Halika Dito — "Come here" in Filipino — tells the story of a woman waiting for her husband to return, lost somewhere in the wilderness of the modern city. Rooted in the feminine tradition of the Kulintang, a gong instrument long associated with women in Filipino culture, the work holds her longing at its centre: patient, insistent, and quietly fierce.

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The dancer embodies this waiting in the body. Behind her, a storybook world of vivid, painterly imagery unfolds in projection, conjuring the fractured pace of urban life from which her husband has not returned. The Gandingan — the speaking gong, whose tones imitate the cadences of the Maguindanao language — carries the work's recurring theme like a call that cannot stop itself: Come here, come here, I am waiting for you.

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Halika Dito is a music theatre work for dancer, Kulintang gongs, Gandingan, big gong, drums, violin, and bassoon, with a polyphonic performance score. The Gandingan weaves through the work as ostinato while the violin and bassoon erupt around it, voicing the rawness of grief and desire. The Kulintang, big gong, and drums ground the piece in its Asian sonic roots, binding these threads into a fusion that is at once intimate and expansive.