64 Carving Out a Space social ills. Her post neo-ethnic choreographies, though lesser in scale in terms of their narratives—they are no longer “historical” and “cultural” in the traditional sense—are nonetheless closer readings of what afflicts the Filipino of today, in particular the urban Filipino. But perhaps using the term “post neo-ethnic” is even problematic as the term assumes a clean and clear leaving behind of a kind of choreography, which did not seem to happen in Locsin’s case. Asked when the shift actually happened, Locsin starts recalling that tipping point, that moment when she decided to develop a new vocabulary. Like most artists who are not wont to document (i.e., in writing) their own histories as their works should be taken as histories themselves, Locsin attempts to piece things together, to make connections between milieu, motivations, materials that gave birth to urbanative works. And in her story of how this new form came to be, we see how “art is projected through the clarity of its form,” and how “form is the shape of a content” (Holm in Brown 1979, 78). The earliest urbanative choreography that comes to Locsin’s mind is Four Last Songs (1999) which she created as a tribute to the former CCP President, Ma. Theresa Escoda Roxas whom she affectionately called “Tita Bing.” It was actually Locsin who volunteered to choreograph the piece whose music was Richard Strauss’ “Four Last Songs,” Roxas’ favorite. In that year, it was not just the death of the CCP president that deeply moved Locsin; she was still recovering from the death of her father the previous year. With so much grief, Locsin had to find another vocabulary for her choreographies as the neo-ethnic movements did not sit well with the pieces she had in mind. This is not to say that her new works were devoid of neo-ethnic tendencies as she “purposely distorted them [neo-ethnic movements] and came up with new movements which [she ] believed expressed how [she] felt at that time (Locsin, e-mail to author July 24, 2011). Her former student and now professional dancer, Georgette Sanchez, remembers having had more “freedom to distort more and use [her] body. But the use of the center, control and strength of the legs were there... [these] qualities [which marked Locsin’s neo-ethnic pieces] were always present.” Sanchez also noticed that though the pieces were still “technically hard and challenging,” they were created around what the dancers’ bodies could do (Sanchez, e-mail to Locsin, July 26, 2011). Feeling elated at the results of her “distortions,” Locsin continued to create similar pieces when she returned to Davao. There seems to be a pattern in the naming of Locsin’s signature dance vocabularies (in literature, these would probably be equivalent to