Saturday, December 19, 2015

12:05 AM | The Way of the Kite: YATTA at 10

The passing of the years can astound you in the act of retrospection: it flattens everything into a single instant that you simply cannot believe all those years have indeed gone by. We ask silly questions such as, “Wasn’t it just yesterday when we were doing this or that?” or “Wasn’t it only the other week that I first saw you in this or that?” The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t yesterday or the other week. It was a full ten years ago, but our minds simply recoil from the realization that time may be insanely static in our perception but is in reality insanely fluid in unfolding action.

It has been ten years since Dessa Quesada-Palm, the doyenne of Dumaguete community theatre, founded the Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts—YATTA to the rest of us who have followed its development over the years. It grew organically from a series of theatre workshops—then called Lambigit—that Dessa was doing for the community after having newly arrived in Dumaguete sometime in 2003. In her recollection of those early years, the Lambigit workshops should have ended with just a final theatrical activity for everyone involved—but seeing the faces of the young participants, she felt a sudden calling for doing something grander, something that went beyond the original purpose of that workshop. She remembered telling the participants: “Would you like for this to go on, if you feel like it?” The response from them was an electrifying yes—and YATTA some came to be.



Rev. Colby Palm, Dessa’s husband, remembered those years in a tribute: “In the beginning we had so little of everything but [we had] so much of fun. Every YATTA gathering felt [like] a Christmas Party. I remember because we had no office, no creative space, and everything happened at the house. The big gatherings would begin with parlor games, and the small gatherings with an exercise warm-up video… When it was time to perform we [also] had so little. I would watch YATTA pack sets, costumes, and bodies into one tricycle, [which would] rumble to the [event venue]… When performing, we had so little, and I would watch YATTA creatively share one single microphone for a whole performance… Then we would all return to the house [and] gather around the TV, all excited to watch the video of our show. [There’d be] heckling and teasing at every mistake [and] every blooper… In the beginning everyone did everything. Everyone had to act, had to sing, had to make sets, had to help write the script the songs.”

The first YATTA show I saw was Kikay Kalaykay, their small musical production about growing up dreaming of a good future while living in a dumpsite. This play first saw staging at the Fleur de Lis Hall at the Saint Paul University Dumaguete campus, which instantly became memorable for its anthem, “The Four Rs”—a rousing anthem, staged in Broadway spectacle, that quickly became a useful mnemonic for better garbage control: “reduce, re-use, recycle, recover.” That was back in 2007, but it might as well have been staged only yesterday. Where do the years go?

Last December 18, celebrating YATTA’s 10th anniversary at The Spanish Heritage, we were reminded by YATTA Board of Trustees member Glynda Timtim Descuatan that the troupe’s symbol—emblazoned proudly in its logo—is a bunch of young people flying a kite. “The kite soars,” Ms. Descuatan said, “but it soars high and constant in the wind because it is grounded by helping hands that tug at it.” In a sense, it is flight that’s molded by the hands of people who know keeping things grounded is necessary for the flying to succeed. That is YATTA’s existence in a nutshell.

For the anniversary, we were treated by YATTA’s current members to a theatrical production in vignettes, recalling some of the group’s greatest hits. It began with one of its first efforts in 2005, Koko Kaka, a small children’s play—really a monologue—that illustrated the virtues of kindness and cooperation. It ended with a restaging of the finale from Scharon Mani, its crowning achievement in 2015 with, a jubilantly composed jukebox musical which sprang from a collaboration with the indie musicians from the Belltower Project and the Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee or CAC.

Along the way, most of us in attendance were eagerly reminded of our suddenly remembered participations in some of YATTA’s merry shenanigans. In my case, I was reminded I had been part of Kisaw, our three-year effort—between 2009 and 2011—at making the National Arts Month happen in Dumaguete. I had also actually designed their poster for Leon Kilat and Other Short Plays, their first collaboration with the CAC that saw them conquer the Luce Auditorium stage. That was one of two gentle reminders we got about YATTA. That it is about its friends and supporters being able to gather and give back to the community, and indeed we have seen how YATTA has touched many lives beyond its members, coming to involve many of Dumaguete’s brightest and most talented in the pursuit of using theatre for a social purpose.

The second reminder—and perhaps the more important one—is that YATTA is about empowering the community’s youth to get engaged in societal issues with strong imperative. This is its greatest strength. Junsly Kitay, one of its older members, is the perfect example of a YATTA success story—a young boy who hails from one of the city’s slums, whose very life at a young age seemed designed to follow the usual trajectory of failure because of poverty. Theatre, through YATTA, gave Mr. Kitay a ticket out of that arc.

He first heard about the Lambigit workshops in 2002 while watching television and saw Ms. Quesada-Palm inviting young people of all stripes from all over the city to join in. “I remember telling myself, for some reason, that someday I’d be part of that,” Mr. Kitay said. In 2006, four years later, he finally did—ending a long drought in his childhood when every avenue of artistic expression he tried to participate in—the visual arts, dance, choral music—seemed to close off on him. “You will never have to force anything that is truly meant to be,” Mr. Kitay admitted. “And yes, there is a plan, and your soul knows what it is. The world is a big machine, and you are part of it with a singular mission to fulfill—you just have to learn and be patient enough to find it. YATTA helped me find mine.”

For Mr. Kitay, what YATTA taught him is that there can be many good reasons for participating in the arts—one of which is advocacy, and having faith that young people like him can indeed do their part for society through artistic expression. “What first made us feel invested in YATTA is the way it helped us get rid of the fear of performing. And then it got us to do our little part in making costumes and making sets, all practical things that built craft and camaraderie. And then, finally, it got us to think that what we were doing was for a bigger cause beyond any consideration, even that of financial gain. Truth to tell, we were happy with just being given fare and food—as long as we were performing for an advocacy we believed in.”

In his final reflection, Mr. Kitay said: “If I had not joined YATTA, the probability would be that I would be part of the problem that you will have to solve. Now, I am only too happy to be part of the solution instead. It’s true that theater is life—through our performance, we can practice what we wish to happen and we wish to see in our society: for peaceful community, for respect for one another, for working for the good of everyone.

“In the end, I have to confess that I still have many struggles in life. I’ve seen better days, but I’ve also seen worse. I don’t have everything I want, but I do have all I need. My life may not be perfect, but I am blessed with my YATTA family. I may not be there yet [in the road to the fulfillment of all my dreams], but I am closer to it today than I was yesterday [because of YATTA].”

The 10th anniversary event ended with a touching song in Cebuano, sung by everyone clasping hands in a tight circle, which riffed on the simple theme of thankfulness and friendship. “Salamat, higala, sa inyong panahon,” the song went. “Salamat, higala, sa pulo ka tuig. Nabati namo ang inyong paghigugma’g pagtagad. Salamat, higala…”

And rightfully so: the message of that sentimental song is the very foundation of the past ten years of YATTA. Congratulations, Dessa and everyone from our little community theatre troupe that could. What you do—this is how you make a difference.

Labels: advocacy, art and culture, dumaguete, issues, life, people, silliman, theatre, YATTA

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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

12:06 AM | Chronicling a Cultural History

On November 21, a Thursday, we are going to launch the coffee table book, Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman University, at 5:30 PM at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium Foyer. In attendance will be some of Silliman University’s cultural icons over the years, including theatre actor Junix Inocian, dancer Lucy Jumawan, writers Myrna Pena-Reyes, Lorna Makil, and Cesar Ruiz Aquino, theatre producer Luna Inocian, animator Ramon del Prado, painter Kitty Taniguchi, among others. The event culminates a year of relentless research and writing for many of us in Silliman, under the generous sponsorship of Julio Sy Jr. and the Tao Foundation. It will be a signal for me, at the very least, to finally get some proper sleep.



But I am reminded of what Albert Camus once said: “Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.” It was this clear-eyed perspective of what culture means to society that has kept me going the past year, and kept me sane as I—and editors Warlito Caturay Jr., Sherro Lee Lagrimas, Diomar Abrio, Annabelle Lee-Adriano, Leo Mamicpic, Moses Joshua Atega, Ron Jacob Calumpang, among others—struggled with a project that has consumed us through the best of times and, alas, also through the worst of times.

In 2009, two years before the Cultural Affairs Committee of Silliman University celebrated its golden anniversary, I made an innocent suggestion to the organization that perhaps we needed to take an ambitious step in our commemoration of the 50th anniversary and spearhead a project that would document the rich cultural history of this university.

“Why not make a coffee table?” I said. Alas, in life, the one who speaks out almost always gets the painstaking job of making true what has been hatched in words.

Needless to say, I got the chief editor’s job of compiling, and overseeing, a work of putting together in one volume not just fifty years of the CAC, but also a hundred years of culture and the arts in Silliman. Would I have said anything in 2009 if I had known what it would be actually like to undertake a project like this? Well, if I had only known, I would have quaked in my shoes: but I didn’t know, and for the most part, an ignorance of what was entailed indeed ironically gave birth to this book.

This book, indeed, constitutes a collective act of remembering. As a work of cultural history, it contains significant fragments of the past fifty years and even more—assembling a cultural mosaic of the locale that paints an unfolding story: over all these years, it continues to shape, instruct, and inspire generations of artists and cultural workers in its own being and becoming. This book, in that sense, thus becomes a work that also invites a necessary conversation involving retrospection and looking forward. Hence, we have titled this book Handulantaw—a deliberate connection of the Cebuano words handum/handumanan (“reminisce/keepsake”) and lantaw (“looking forward”). The handum part of that spirit is evident enough in this project. The volume is a work that is devoted, first and foremost, to chronicle two things…

First, we aimed to chart, with the persistence of ferocious researchers and archivists, the vibrant history of culture and the arts in Silliman since its founding by Presbyterian missionaries in 1901, when it was still known as Silliman Institute. This includes the ripples that history has made not only in Dumaguete City in Negros Oriental, but also the Philippines and the world. The undertaking of this task has not been easy, however. Much of the data and artifacts of this specifically local cultural history remains unarchived, uncatalogued, and unresearched, which meant we had to search and sift through hundreds of photographs, programs, memoranda, and so on and so forth that have lain undisturbed and covered with dust in countless rotting photo albums and scrapbooks in many houses as well as in dim storage rooms around campus. A herculean task, indeed—for how to shape all of that which we have gathered into a coherent story of Silliman’s cultural tradition? For the most part, what we have also done is to engage in conversation many of the people who have contributed to that cultural tradition over the course of the last century, their voices constituting a veritable oral history of art and culture in Silliman University. We caught National Artist for Film Eddie Romero in his house in Quezon City early in 2013, for example—just a few short months before he died. His story and the stories of Silliman’s other artists and cultural workers were more than ripe for this project. We felt it was about time to record these before many of the bearers of the cultural narrative, too, passed away.

Second, we have compiled a work (which includes essays, profiles, photographs, and graphic design by some of the best writers and artists working in the university and Dumaguete today) that celebrates the first fifty years of Silliman’s Cultural Affairs Committee, which is otherwise more popularly (and affectionately) referred to by its acronym. The salute to the CAC is fitting: it has shaped much of the university’s artistic history since 1962 into a steadfast platform of culture that has fostered local talents and showcased the best of national and international performing groups—inevitably making Dumaguete arguably the Cultural Center of Southern Philippines.

We finally started work on this book in 2012. The idea sprang from what we had perceived to be a simple need to celebrate, in a lasting way, the golden anniversary of the CAC. Fifty years, after all, is a landmark of admirable persistence for any institution: that meant a continuity of its goals, and an unending belief of what it could achieve to make the arts an integral part of the identity and transformation of the community.

Handulantaw was conceived to address an absence since much of the cultural history of this country has involved telling the story mostly from the point-of-view of Manila, the national capital. It is a narrative that paints, if unintentionally, a mute canvas of the cultural wellsprings that exist elsewhere in the country. The way our popular media and our monographs constitute the story of national art, it seems as if almost every artist and artistic production has to be located in the jungles of the capital to matter, or to make a dent in the story. Within that context, Dumaguete City becomes an interesting case study of culture in the Philippines. A small city outside of the economic league of bigger provincial cities like Cebu, Davao, Bacolod, Iloilo, Naga, Cagayan de Oro, and Baguio, it has nevertheless become an unlikely center of culture in the Philippines, helping to shape in definitive ways the literary, musical, and theatrical landscapes of the nation. What other city of its kind could boast of producing two National Artists—Romero for film and Edith Lopez Tiempo for literature? What is it about Dumaguete that makes it a geographic cultural wonder despite neglect—or perhaps just mere cultural mismanagement—by the local government? The answers are unclear, but culture thrives in Dumaguete City anyway. In 2010, the young Dumaguete filmmaker Carmen del Prado sought answers in her documentary, Dumaguete: An Artists’ Haven, and comes up with one: as a university town of a very specific geographic location (situated in a tropical bosom within the combined embrace of mountain—the Cuernos de Negros—and sea—Tañon Strait) with a very specific temperament (slow, reflexive), the place has become a “place of nurture” for those with artistic sensibilities. The academic environment unique to the place, of course, provides a solid framework for cultural growth, or least sustenance. Thus, to tell the story of culture in Dumaguete, we also have to tell the story of Silliman University. One is intrinsically intertwined with the other.

But it is ultimately the people that make the place for what it is, and in Handulantaw, we have come to an understanding that the dynamics of art and culture in Silliman and Dumaguete cannot be told fully without considering the individual personal stories behind the development of each artistic field. What is local theater, for example, without Amiel Leonardia or Ephraim Bejar? What is local literature without Edilberto and Edith Tiempo? What is local film without Eddie Romero and Ramon del Prado? What is local music without the generational efforts of the Dimaya and Vista families? This book, thus, attempts to tell the story of local culture through the prism of the lives of selected cultural movers. There are hundreds of them, of course, as is only fitting for a university that has withstood the test of time for more than a hundred years. Our choice of fifty is both arbitrary and specific: the first because all lists must eventually cap its number or risk the chaos of a flood of names without end, and the second because fifty is a good round number that coincides with this book’s celebration of the CAC’s golden anniversary. This list of “Cultural Movers” is a selection of people whom the editors have deemed to be prime movers of culture and the arts in Silliman, culled from a painstaking process that lasted almost a year, with patient consultation with various cultural stakeholders in the community.

In the final analysis, taking note of the general history of culture and the arts in Silliman University and Dumaguete City, as well as the individual stories of our Cultural Movers, we have come to understand, foremost, the passions of the artist and the lengths they go to shape that passion, to see it embodied as an artwork. Often that meant doing battle with forces, subtle or unsubtle, that hinders full expression of that consuming artistry. To paraphrase the observation of a fictional character in a popular animated film, the world is often unkind to artists. The work of culture is often both frustrating and rewarding. And sometimes, the frustration can start to break our spirits—if only temporarily. Once, while doing an Arts Month event in Dumaguete with theater actress Dessa Quesada-Palm, I turned to her with what must have been despair in my voice: “Why do we do this? Cultural work can be such a thankless job.” But she turned to me and said, “Because despite everything else, we love what we do—and we cannot help but share it with everybody else.” She is right, and this book is a chronicle of that imperative.

I am particularly happy that I work with kindred spirits in the Cultural Affairs Committee of Silliman University. Under Diomar Abrio’s savvy leadership as the University Cultural Officer, and with keen support from University President Ben S. Malayang III, the CAC has worked hard in recent years to put structure and balance to the cultural life of the university and the city. This book celebrates that striving for cultural structure and balance in CAC’s first fifty years. Those years have indeed shown remarkable consistency and unflagging faith even as the sands of time continue to shift under our feet, which is perhaps a testament to the Silliman Spirit.

In the end, the legacy of Silliman in Philippine arts and culture cannot be denied. Handulantaw is our touchstone. This is our occasion to remember and to commemorate. This is our chance to understand what immortality, especially in the arts, really means in our transient world.

But this is nevertheless an incomplete story, as any such project will always be. This story will always remain an unfolding one. But such is the grace of a rich history. The challenge is in the putting together and in the making sense of its parts, and what may seem so disparate, belonging to distant contexts of time and space, are brought together here in a narrative that becomes accessible, real, and meaningful to the present.

This is what we are celebrating: that intractable yearning in each of us to sustain life and creativity come what may. It is, indeed it is, a powerful and irresistible covenant with the Divine. (This article is slightly modified from the preface for Handulantaw.)



The entire editorial staff of Handulantaw at the Luce Auditorium.



The art and research staff of Handulantaw at the Luce Auditorium.



The writing staff of Handulantaw at the Luce Auditorium.



The members of the Cultural Affairs Committee at the Luce Auditorium.

Labels: advocacy, art and culture, cultural affairs committee, dance, dumaguete, film, literature, music, negros, painting, silliman

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

1:55 PM | Gang Badoy is the Bomb

I have to post this article, "We Were a Nation of Citizen Journalists That Night," written by Pam Pastor for the Philippine Daily Inquirer's YOU Section. It's about RockEd's Gang Badoy, one of the bestest people I know, simply because she radiates a fine sense of advocacy in whatever she does. (And I love the way we just keep bumping into each other. "Oh, andito ka pala sa Dumaguete?" I told her a few months ago when we bumped in Hayahay after last seeing her in Cubao X. She laughed, and then we got to talk a little bit...)

Here's an excerpt from Pam's article:

[T]he night “Ondoy” struck, the Rock Ed founder set aside her grief and did what she does best – try to make a difference.

“I tried driving out to Eastwood to pick up the core group of Rock Ed volunteers who were there early for our Girl Code event. We drove around for over two hours trying to get to Eastwood from Ortigas Center. We never got to them. Finally, at around 3:30 p.m., I decided to go back home and go online.”

Gang soon realized that so many Twitter and Facebook users were posting useful information about the typhoon. But she knew a lot of people had already lost electric power and most likely no longer had access to the Internet. They had only their mobile phones which gave them access only to FM stations and not AM radio.

Gang felt she had to do something. “I said, I’ll go on air!”

But Gang isn’t a DJ on Jam 88.3. She hosts Rock Ed Radio, a two-hour talk show Wednesday nights.

She walked to the studio in Ortigas Center to get hold of the station manager. “But he lived in an affected area and was managing things at home. So I just barged into the dark empty studio.”

She told the guard, the only one around, “You must help me stop the auto-broadcast and I need to go on air. He was very hesitant because he didn’t know me and wasn’t sure if I knew how to operate the board. He was right, I didn’t. But I insisted and said, ‘Malaking tulong ang may radyo na nagbobroadcast ng info, bumabaha na sa labas, parang malaki ’to, sir.’ We stared at each other for a time, with me determined to go on air even if I had to force my way through the board buttons.”

Read the rest here.

In other news, American G.I.s wonders why we still could smile after everything. (Because we're not a pampered culture! Which may be why not having affluence can be such a blessing, in a way...)

[photo courtesy of pdi]

Labels: advocacy, communication, disasters, issues, people, radio

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