traditions of grief, remembrance, and offering.

ALAY: A Mourning Ritual Performance

ALAY is a mourning ritual performance created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, rooted in Ilocano traditions of grief, remembrance, and offering. Drawing from ancestral practices of lamentation, prayer, and embodied devotion, the work explores how grief lives in the body and how ritual can hold what language cannot.

Positioned at the intersection of performance, ritual, and social practice, ALAY treats mourning as a living, communal practice. Through gesture, repetition, sound, and presence, the performance creates a shared space where grief is witnessed rather than explained, and where collective attention becomes an act of care.

ALAY reframes mourning as relational and expansive. The performance asks: What does it mean to mourn together? How might ritual be adapted and reimagined within contemporary performance practice? And how can ancestral knowledge inform present-day modes of gathering, remembrance, and healing?

ALAY functions both as a performance and an offering to our ancestors, to the community, and to those carrying unspoken or unresolved grief. Audiences are invited into an intimate ritual space that prioritizes presence over spectacle and process over product, foregrounding mourning as a shared human experience rather than an individual burden.

Created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, ALAY reflects Gloria’s ongoing artistic practice of exploring theater as ritual. The work builds a bridge between inherited ceremonial practices and contemporary performance, offering a space to sit with loss, tenderness, and collective remembrance.

ALAY is a durational performance. Audience can enter and exit at any point throughout the performance time.

Tickets are FREE but a suggested donation of $15 is much appreciated.

You can send a donation to:
Venmo: @theagloria

Zelle: theagloria@gmail.com

PayPal: theagloria@gmail.com

About the Artist:

Dorothea Gloria (she/her) is a Filipina theater-maker, actress, and performance artist based in New York City. Her work weaves ritual, community, and contemporary storytelling, with artistic research focused on mourning practices from the Ilocos region of the Philippines and their translation into contemporary performance. Grounded in process-driven creation, her work centers on collaboration, cultural memory, and collective exchange.

Dorothea is the Co-founder of RiffRaff NYC, an artist-led platform dedicated to developing new work and sharing multicultural stories through collaborative performance. Through RiffRaff, she nurtures artists in creating pieces that reflect diverse lived experiences while building community through generative and exploratory processes.

As an actress, Dorothea has performed with Spellbound Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights, The Flea Theater, and other New York–based companies. In the Philippines, she has worked with Repertory Philippines, PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association), and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She completed the conservatory program at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.

She is currently the Co-President of The League of Professional Theatre Women. When not in rehearsal, she can often be found in Bryant Park practicing juggling and flow arts.