Taipei, Aug. 30 (CNA) Belgium-based Filipino dancer Joshua Serafin’s performance later this week at the Taipei Arts Festival explores transgender beauty pageants from the Philippines and the politics, culture and hidden colonial past behind the industry, the artist said Tuesday.

The 60-minute contemporary solo performance, titled "MISS," starts with an abstract image and becomes a lecture, before regaling the audience with explosive movements, humor and concluding with the sort of question-and-answer segment commonly seen in beauty pageants, Serafin told CNA.

"Miss" Work-In-Progress Trailer from Joshua Serafin on Vimeo.

Based on the vocabulary of beauty pageants, including poses and cliché dance moves, they expose not only the construct of femininity and beauty but also the religious influences left behind by the superpowers that colonized the Philippines, Serafin said.

"It's actually very violent," Serafin said. "I mean, who dictates these are the ideal beauties and the violence the women need to go through to look the part?"

Serafin, who prefers the pronouns they/them, said they understand that many women or trans women undergo the selection process to escape poverty in the hope of reaching a better career or greater recognition.

"But to go through this selection process and training is violent, and of course there are many things we don't know happening behind the scenes," Serafin said. "The industry is not the kindest one."

Furthermore, speaking about the colonial context of beauty pageants in the Philippines, Serafin said the religious-historical Santacruzan was the starting point of beauty pageants in the country as it introduced the idea with a Catholic connotation.

Serafin described it as a colonial apparatus used by the Spanish, similar to the way the Americans later brought the tradition of carnival queens to Manila.

"The Philippines is such a big country and it's so hard to colonize it in one go, so they ask one woman to represent one region and all the goods from that place," Serafin said. "You pick a woman to represent that and bring them all in to Manila to compete for the position of 'Carnival Queen'."

The method was an American imperial tool to bring women and products to the capital city instead of having to travel to every region, Serafin said.

"As an American imperial colonialist method, it just makes things easier for people to come to Manila than for them going to the provinces," Serafin said.

Born in 1995 in the Philippines, the 26-year-old Serafin is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts and choreography, according to Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), the organizer of the Taipei Arts Festival.

Serafin lived in Bacolod City until 12 before moving to Manila and staying there until 18. Serafin then lived in Hong Kong for two years before moving to Belgium, where they have been for the past six years.

Serafin's educational background includes the Philippine High School for the Arts, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, P.A.R.T.S.: School for contemporary dance in Brussels, and KASK School of Arts in Ghent, according to TPAC.

Serafin 's "MISS" will be staged Sept. 1-4 at the Taipei Performing Arts Center.