THIS weekend, the walkway facing the normally respectable National Gallery of Australia will explode into life in a huge street-dancing party that owes much to the culture of Australia’s Filipino neighbours to the north.

Ostensibly an homage to the dazzling images flowing across the 60-metre façade of the gallery, created by Sydney’s Club Ate (it means “big sister”) collective, is also a great excuse for leaders of Canberra’s Filipino community to come out in force and show Canberrans how to celebrate.

Until March 9, Club Ate’s video projection, “In Muva (say it out loud) We Trust”, follows the NGA’s success with Aboriginal artist Tony Albert’s work “I Am Visible” for “Enlighten 2019”. This time round the national collecting institution is laying on a feast of markedly queer fun.

The Club Ate collective is led by artists Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, the latter the creator of the underground vogue event, the Sissy Ball.

Ra is both the “Muva” and “Big Sister” to Club Ate. A powerful personality and a leader in Sydney’s queer community, she is a former student at the Martha Graham School in New York and an alumna of Canberra’s QL2 Dance, with whom she is currently doing a project.

Drawing on their shared Filipino-Australian heritage, she and Shoulder use performance, costume and video to create work about personal discovery and stories of the queer Asia-Pacific diaspora.

At the heart of their work is their ongoing video-scape “Ex Nilalang”, a body of moving visual art that uses myth to explore the intersections of queer identities. “Nilalang” means both “to create” and also “creature”, suggesting both a transformation of existing mythologies and also the imagining of future folklore.

One sequence involves a performer dancing frenetically as the eerie, inhuman “Mananangaal” creature from the Balud region’s folklore, capable of severing its upper torso and sprouting huge bat-like wings but also singing a poignant mourning song for her lost culture.

It will do the gallery’s image no harm, and Shaune Lakin, the gallery’s senior curator of photography, says: “As Club Ate’s spectacular digital sky-world in effect ‘queers’ the building’s brutalist concrete structure, the streets will be ignited with dance, music and spectacle.”

Ra is a keen participant in Filipino community life both here and in Sydney and tells “CityNews” she has always found Filipinos open and accessible to queer culture, which “feels more fluid” among them.

With that in mind, she’s invited members of Canberra’s Filipino community to join performance artists and eight QL2dancers in leading the dancing on Saturday. They’ve been working closely with Ra, who says of the event, “Club Muva is a nurturing space for expression, a celebration of identity and connectedness.”

Recently “CityNews” caught up with Cecilia Flores, Feding Donaghue and Nadar Elliott, as they checked out their dancing skills on the treacherous steps of the old entrance to the NGA.

They told “CityNews” that they were always in practice, especially because of the recent Multicultural Festival, but that at any time they could be counted on to do street-dancing, a popular custom at harvest time, on Saint days and generally as a celebration of joy.

Flores, a member of the Filipino Community Council of the ACT, said many of the dancers would dress up in the famous butterfly or “Mestizo” dress, but that it represented just one of the many cultures in a nation with 7900 islands and 75 native dialects, with a rich fusion of influences from precolonial, Malay, through Portuguese, Spanish and American cultures.

As Ra puts it, “audiences can be immersed in our floorless ocean of potential and join our interwoven families in an action towards radical togetherness.”

“Club Ate: In Muva We Trust,” façade, National Gallery of Australia, until March 9, 8pm-late, free.

Club Muva, Saturday, March 7, Parkes Place East, National Gallery of Australia. 8pm-late, free.