When Sydney Loyola applied to the Creative Work Fund to collaborate with the Filipino American Development Foundation and multiple artists and artistic companies, she planned for the work to be part of the annual Parol Lantern Festival in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. The project vision was to contemporize and contextualize a traditional work as a means of recognizing the resilience of San Francisco’s Filipinx community.
Because of the global pandemic, the live Parol Lantern Festival was canceled, but artists in the US and the Philippines worked together with Sydney Loyola to create this short film Sayaw Sa Llaw — Dancing in the Light, which premiered on YouTube on December 18, 2020.