Friday, December 20, 2024
3:38 PM |
St. Luigi Patron Saint of Health Care as Human Right
Labels: health, human rights, humor, murder, people
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 218.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
4:49 PM |
Plays! Plays! Plays!
I just finished editing and preparing a packet of full-length plays by Silliman writers [most of them Palanca winners] for Dessa Quesada-Palm’s directing class next semester. Was happy to note that three of them are comedies, and one — Lemuel Torrevillas’ Enter Edison, or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something — is an absolute farce of the first order. I also loved the pre-colonial shenanigans of Leoncio Deriada’s Maragtas: How Kapinangan Tricked Sumakwel Twice, the Basay-set agrarian reform family melodrama in Bobby Flores Villasis’ Eidolon, the rape legal melodrama of Elsie Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and the forbidden love sarswela of Rolin Migyuel Cadallo Obina’s San Nicolas. [There is another musical in the mix: Lakas ng Mahirap by Rosario Cruz Lucero.] Three are by former students of mine: Mike Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago, Beryl Andrea Delicana’s Mango Tree, and Jireh Catacutan’s Una't Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco. I have nine in all so far, and waiting to source out three more [one by Edilberto Tiempo, one by Linda Faigao-Hall, and one by Krip Yuson]. This really should be an anthology.Labels: dumaguete, philippine literature, silliman, theatre, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, December 15, 2024
11:20 AM |
Lina Sagaral Reyes, 1961-2024
The last time Lina and I chatted was only a month ago. She wanted me to join her for a journalism event slated in Mindanao next year. Of course I said yes. Silliman and Dumaguete will miss you, Lina. Thank you for being a gentle guide when I was going through my own mental health crisis during the pandemic.
Lina Sagaral Reyes was a poet and journalist. She was born on 6 July 1961 in Villalimpia, Bohol, which according to her was a "a village of blacksmiths, nipa thatchers, fishers, carpenters, a few teachers, sailors and other professionals, and women who live on their own."
She moved to Dumaguete City and took courses in Journalism and Creative Writing at Silliman University between 1978 and 1983, and made the distinction of being the first female student elected as President of the SU Student Government. In 1987, she was diagnosed with a disease, which doctors claimed would take her life in two years. She wrote furiously in this time, and was quite prolific — but she outlived the diagnosis, and she returned to Bohol, reclaimed her parents' house, and transformed it into the office of the Center for Creative Women. She began researching on the life stories of creative women in villages for the Writers Involved in Creative Cultural Alternatives [WICCA]. She won the Palanca Award for her poetry in 1987 [first prize, for “(Instead of a Will These) For All the Loved Ones”] and then in 1990 [third prize, for “Istorya”]. She would author the poetry collection, Honing Weapons, published by Lunhaw Books in 1987. Another collection, ‘Storya, was published in 1993 by the Babaylan Women's Publishing Collective and the Institute of Women's Studies of St. Scholastica's College.
As a journalist, she wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Mindanao Gold Star Daily, and often reported on the intersection between gender, the environment, climate change, culture, the arts, and mental health. As one of the directors of the The Cagayan de Oro Press Club Journalism Institute, she fostered collaborations with other organizations and drafted programs to enhance the media community. In 1998 she received the Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Investigative Journalism, for an expose on sand dredging to accommodate an international resort. In 2000 she received the National Science and Technology Journalism Grand Prize for an investigation into an algal bloom in Macajalar Bay, and in 2020 her in-depth probe into corporate pineapple farms and their questionable carbon-negative claims won her the Globe Media Excellence Awards.
She died on 14 December 2024.
Here’s a poem by Lina from her Palanca-winning collection, ‘Storya, in 1990:
Here’s a poem in tribute to Lina by Adonis Durado:
And another poem in tribute to Lina by Elio Garcia:
Labels: dumaguete, journalism, obituary, philippine literature, poetry, silliman, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
9:00 AM |
The Beauty of Old Houses
The old house along Acias Pinili Street in Tinago was easy to overlook, even if you’ve lived in Dumaguete for so long. We tend to avert our gaze from what looks like the apotheosis of the decrepit—the fading brownness of old wood making what is otherwise an imposing structure blend into what background there is: often that’s wild vegetation; sometimes it’s the other buildings around it. Old houses always melt into nothingness. Structures of this kind—the heritage houses of the community’s landed families of long ago—are easy to miss, indeed, except when one trains their eyes to see beauty in the old and often abandoned.
So many of these still abound in Dumaguete—some still being used in myriad ways by their owners, some seemingly abandoned. Here’s an incomplete rundown: There’s the imposing one between the local branch of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the building that houses a Mercury Drug in Daro, right near the crossing of the National Highway and E.J. Blanco Drive. There’s the one just along Perdices Street, near Ever Mall, right in the center of town, which was converted into a now defunct budget hotel. There’s the one owned by the family of the late Teresa Basa—her of the infamous murder case in Chicago solved by her ghost—right near the corner of Lorenzo Teves Street and Calle Sta. Catalina, which has seen better days.
My two favorites are contrasts: the small white house at the corner of Pinili Street and Calle Sta. Catalina, which is still beautiful to behold after all these years; and the Flores house at the corner of E.J. Blanco Drive and Hibbard Avenue, which is still largely intact—but has lost its beautiful front lawn and garden [which had a beautiful willowy tree at the corner] to an ill-conceived structure that has housed an ever-revolving array of businesses, from an eatery to a barber shop.
Some are lost forever, like that splendid small white house with Greek columns beside the Dumaguete Rural Bank, which was later demolished to make way for an ugly grill house, which soon closed shop anyway. But I’m just happy to note that this fate has escaped the historic Locsin house at the corner of Dr. V. Locsin Street and Calle Sta. Catalina—important for being the house that hosted the final meeting that divided Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental early in 1901. Today, it has been largely preserved.
These structures are repositories of family histories—the people who helped make Dumaguete become a vibrant community—and in turn, they have helped create the makeup of local history as well. So when we lose them, we lose a small but significant part of that history as well. We lose our stories with their loss.
The conundrum, of course, lies in the fact that these are privately-owned structures whose fates lie in the hands of owners. Some are neglectful, or ignorant of family history. Some only see these as pieces of real estate—and valuable in that sense only. But some owners see value in the old structures—because they are truly beautiful once restored—and have made good cases for adaptive reuse, because restoring the original architectural splendor actually do add value to the property. Adaptive reuse refers to the process of reusing an existing building for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for, and has been specifically used as a term to salvage heritage buildings. Wikipedia notes that “with adaptive reuse becoming an effective strategy for optimizing the operational and commercial performance of built assets, “ it has “prevented thousands of buildings’ demolition and has allowed them to become critical components of urban regeneration”—with stakeholders such as architects, developers, builders, and entrepreneurs making sure “that the finished product will still serve the need of the market, that it will be completely useful for its new purpose, and that it will be competitively priced” once rejuvenated and restored. For me, adaptive reuse of an old structure is still better than demolishing it and then replacing it with a new one that has no character, whose aesthetics are so bland they actually are eye sores. [Don’t get me started on the tendency of current Dumaguete builders to drop another “box building” on us.]
Many of the old sugar mansions along Rizal Avenue, like the Serafin Teves mansion [which now houses Starbucks Dakong Balay] and the Manuel Teves mansion [which now houses Sans Rival], are great cases of adaptive reuse. So is The Spanish Heritage at the corner of Calle San Juan and Calle Sta. Catalina, built from an old warehouse. [I’m also glad it is back to being used as an events place, after being used as a church for so long—a strange kind of sequestration which felt like a loss to the cultural heritage of the community.] Another good case for adaptive reuse is Buglas Isla Café, which used to be the Rotea heritage house in Bais City, transferred brick by brick and wood panel by wood panel to Dumaguete by the Lhuillers. [The Lhuillers also restored the old Wuthrich mansion along Rizal Avenue.] I was also happy to see the Blas Elnar building—a splendid Art Deco building at the corner of Dr. V. Locsin Street and Calle Maria Christina, whose beauty was lost to the ravages of time—restored, although it has yet to show any sign of being in use.
The best recent example remains the Dumaguete Presidencia—which used to house many of the offices of City Hall, and whose architectural integrity, as designed by the great architect Juan M. Arellano, was lost to ill-conceived renovations and expansions over the decades, which reduced the 1936 building to an ugly shadow of its former self. Restoration started in 2017, and now it houses the Dumaguete branch of the National Museum of the Philippines.
But the upkeep of old houses is expensive, and proper restoration needs expertise—and a considerably deep pocket. I don’t blame owners for hedging on their properties on economic reasons alone. I don’t blame them for abandonment, especially if all other recourse beyond selling seems impossible to undertake.
Casa Arrieta, built in the 1920s, is a house that I have loved for many years, and I have always been concerned that the owners were “neglecting” it and was not seeing its full potential. But we must also consider the Arrieta family who owned the heritage house, and how it must have been prohibitive for them to do the upkeep of an old house, even though they might not have wanted to part with it. Anna May Cruz would later tell me: “My aunt’s family didn’t want to part with it but no one could afford its upkeep. The neglect was not intentional.”
One day, a few months ago, passing by its old location, it was just ... gone.
That really made me despondent, and I thought again about how many heritage houses in Dumaguete were disappearing.
And then I was told that this old house, about to be demolished, was actually bought wholesale by Leon Gallery’s Jaime Ponce de Leon, and transferred from Pinili Street to a lot located in Fatima Village in Bantayan.
It has been restored to its full glory, and now called Casa Paquita, named after Doña Francisca “Paquita” Somoza Arnaiz-Ponce de Leon, Popong’s lola. [Doña Paquita was the wife of Dr. Ramon Ponce de Leon, the first Filipino resident director of the Mission Hospital—the precursor of the Silliman University Medical Center—and its medical director during the Japanese occupation of Dumaguete.]
Last December 12, it finally opened via the small restaurant in the premises called Café Maria, named after another lola, Doña Maria Arnaiz-Diaz, and managed by Mikel and Nadia Teves of Si, Señor. [The legendary Inday Iyay Diaz was once provincial board member, and was active in civic work all over Negros Oriental—including involvements with the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and the Philippine Mental Health Association. She also founded East Negros Institute in Tanjay to accommodate secondary school aspirants in the then town, and built chapels, basketball courts, reading centers, health centers and the like, even after her terms in the provincial board, when she retired from politics.]
Save for the restaurant, there are no set plans for the rest of Casa Paquita for the moment—but I am told that Popong intends to make it a showcase for how a 1920s residence in Dumaguete looked like, and has currently furnished it with things appropriate to the period. A museum of 1920s Dumaguete residential elegance, so to speak. Dumaguete, bereft of heritage projects like this for so long, needs this capsule of history as a token to its past. At this juncture of our story as a community when the city seems to be bursting in the seams in the name of progress, Casa Paquita is a necessary corrective.
Labels: architecture, dumaguete, heritage, negros, old houses
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
11:00 PM |
Nikki Giovanni, 1943-2024
I've been teaching this poem for years. Rest in peace, Nikki Giovanni. Her obituary at the New York Times here.
Labels: obituary, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:00 PM |
Casa Paquita
I’ve been wanting to share the photos below for a few months now, but Jaime Ponce de Leon asked me to wait. You see, I’ve loved this old, old house along Pinili Street for many years, and I have always been concerned that the owners were neglecting it and was not seeing its full potential. Then one day, passing by its old location, it was just ... gone. That really made me despondent, and I thought about how many heritage houses in Dumaguete were disappearing, because some owners consider them useless, or their possible restoration would take so much work [and finances]. For the Arrieta family who owned the heritage house, it must have been prohibitive to do the upkeep of an old house, even though they might not have wanted to part with it. Anna May Cruz would later tell me: “My aunt’s family didn’t want to part with it but no one could afford its upkeep. The neglect was not intentional.”
And then I was told that this old house, about to be demolished, was actually bought wholesale, and transferred to somewhere in Fatima Village, restored to its full glory. Tomorrow, December 12, it finally opens as Cafe Maria in Casa Paquita, a restaurant and a gallery. Congratulations, Mikel Teves and Nadia Teves!
[Cafe Maria is named after Maria Arnaiz-Diaz and Casa Paquita is named after Paquita Arnaiz-Ponce de Leon.]
Labels: cafes, dumaguete, gallries, heritage, negros, old houses, restaurants
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 217.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
4:11 PM |
Delegating Cleanup
Slept very late last night [this morning?] because of work but I had to wake up early because the cleaners were coming, and I really wanted the apartment clean for the holidays. This is where I am right now, delegating what I really cannot do on my own anymore. I loved the swiftness of the cleanup professionals do, but I couldn’t help but think that cleaning time used to be my time for self-reflection. But I really cannot do that anymore. I’m reserving my energy for other things. After the cleanup, I went right back to sleep, needed it. So here I am, in the middle of the afternoon, finally awake, and back to work once more.Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, December 07, 2024
3:50 PM |
Creativity is Work
I remember this one particular low point in my life as a writer and as a cultural worker. I once put together a publication—let’s be obscure about this and not say whether it was a book or a magazine or even a pamphlet or brochure—that meant so much to me at that time. I said yes to it because I believed in the work and what it could potentially contribute to the cultural life of the community. I knew there was hardly any budget—most of these things barely have any, which is sad fact about cultural work. But like most of these things that I do, I often compel the universe to somehow find me just compensation for the work load I am sure to have.
And the work load, indeed, was backbreaking.
I wrote, I edited, I designed everything. It took two months of painstaking concentration, but I did it. I finished the project.
Finally, off to the printers the publication went—and now came the awkward time to ask the project manager about the compensation.
“Five thousand pesos,” the project manager told me.
I gulped. I knew it was going to be small—but not that small. Ten thousand felt like the lowest I could mark my creative labor down, but five? I felt myself deflate. I was in a tricycle, on the way to the mall to watch a movie, and, dear readers, I found myself crying.
Was that it? Was the price for the hard work I just did? Why am I even doing this?
This was many moons ago, and of course, judging by the work I still do, I have not really stopped pursuing creative projects—even when I find myself staring at the abyss. Once in a while, especially when a crisis of confidence hits, I talk with fellow creatives to try to find, once again, my bearings. The theatre artist Dessa Quesada-Palm has always been one person to turn to in times like this, and what she told me once keeps coming back to me: “Why do we do this, even if the returns are not exactly giving? Because we die if we don’t.”
We die if we don’t.
This is the reason.
But I also hope this will not be used as an excuse for always underrating the importance of creative work in any community.
I read a disheartening article a few years ago that studied people’s perception about projects we pursue because of creative talent: apparently, for most people, passion seems to be compensation enough ... hence there is no expected real [read: monetary] compensation.
Passion is enough compensation daw.
This is why creatives are often asked to render their talent for things where no budget is ever allocated for them, sometimes asking them to do their bit for “exposure.” Dancers, singers, designers, visual artists, theatre artists, writers, musicians can all attest to this.
I get asked to write/edit for free all the time. Sometimes I do, for friendship’s sake or for project’s sake, to be fair—but that should be my call. I think that people have this idea that because it springs from talent, this must be “easy” for us to do. [But, if this is so “easy,” how come you’re not doing it yourself, and why are you asking me?]
This is why I’ve mostly stopped accepting requests for speeches/judging competitions if the only compensation I get is a coffee mug and a parchment paper with my name on it. We render time and hard work for these things. For example, people don’t know the sheer effort of having to write a speech with a theme, and having to perform it, too!
People also ask for free copies of my books, sometimes. But exploitation of creatives have been part of the system for so long, some of the egregious practices are even now considered “standard”: beware, for example, about competitions—kanang mga logo-making, poster-making, theme song-making competitions, which asks many, many creatives to do hard work essentially for free. Of late, musicians in Dumaguete are finally in an uproar about this unfair state of things. And apparently writers, too, courtesy of Beverly Wico Siy’s ongoing crusade about publications that [1] don’t pay writers, or [2] don’t even give them complimentary copies of the projects their writings appear in—although they do have a budget to pay their printers.
This is complicated stuff, to be honest, with nuances I haven’t even begun to explore. I have projects, too, where I cannot seriously compensate talent [like events for Pride Month, which is a movement that’s basically voluntary]. I learned this from Gang Capati when we were still doing RockEd Dumaguete: be prepared to at least feed your volunteers.
But, overall, this is the plea: please pay your creatives, and if you like their work, please be their patrons. We have bills to pay, too.
Labels: cultural work, life, work, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, December 06, 2024
11:49 AM |
Last Class of the Semester
Still recuperating, but I got up to attend my last full class of the semester. Slowly and surely ticking off my last classes before the semestral break. Critical Writing Workshop, done! Fiction Workshop, done! Playwriting Workshop, done! Asian Literature, done! And finally done with Literature and Cultural Studies [which I'm just subbing for]. Now to rest.
Labels: health, life, silliman, teaching
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 216.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, December 01, 2024
9:00 AM |
A Second Homecoming for Elsa Martinez Coscolluela
She is one of the best writers I know—although when you mention that to her, Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela would demur. Once I remember her referring to her brother, the late David Martinez, as the better writer in the family. Granted, he was also a Palanca winner—he did the astonishing double whammy in 1997 by winning the Palanca first prizes for both the short story and poetry. But I think Ma’am Elsie is in a class of her own, and I will always be her grateful reader.
Admittedly, I first knew about her from two things. First, in high school, I came upon her short story “After This, Our Exile,” which won third prize at the 1972 Palanca Awards. I did not exactly know the import of her name yet, but I remember being blown away by the story’s instinctive feel for hacienda life in Negros, able to look beyond the gloss and see the rot behind the glitter of sugar. Second, when I knew more about her upon entering college at Silliman University, I learned that she was in fact crowned Miss Silliman in 1964—and I was quite astonished to realize one can actually be a great writer and also be a campus beauty queen. [Alas, when you’re younger, you tend to pigeonhole people into specifics. I later learned beauty queen writers were actually not uncommon. The equally great Dumaguete writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was crowned Miss Negros Oriental in 1970. There’s also Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio who was Miss Dumaguete in 1985 and Miss Negros Oriental in 1987—and while she would not really call herself a writer, she is in fact a fascinating essayist, usually writing about local culture and heritage.]
Ma’am Elsie is still a beauty after all these years, and I have always taken to her as a kind of long-distance mentor. We chat often on Messenger, and the last time I was in Bacolod early this year, she went out of her way to take me out to dinner. I find this personal relationship with her very humbling. It is an honor to be friends with one of Silliman’s greatest writers.
The thing about Ma’am Elsie is that she is prolific. She writes poetry. She writes essays. She writes short stories. And she writes plays of various kinds—theatrical ones, of course, but also ones written for television and film. In the late 1960s until the 1980s, she was so prolific in her literary output that eventually she was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1996—for the feat of having won five first prizes. Which is not something very easy to do. [For the record, she has won a total of 24 Palanca Awards.]
I love her plays. Her subject is so varied, but she returns often to the Negros of her childhood—which is in Dumaguete; and her adulthood—which is in Bacolod. That she is considered one of the foremost writers of both Negrense capitals means she has the pulse of Negros in her writings. And thus she is able to write truthfully about the place, and about us.
The thing about her plays, however, is that they’re seldom performed, if ever, even if they have won awards. The recurring joke about winning the Palanca for the play is that, after the awards ceremony, these plays find home not on the stage but in the drawer. But not for lack of trying by these playwrights; who wouldn’t want to have their plays staged? The simple reason is this: theatrical productions of local plays are very rare—unless you’re Nick Joaquin, Rene O. Villanueva, Nicolas Pichay, Floy Quintos, or Rody Vera, or, of late, Vincent de Jesus, Carlo Vergara, Dustin Celestino, Joshua Lim So, Guelan Varela-Luarca, or Eljay Castro Deldoc. You will notice a preponderance of Manila writers. The seeming exception seems to be Glenn Sevilla Mas from Iloilo, but he does work and live in Manila. Even in regional theater, play selections tend to favor Manila writers. How many times have we seen Marcelo Agana Jr.’s New Yorker in Tondo in Dumaguete? Or F. Sionil Jose’s Progress in Cebu? Too many times. They’re classics, of course—but their constant rotation in terms of local production seems to come at the expense of local writers.
One of Ma’am Elsie’s most famous plays is In My Father’s House, which won the Palanca in 1980. This is a Dumaguete play, based on the lives of her father and uncle who lived through World War II in Dumaguete, and who suffered tragically during the Japanese Occupation of the Oriental Negrense town. [Dumaguete would only become a city in 1948.] After the play won the Palanca, it was performed everywhere—at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila and at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in Quezon City; in Singapore; in L.A.; even in Tokyo. But it was never staged in Dumaguete. Here it was, a quintessential Dumaguete play, but never performed in Dumaguete itself.
That is until 2013, when the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council took the chance of bringing it back home, under the direction of Amiel Leonardia. I was part of that cast at the Luce Auditorium, and we were honored to be part of that history in the making.
And that’s the thing. There are so many playwrights from Silliman and/or Negros Oriental. We have Ricaredo Demetillo, Bobby Flores Villasis, Linda Faigao-Hall, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Roberto Ponteñila Jr., Lemuel Torrevillas, Alfred Yuson, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Luna Griño-Inocian, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Rolin Migyel Obina, and many others. Ang among the younger set, we have Beryl Andrea Delicana, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Karla Longjas, Junsly Kitay, Michael Aaron Gomez, Benjie Kitay, and Jireh Catacutan. Their plays keep winning plaudits everywhere—but they remain unstaged.
Which is why last year, Dessa and I took the initiative to start staging Palanca-winning plays by local writers, to be directed by our student directors at the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University as part of their senior thesis productions. We thought this would give their works a chance to come alive. We started with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Bobby Flores Villasis last year. This year, we have continued this project with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. Staging In My Father’s House in 2013 was her homecoming to Dumaguete; this play festival should serve as the second one.
Last November 28, we finally raised the curtain on the first playdate of the Elsa Martinez Coscolluela Play Festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theatre at Silliman University. We knew the endeavor is partly to honor our beloved Dumaguete [and Bacolod] playwright, but we also were aware that the project is still essentially a laboratory for Silliman’s theatre students. We were going to watch student-directed plays, not professionally staged ones—and for that, we knew it will mostly be a hit or miss affair depending on the strengths of the student director involved. [You take these things with a grain of salt, always hoping for the best.]
Which is really to say: I was awed by what I saw of the Set A plays that night—with Bret Bonnie Ybañez directing Japayukisan, the opening play, and Francis Esguerra directing Blood Spoor, the final play for opening night.
Mr. Ybañez took the melodrama of a young woman arriving home from abroad to attend her father’s funeral and keeping fiercely the secret that she works as a Japayuki [or nightclub entertainer] in Japan, and staged the play with surprising restraint and subtlety. [Even with a delicious catfight involved!] Even with a forlorn scene of having closure with an old boyfriend! [This scene actually made me tear up.]
What made the production work was that Mr. Ybañez knew how to get to the interiority of the story; he also knew that good casting for our protagonist would be enough to telegraph the emotional core of the story. Mass Communication student Joriz Angel Palermo as Mayang the Japayuki truly gets to the heart of her character so well: we commiserated with her when she grappled with her secret; we ached for her when she confronted her sister and mother about having to support her family while her siblings got the privilege of going to school on her dime while she stripped away her dignity in a mob-controlled bar in Japan; and we rooted for her when she was tearing the hair out of a nosy “family friend.” When she is later confronted by her ex-boyfriend to get to the heart of their breakup, we finally comprehend where she is coming from and the extent to which she has arrived at a hard-earned worldly wisdom: “We don’t always get what we want. Plans miscarry, feelings change, dreams die—.” Heady stuff, and yet I like that at the end of it, the two characters choose to be kind to each other, to say goodbye in tacit understanding of their parting. Powerful stuff.
Mr. Esguerra, on the other hand, has the luckier hand in directing a material that invites the epic and the atmospheric. But he also shows that he knows what exactly to do with every beat of the story: he begins the play with bird sound in complete darkness, then with the actors coming in from the direction of the audience, screaming incoherent pain in that darkness—until suddenly, a shaft of stage light shows us a woman on centerstage cradling a dying, bloodied girl. Then we get a sense of the other characters in the melee, all looking bloody, and then we understand that this is a community of Mindanao lumad, their homes having been randomly attacked by the military. There is much wailing, and recrimination, and later on, some quiet moments when the characters ponder their fate with each other. And then all of that gets embraced with some uncanny use of supernatural elements—fog and chanting and blinking lights do the trick—which are somehow tied up with the age-old beliefs and rituals of the hurting tribe. It is a very serious play, but it works. It is also very bloody and deadly, although all the violence occurs off-stage. I quite liked it. I admired how Esguerra knew how to pace the material, how to block, how to use music effectively, and how to detonate the drama with eerie silence. I like that he has a good sense of stage spectacle, which is rarely achieved by most student directors.
As of this publication, Set A [Japayukisan and Blood Spoor] would have finished their two-day run. You can still, however, catch Set B [First Fruits and Late Journey Home] on December 2 and 3, and Set C [The Captive Word] on December 6 and 7. The first two plays were more than the worth of the measly P200 ticket. If you are in Dumaguete, do yourself a favor and catch the remainder of the festival. This is truly a celebration of Dumaguete’s literary heritage.
This year, Dumaguete City is the official Philippine endorsee to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2025, and it deserves that distinction truly. Doing this kind of theatre festival, of putting life to the literary works of our local literary artists, is very much a part of that effort.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, negros, philippine history, philippine literature, silliman, theatre, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, November 30, 2024
I was no longer feeling human by day’s end yesterday. Was just so exhausted from work, and probably should have heeded the call to take a cat nap in the early afternoon. But there was work to do, and less energy to do them. The s.o. swooped in around 6 PM, took me to a good Chinese dinner at Dayo, and — best of all — assented to my sudden hankering for a foot massage. Dear God, I needed that foot massage. It gave me all the energy I needed to finish the to-do’s for the day.
Labels: life, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 215.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, November 22, 2024
Anyone who knows me well enough knows where to find me in Dumaguete. In this corner of The Bricks Hotel [ IG: @thebrickshotel ] where I read, write, relax, do my work outside of the classroom. This is my current comfort zone in Dumaguete. The coffee is just there for the asking, and the staff are people I’ve known for some years now. I like that even when it’s a hot day, you can bank on the constant breeze coming in from the Bohol Sea. I like that there’s a view of the Rizal Boulevard whenever I want it. I like that I see the sea. I need that: I’m an island boy, and I need the sea.Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 214.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
9:24 PM |
Copycat by Idwardo
Often, when I go and see exhibitions in town, I turn off the pesky part of my brain that allows voices uttering art theory, and art history, and art techniques, and just feel around the gallery and be drawn to the one object that I cannot shake. In the Arté Café Gallery [ IG: @artegalleryph ] exhibit, PREKARYATSII, now showing at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete [ IG: @adcdumaguete ], this happens to be “Copycat,” a work in acrylic by Cebu artist Idwardo. There’s something vaguely cinematic about it, like a piece of color film stripped to its basic Technicolor separations, which render the subject — a young man in an Asian squat staring straight at the viewer — both mysterious and compelling, rendered as he is in rainbow basics. That his “copies” in the other colors show different facets of himself — one faceless and the other grotesquely masked — also lend to this mystery, signifying some subtext of horror. There’s an interactive quality to the art as well: when you take the invitation to scan the QR code beside it, your cellphone screen immediately becomes a camera that has settings making each figure pop out more prominently. It’s quite a nice addendum to the exercise, but I like the tripartite nature of the painting itself: our selves in three iterations, guises of who we are, staring straight at life [or the viewer] with a somber, even steely gaze. I wonder what he thinks of me, this young man in a squat in three colors. I wonder why he stares so.Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, gallries, painting
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, November 17, 2024
9:00 AM |
The Dumaguete Inato as Life
This is, admittedly, a generalization—and many exceptions abound! But the following are things non-Dumagueteños—especially poor Manila people who come to our city bound by the rules of engagement they have been doing in the metropolis for years and who think their praxis is universal—should learn about doing events in our beloved city of infinite mysteries:
[1] No one will answer your emails. The best way to get in touch with anyone in Dumaguete with a high degree of responsiveness, is through Messenger. [Not even Viber!] It helps, of course, that you have a well-connected point-person who can gather everyone else in your group chat.
[2] Dumagueteños live dangerously by doing everything last minute. Because if we plan too much ahead, things will not usually happen.
[3] Dumaguete is such a small city, but we rarely see each other. This has to be noted, especially if you expect us to always be under each other’s beck and call, because everyone is “five minutes away.”
[4] Don’t fret about only having three people register for your events through your officials channels, and you’re scared about nobody showing up. A good audience, always seemingly out of nowhere, will arrive on the very day itself. Same with ticket sales. Everyone buys tickets to events on the day itself.
And finally: [5] The event will almost always go well, nonetheless.
This is just how things go in Dumaguete.
I’ve come to this conclusion because it has happened twice, at least for me, this year. We will not mention the events very specifically, just to protect the identifies of all involved, but the first one—a matter of national importance—occurred sometime midyear. The person in charge who hailed from a major national office in the capital was emailing everyone concerned in Dumaguete for at least two months. They had questions, they needed to coordinate. We were supposed to meet earlier, but our schedules did not coincide—and it took some time for both of us to finally “meet” online. They continued emailing everyone in the interim—except me—but no one was answering back, except for one or two. [I do get the need the need to email. It’s official, especially if you are using the office-assigned email address. It’s also for paper trail. I get that, and I get why they were continuing to do so.] They would also try to call people—but no one was answering. Three weeks before the event, I finally messaged them in Messenger [I got their account from someone else involved in the project]. We connected. I told them I knew everyone they needed in the team and that Messenger would be faster for everyone to contribute their share of the work—and I promised to gather them all via the app. And then we all finally converged, and everyone started replying, and the project started. And the event was a resounding success.
A few months later, another national event was to take place in Dumaguete. The same deal: the people from the national office tried to email everyone. Tried to even email the hotels they intended to stay in, and the restaurants they intended to hold officials banquets in. Again, no responses via email. They finally chose a different venue for the event—because the first venue was not answering back, via email. I met the organizers for the first time in person a day before the event. They told me they were not sure anyone would show up, because nobody was answering their invitation emails. They budgeted for 70 people, but only three registered so far. I told them people would just show on the day itself, and not to worry. I also told them I’d invite people I knew—via Messenger—as soon as I could. The next day, people indeed showed up. And more people showed up on the second day. And the event was a resounding success.
I think back to one other event that happened in Dumaguete a few years ago. A theatrical company wanted to do a leg of a play they were touring around the country in Dumaguete. Their very efficient creative team came all the way from Manila, doing everything the Manila way. It was very instructional, and some of the things they did were things us locals actually learned from. But I remember one particular demand they wanted to accomplish in Dumaguete: they wanted a press conference in a mall. And we were like: “Umm, no one really does press conferences for cultural shows in Dumaguete, unless it’s a beauty pageant.” The press would probably not show up, except for campus journalists. And even if they did, we were not sure they would even see the show to write about it. True enough, the press conference that eventually happened was a disaster. But the show itself was somewhat well-received by the locals. It ran for about a week.
The lesson I guess is that every place has its own culture with which to do things, and it pays to be aware of these specificities—or at least have someone local and knowledgeable who can guide you through the intricacies. Best practices in Manila are not necessarily best practices in Dumaguete. Seasoned businessmen know this. The way you make a deal in New York is not the way you make a deal in Tokyo, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lumpur. There are cultural barriers at play—and one tiny mistake in misreading will lead to disappointment, and no deal.
I posted a short version of this essay on Facebook and the response has been tremendous. I thought there would be people who would negate everything I said—“Dumaguete Pride,” and all that—but to my astonishment, most of the responses only underlined what I said as something true of the community. Gaba-an Youth Lead’s Dennis Caballero said: “Tinuod gud ni!” DTI’s Anton Gabila said: “True! Especially the second one. On the last hour of the previous day, mapuno ra gyud mga sign-up forms.” Bun Yeng Ngan, who runs a successful events company in Manila but is from Dumaguete, said: “You’re telling me! After 31 years as an organizer of corporate events, sa Dumaguete ra jud ko bilib! Ikatawa na lang para dili ka ma-pikon. Nothing personal. It is what it is! I love Dumaguete.” The National Book Development Board’s Bethel Samson Delatado said: “I experienced the [no email response] one, hehehe.” Travel diva Angelo Villanueva said: “Trulalooooo!” Lawyer Golda Benjamin said: “No one answers emails. OMG. So true!” Playwright Lendz Barinque said: “The first and the second used to frustrate me so much, until I just gave in. And que sera, sera.” Back Pack Solutions’ Ernest Acar said: “I had to let go of the usual conventions of what event preparation should be when I moved back here. Makapasmo, pero lingaw. Haha.”
But why don’t we answer emails? I have a feeling this has something to do with the formality we have come to associate with this kind of correspondence. And Dumaguete as a place is far from a bastion of the formal. We are relentlessly informal. I sometimes teach wearing tsinelas and shorts, and no one will bat an eyelash. Messenger is very informal, like the Sunday tabo-an we love in Valencia. [The best way to do emails in Dumaguete? Email the secretaries. And then call them to tell them that you sent an email.]
Why do we do everything last minute? I think this is a remnant of the way Dumaguete used to be: the smallness of the place allowed us to do so many things in a given day. Unlike Manila, where life is so hectic and the region so huge and the traffic so relentless, you are trained to do only one thing a day, and two if you have superpowers. In Dumaguete, we can do five, seven, ten things in succession in a day—and so it is easier to put things together in less time. And we forget the immediacy of events if we plan it ahead with too much time to plan and execute. Dumaguete loves immediacy. Which is why it is easier to do “instant fairs,” “pop-up events,” and the like here. Plan things too much and people will dilly-dally more. Plan it one minute before, and people will show up. I remember someone telling me that fifteen years or so ago, many Dumagueteños would only begin to proceed to the airport to catch the flight they are scheduled on when they can already hear the airplane landing. That is the heart of the Dumaguete “last-minute.”
Why don’t we see each other often, even if Dumaguete is so small? I have no idea.
Why do we just show up for things, and why do we buy tickets last minute? Because that’s just us. Because we are doing so many things in a typical Dumaguete day, the only commitment we can make to events is not to register—there’s no time for registration!—but to just show up. I once organized a screening for Lav Diaz’s five-hour film, Norte: The End of History, at Robinsons Movieworld in 2013. You would think a five-hour film would be daunting for an ordinary Dumagueteño. Nope. You would think the slow ticket sales at the start concerned me. Nope. By the morning of screening day, we sold out every ticket. And there were clamors for more.
Like some of the responses above, this way of doing things is not for everyone, not even some Dumagueteños themselves. Vida Tusoy commented: “As an inveterate planner, this will trigger my anxiety.” The truth is, even the “culprits” themselves know this anxiety first hand, and after every successful event, a lot would commiserate among themselves: “Let’s plan better next time”—which means: “Let’s email each other and answer back,” “Let’s not do things last minute,” “Let’s make sure we have proper audience development,” etc. Honorable wishful thinking really, because the next year, the same things still happen.
There’s a whiff of “unprofessionalism” that we can be accused of concerning all these, of course. Bun Yeng Ngan and theatre artist Belen Calingacion did not mince words and called the attitude “inato gihapon diay”—in other words, a “small town” attitude to life. But I think “inato”—which is really best translated as “doing things our own way”—is not really about having a “small town” attitude; it is about steadfastly doing it “our own way,” because time and again, these ways have really proven more effective than the textbook-prescribed “professional way.”
I think that’s really the heart of the Dumagueteño: we have always stubbornly done things our way all throughout our history, and the best things about Dumaguete living have really been the product of that stubbornness. Like the “inasal,” as demonstrated by our Occidental Negrense siblings; it’s chicken grilled in a very particular way that makes it “inasal” in Bacolod, but did we do the same thing in Dumaguete? Nope. We grilled chicken marinated in milk, and the taste was, and is, remarkably different. We called it “inato.” Thus Jo’s Chicken Inato—the epitome of Dumaguete grilled chicken fare—was born.
This “inato” attitude was what made our elites of yore build their mansions along the old Marina—no other elites in major towns in the Philippines did that, having their mansions face the sea. The result? The Rizal Boulevard.
This “inato” attitude keeps us from being too outlandish and preening with our accomplishments—but take a look at all the accomplished Dumagueteños who have ever lived. We have two National Artists [three if you count one heavily identified with Cebu]. And two National Scientists. Since 2017, I have featured weekly on the Dumaguete City Tourism Facebook page at least one prominent Dumagueteño or Oriental Negrense who have done much for their profession or for their community, and a lot of them are actually world-renowned. It is already 2024, and my list has not been exhausted yet.
This “inato” attitude is what keeps everything we do distinctly Dumagueteño. At the first Dumaguete Literary Festival we did last April, we made the “inato” our motif. We had vans to ferry guests, but our official transport was the tricycle. Most literary festivals in the country are held in malls; we purposely held ours in an old heritage house. Most literary festivals in the country would also quietly proscribe a formality in dress by participants; we advised our guests and participants to come in wearing tsinelas and shorts. And it worked!
So I’m not exactly sure I’d call everything we do as “inato” the way it’s connoted—a shaming negative. We’re just “chill” this way. Every place has a rhythm which works for it. This is the Dumaguete rhythm for the most part, and it works.
[Photo by Alan Kirit Jr.]
Labels: culture, dumaguete, life, negros
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, November 15, 2024
10:00 PM |
La Boheme at Silliman
I love the fact that in Dumaguete, I can tell myself: “I want to end this busy week by watching opera.” And watch I did, straight from my last class of the day.
In the photo, that’s Rodolfo and Mimi in this barebones production of Puccini’s La Boheme at Silliman University’s Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, presented by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and featuring the performers from Viva Voce Voice Lab. The entire opera was staged, but it was not a full-fledged production — there was no orchestra [only a piano] and there were no elaborate costumes — but all there was were performance, gusto, and the beauty of the human voice. Often, that’s enough.
The show was packaged as an educational outreach program, to teach contemporary Filipino audiences about what opera is all about, and to make a traditionally daunting art form be accessible to those who have only heard about what opera is like and are too intimidated to watch any. Hence, the helpful introduction by artistic director Camille Lopez Molina before the show began [she was very funny]. Hence, the simplicity of the staging. Hence, the supertitles projected on screen that directly translated the Italian lyrics the performers were singing.
Truth to tell, this was my first opera, and although it was done in this format, I was grateful for what it was — because everyone in the audience truly enjoyed the musical spectacle onstage: an audience of mostly students awww’d at the lighting quick romance between the two leads, arrrgh’d at the seeming red-flagness of Rodolfo when he wanted to break up with Mimi, and ohhhh’d at Mimi’s final demise.
[Molina also explained that the company specifically sought out a performance at the Luce because this was Viva Voce’s experiment with raw voice projection, no amplification, in a suitable theater: the Luce remains the only theater in the country with the best acoustics.]
I can readily tell when a Luce audience is appreciative [and Dumaguete is notoriously hard to please], and tonight was one for the books.
At the end, I also realized that this show signaled the end of the pandemic for me. At least culturally speaking. The last show I watched at the Luce before lockdown started in 2020 was Rent, the Jonathan Larson musical that borrows heavily from La Boheme. Four year later, I am watching the OG material on the same stage. My pandemic has been properly bookended.
P.S. It’s now funny to me that when I listened to opera before, the Italian lyrics and the melodic voice made me think they were singing of very important pronouncements. Now I know that they’re just singing of the most mundane things, like: “I left a pink bonnet underneath your pillow. Please pack it for me.”Labels: art and culture, cultural affairs committee, cultural center of the philippines, dumaguete, life, music, opera, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
