Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
We write this in leave-taking. By the time this essay sees print, Arbour—the restaurant along Hibbard Avenue near Bantayan which had delighted the most discriminating food lovers in Dumaguete since its establishment at the height of the pandemic—would have closed, leaving behind its namesake now gracing the restaurant at Silver Reef Resort in Dauin. In a sense, Arbour will still be with us. But that mint green enclave of culinary goodness in Bantayan will be much-missed.
But we caught one of its last services for Valentines Day, so in a sense, this is also a love letter of sorts to chef Jan Schlimme and wife Jen, whom we first met in Dumaguete at the height of the pandemic—in October 2021, to be exact. They were vacationing in Bacolod from restaurant work in Hong Kong when the lockdown happened, and as the tolls of the pandemic turned into a long certainty, both answered a call to do food consulting for Casablanca Restaurant in Dumaguete. It was supposed to be a short stay: just revamp the Casablanca menu to suit pandemic realities, and then go back to Bacolod or elsewhere. But as with the usual, the Schlimmes found themselves “na-dagit” in Dumaguete, and in December of 2021, they found themselves establishing Arbour, what they envisioned to be a modern European restaurant nestled in Dumaguete.
We’ve loved Arbour’s fares since its beginnings, but this Valentine dinner proved to be something else.
One might expect bombast suited for couples celebrating love on love day itself—but what we liked about our Valentine dinner at Arbour was its restraint. There is a quiet artistry to restraint. In the culinary world, where excess is often mistaken for excellence, true mastery lies in knowing when to hold back. Arbour, helmed by the deft hands of head chef Jan Schlimme, understands this. In a city like Dumaguete—where the abundance of imported goods tempts restaurants into over-reliance on the exotic—Arbour does something radical: it trusts its ingredients, it allows them to shine on the plate. Here, the stars of the meal are not the truffle oils or the aged cheeses, but the produce, fresh and immediate, speaking in flavors unmasked by pretense. Arbour makes the flavor of their ingredients their main star attraction, and rather than to mask the basic components, their adept use of seasoning enhances the flavors of each element, pushed to their limit by the addition of just enough salt and pepper.
The journey begins with a plate that feels like the memory of an afternoon garden. The roasted beetroot salad, vibrant in its deep magenta, is an ode to the earth’s sweetness. The beets and carrots, slow-roasted until their sugars bloom, find a sharp foil in the herbed goat cheese, its tang cutting through like a breeze. There is a kind of poetry in this contrast—take note of the soft caramelization of root vegetables against the assertive creaminess of cheese. The dill fronds and lettuce greens lend their crispness, a whisper of freshness that lifts the dish from the soil into the air. It is, in many ways, a microcosm of Arbour itself: simplicity rendered with precision, a dish that knows exactly what it wants to be.
Then there is the salmon, pan-seared to that elusive point where the skin crackles but the flesh still yields at the touch of a fork. It comes with creamed potatoes, a comforting counterweight, and cucumbers that sing in cool, clean notes. What is remarkable is how the dish avoids the heaviness often associated with cream and oil. The balance is meticulous—enough seasoning to coax out the natural flavors, never enough to overshadow them. Here, every element has a role to play, and each one performs it to perfection.
The braised beef cheek arrives next, steeped in a red wine sauce that speaks of slow afternoons and patient craftsmanship. The meat falls apart at the suggestion of a spoon, its richness cut by the gentle char of green onion. Julienne carrots, bound in a delicate green ribbon, add a touch of visual poetry. There is nostalgia here—the unshakable warmth of beef and potatoes, a partnership as old as time. Yet, there is also refinement: the subtle elevation of flavor, the understanding that indulgence need not be overwhelming. A slice of bread would have been a welcome addition, something to sop up every last drop of sauce, but even without it, the dish stands whole, assured.
The meal closes with a flourish: a vanilla crème, lush and thick, paired with fresh strawberries, a bright compote, and a dark, silken ganache. It is an elegant echo of childhood indulgence—the trio of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate familiar yet new. Again, richness versus freshness ebb and flow throughout eating this dish: a spoonful of the vanilla crème and chocolate ganache in one bite then fresh strawberries and mint in the other. The strawberry compote adds a touch of acidity and sweetness. An added element of a salted biscuit crumb would have brought this dessert into new heights, but as is it closes the meal succinctly. Arbour understands when to stop. And that is its magic.
We will miss Arbour as it existed in Bantayan since 2021. European food borne in the tropics has its unique obstacles to overcome. Despite the abundance of suppliers in Dumaguete for processed food like cured meats, cheeses, and dairy products, Arbour never relies on these ingredients as trump cards to make good dishes. We’ve found that these ingredients, in Jan Schlimme’s hands, are supporting characters to the real highlight, which is the fresh produce.
Thank you for three years of good food, Arbour.
[Written with Renz Torres for “Culinary Cuts” for Dumaguete MetroPost, 16 February 2025 issue]
7:24 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 14: Art in the Post-Pandemic—An Epilogue
In Shelter Gallery over in Tabuctubig, just as the month of May was easing into fruition, I stumbled on a show that was exhibiting works of such vitality, such strong presences, and such mindful meaningfulness that the apt response from any art lover might as well be worship. I’m not kidding.
The show is titled Matinabangon, and it opened last May 12 [and closes on June 16], and is meant to be a showcase of contemporary visual artistry from the other side of Negros Island, represented here by Occidental artists Charlie Co, Ann Gaurana, Barry Cervantes, Elwah Gonzales, HR Campos, Janrey Llegue, Jay R. Delleva, Jovito Hecita, Jun Jun Montelibano, Karl Arnaiz, RA Tijing, and Vincent Sarnate, all from by Bacolod’s Orange Project. Talk about Bacolod artists coming to the Dumaguete art scene, and meaning business. They came blazing.
The first painting that drew me in was “Tryst at the Creek,” by Jun Jun Montelibano, which haunted me even days after seeing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was it the painting’s storytelling quality? Was it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Was it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white, holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages—which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet the painting is also a picture of loveliness. It is also frightening. Both all at once.
It was the key piece of art that provided me the way to look at and appreciate the other works in the collection—an exhibit of such eclectic curation that also somehow made this show come off as an unintended boast, but certainly a well-deserved one. The show seems to say, “This is what we do in Bacolod, Dumaguete.” A dare.
And what is it that they do?
One can begin with Charlie Co, the godfather of Bacolod visual arts, who knocks off timid artistry that coasts along with having nothing to say by giving us “Anger,” a work in acrylic on canvas which is worthy of its title: it depicts primarily what looks like a brutalized man who sneers in contortions of anger and pain as he is paraded around—like a crucified Christ—in an unholy procession, held aloft by a menacing mass of people in strange yellow masks. It invites religious and political readings, maybe even the sociological—but the point is the poignant pain dramatized by the man’s face, his eyes fixed on the viewer like a rebuke. The work unsettles, by design of course, and with this, an artistic gauntlet has been thrown.
But the exhibit is not all like this work by Co. The show contains multitudes of styles: from classical representational pieces like Karl Arnaiz’s “Mother and Child,” a work in charcoal on paper that recalls familiar Renaissance figures, and Ann Gaurana’s “Consenting Vulnerability,” a work in oil featuring a female nude, with flowers, on an oblong-shaped canvas—with the woman’s face turned away from us like a knowing rebuke to the male gaze; to the wild surreal contortions and even pop-art inventions of RA Tijing’s “Carnis,” a work in oil which features a two-headed beast in a forest, with some canines popping out of its blue skin, pausing before a feast of red meat, and Barry Cervantes’ “God Bless the Ammunition,” a work in acrylic that also takes the figure of the Christ, this time dressed as the hood ornament of some futuristic rocket ride, driven by a figure in protective gear with a skull for a face, through a landscape that’s clearly an environmental dystopia. Both paintings are ripe for endless interpretations. Also in this latter mode, you have Janrey Llegue’s “Taga Uma” [acrylic and modeling paste on canvas] that takes whatever pro-vegan messaging in Tijing’s work and makes it more horrifically tactile; and Elwah Gonzales’ “Maayo Na Lang ang Sobra Sang sa Kulang” [acrylic on canvas], which is portrait of a woman with a heart for a body, with what looks like sheets of water coming out of the ventricles—a commentary on love? Who knows.
In between these styles, you have Jovito Hecita’s “Pollination to Rot,” a work in mixed media on a round canvas featuring an assemblage of fallen leaves in autumn-rich hue, which on closer inspection is really the color of death, made more precise by the carcasses half-concealed in their midst: the bones of a bird and the decaying body of a rat peeking out from under the leaves, both of which make up the lower angles of a triangle with an actual clock ticking above, its frame yellow as the leaves, and its numberless existence making us mindful about the eventual mortality we all have to face. This is death personified by a painting.
Heady stuff indeed—which probably explains why I found myself attracted to the more whimsical pieces in the collection, like HR Campos’ “Abi Ko Friendly Ka” [mixed media on canvas], which features an orange beast that looks like a dragon—or a menacing caterpillar; or Jay R Delleva’s “Swallowed” [acrylic in canvas], which is very much in the mode of Margaret Keane but taken to a higher conceit with a merry mix of John James Audobon nestlings and William Morris florals; and especially Vincent Sarnate’s exquisitely sculpted mixed media works “Pugad,” “Aratiles,” and “Last Leaf,” which all take the narrative of the botanical mania of plantitas and infuses the figure of the potted plant with the darling nightmare of baby faces growing from the same soil.
I realized right then and there that what attracted me to this show, like Montelibano’s haunting work, was the pieces’ ability to thread nightmare and whimsy in the same breathing space—some more-in-your face or more infused with social messaging than the others. The variety, and the conceit, works. That they’re all done with such boldness of composition and theme adds to the success of the exhibit.
The aim of the show, riffing off the Visayan word of the title which means “to help, support, and assist,” is to represent thematically the raison d’etre of Orange Project and Shelter Gallery together—which is that both are artist-run galleries that “share the same vision to provide nurturing spaces for artists and their communities,” which is “rooted in the mission to provide a multidisciplinary platform for the people and by the people,” thus making matinabangon not just a show title but also a descriptive for the “art eco-system” that both galleries try to be “sustainable” in. All of these are in the statement introducing the show.
That word “sustainable” feels like a wound—because this is the last show you can see at Shelter Gallery before it closes after June 16, when its lease at the venue it occupies finally runs out, and with no clear future for another venue to transfer to in sight.
“This is why I wanted to have this show with Bacolod artists,” Shelter’s main mover Faye Mandi tells me. “I wanted to close the gallery with a blast—featuring very powerful works by fellow artists from the other side of our island. People who share the same vision as I do, who can underline what I’ve been trying to do since opening Shelter.”
It has been a year and six months since Shelter Gallery opened, with its inaugural show featuring Ms. Mandi and Hersley-Ven Casero in a collaborative exhibit—something that propelled them both to loftier reaches as working artists, going as far as maintaining undeniable presences in national art events such as Visayas Art Fair in Cebu and Art Fair Philippines in Manila.
In the interim, Shelter played host to 15 exhibits, including Fast Times [March 2022], Training Wheels [April 2022], At the Moment [May 2022], Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman [June 2022], Jia You [July 2022], Intention [August 2022], Surface Tension [September 2022], Every Day is a Sorrowful Mystery [October 2022], Windows of Perception [October-November 2023], Pagsibol ng Punla [December 2022], Layaw [January 2023], Sonden [February 2023], Ichi-go Ichi-e [March 2023], and Hue [April 2023]—plus two or three one-off events that combined the visual with theatre arts and literary arts. Many of these shows were group exhibitions, but Shelter Gallery managed to put out solo exhibitions, a considerable number of them first-time solo exhibitors, for artists like Rey Labarento, Mikoo Cataylo, Eli Wong, Vanessa Gaston, Chanel Pepino, Trina Montenegro, and Juan Macias.
Ms. Mandi assures me this is not the end of Shelter. That they’re actively scouting venues for relocation, and that the gallery might take another form—but still very much within the range of her vision of “providing nurturing spaces for artists and their communities.” In the meantime, she is eager to go back to her painting—something she has missed since she became busy being a gallery maven.
* * *
But, in the end, as I put this fifteen-part series to a finish, a part of me wonders whether this magnificent resurgence of Dumaguete arts—certainly a COVID-19 miracle—is very much a protracted phenomenon enabled by a pandemic hunger for culture. Imagine a community hankering to make and display art in the first two years of the pandemic, bursting with so many possibilities in 2022, and now reckoning with the wane of that pandemic wave in 2023.
One notes, for instance, the unheralded demise of Dakong Balay Gallery as exhibition space, now reportedly taken over by a franchise coffee shop wanting more space. But the venue started it all with its initial showcase of Hersley-Ven Casero’s paintings in January 2021—snowballing to the establishment of Shelter Gallery in January 2022, and MUGNA Gallery in June 2022, and in that bright environment also ignited the local productions of other arts, from music to theatre, from literature to film, from dance to photography. It became home to artists wanting a home for their art, and home for art lovers wanting to see local art in a pandemic time that didn’t seem to end.
Is the wave over? we can ask. A corollary question becomes: Is art sustainable in a city that may not have all that it has to really appreciate artists in its midst? Because I asked a local gallerist this question once, not too long ago: “Do locals buy art?” The response: “They do—but most cannot go beyond P50,000.”
I still am willing to believe that the pandemic wave of artistic resurgence in Dumaguete is not a fluke—but that it is going through a much-needed reconfiguration given post-pandemic realities. But there are lessons to learn from the past three years:
First, that while institutions like Silliman University and Foundation University remain critical to art production in Dumaguete [which remains very much a “university town”]—and this is simply because both have the infrastructure, and the budget, and the history of art-making at their disposal—the pandemic art wave also taught us we can actually make art even when important cultural institutions like these are closed down. At the height of the pandemic, we didn’t have the Luce or Woodward or Sinco Hall for our theatrical and cultural productions—but we found unlikely venues to stage our plays and cultural shows. We didn’t have their galleries to exhibit our paintings in, but kindred souls found a way to remedy that—and we actually had more galleries during the pandemic than before the pandemic. True, both institutions have also been instrumental in finding ways to bring culture to people via working Internet platforms—this is especially true for Silliman’s Culture and Arts Council—but that instance of independence from them was actually exhilarating, as if we were given a new paradigm for doing art, and finding that it works, even when wonky.
Second, artists will make art—even with a pandemic raging. And their common hunger can ignite community. The pandemic art wave was mostly sustained by young artists who had no care for the quarrels of their elders, and who only wanted a space to exhibit, and a space to commune among themselves. Our young artists made the pandemic art wave happen—and may their hunger remain unabated.
Third, Dumaguete is truly hungry for culture and the arts. I can see that every time a new exhibit, or a new concert, or a new play opens. And I could see that for real when I spent a day at Pinspired Philippines, which occupies the main lobby of Dakong Balay, and which for the longest time provided the entry point to the gallery at the second floor. It astonished me that there was a considerable stream of people coming in, asking if there was an exhibit upstairs. It was more than a trickle. It wasn’t exactly a flood—but the constant stream of patronage was astonishing for me. People will look for art.
When the National Museum at the Dumaguete Presidencia finally opened in late November 2022, it provided me another way to mark this local hunger for culture. According to one of its staff, the average number of visitors coming to the museum daily is around 80 people—but it can reach as high as 250 on very busy days, which apparently seems to happen more often these days. That’s an astonishing number, given the smallness of the museum—and they also get a lot of repeat visitors, people who are hungry to learn more about the geographic and biological diversity of Negros Island, about archeological riches of Dumaguete and its vicinity, and about the beautiful architectural heritage we have on this island as well as in Siquijor.
Our challenge now is to learn from the pandemic as well as from the pre-pandemic, and find ways to consolidate our strengths from both eras in managing local art and culture—to make the post-pandemic a more sustainable time for artists and the people who support them, and to make art that matters to the community, and to foster a deep cultural environment that will sate the hunger of a city that, in fact, yearns for it.
The arts in Dumaguete indeed flourished during the pandemic, miraculously. That success shouldn’t just be a pandemic story.
I was getting a haircut today at the barber’s, and I began to appreciate the fact that even at my age my hair was still quite thick. I had no idea I had hair issues until around late December 2020. I just went through COVID-19 [and these were the days before vaccines were a reality]. After recuperation, I felt fine, but deep inside I knew life was changing in a fundamental way I could not even articulate. I began to go through so much psychological distress that I began to lose my hair. I found hair everywhere, in clumps, on my bed, on the floor, in the bathroom. I seriously thought I was going bald by all the hair I was shedding. This went on for months until Renz finally convinced me to seek therapy in May 2021. It was such a huge help, and the hair loss soon stopped.
7:34 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 13: The Literary Grind
It is arguably difficult to measure the ebbs and flows of the writing life compared to most of the other creative arts. There is always the cue we take of the applause at the finish of a performance, whether dance, or drama, or a musical extravaganza; and there is always the palpable and visceral reaction of the beholder upon seeing a painting or a sculpture or a photograph—and architecture solidly occupies space in the landscape that it cannot help but invite instant reflection.
But literature? This one is enjoyed often in the privacy of a sequestered mind—with the reader putting down a finished book, and reflecting quietly on the words they have just read. Of course, there are other [more public] markers of “literary success” comparable to the reception of its creative cousins: a public reading inviting applause, a piece winning a literary award, a book being published and launched, a work being accepted to a prestigious writing workshop, a work being accepted for publication in a magazine or journal, a book entering a bestseller list. Their common denominator is “acceptance,” and to quote speculative fictionist Stewart Stafford, “All writing is a message in a bottle, cast into the sea in the forlorn hope of recognition and acceptance.” But in the time of the pandemic, most of these markers grounded to a halt, and what deepened—if you were a writer still intent on writing despite the world coming to an end—was the very basic condition of the writing life: its solitariness.
Solitariness is not necessarily a sad thing. According to novelist William Faulkner: “Writing is a solitary job—that is, no one can help you with it, but there’s nothing lonely about it. I have always been too busy, too immersed in what I was doing, either mad at it or laughing at it to have time to wonder whether I was lonely or not lonely. It’s simply solitary. I think there is a difference between loneliness and solitude.” This is true—but writing in the pandemic also made it lonely for many writers: cooped up in the lockdown, the solitariness of the writing became an escape, but when we needed escape from the escape, there was only quarantine to face, and the fear of the outside world to bear.
But the writing experience during the pandemic was not a monolith. There was a variety to it, with some writers declaring going down into the depths of idleness and madness as the pandemic deepened, while others welcoming the respite to churn out works they’d been trying to finish for years but couldn’t because of other obligations [obligations which were suddenly nullified, giving them no more excuses to delay what needed doing]. For many, it was the combination of the two, with months bursting with creativity, and months that invited nothing else but bingeing on Netflix. And so the writing continued, or did not continue, depending on whom you asked.
In the meantime, the markers disappeared, especially in 2020. Gone were the poetry readings or the communal workshops, which necessitated face-to-face interactions. Gone were the awards, the Palanca famously going on hiatus for two years—the first time it has done so since its inception in 1950. Gone were the workshops planned for the year—with the Silliman University National Writers Workshop and other similar workshops finally, and awkwardly, going on Zoom-mode as 2021 dawned. The processes of publications, of course, continued on because their very nature proved immune to the systemic ravages of the pandemic: writers still wrote, still submitted to publications far and wide, still received either acceptances or rejections, repeat. And readers still read—and read voraciously.
In time, even with the pandemic still raging, some of the old normalcy returned.
There were readings again. The first one we attended was a May 2022 reading and a talk with Mitos Suson, a Cebuana author who had accepted an invitation to stay in Dumaguete for a while. She had just published Shards of Time, her memoir/novel about the Martial Law, and it was an opportune time to do a reading with her—but it was an intimate affair, hosted by 451°F Books and Café’s Mike Reyes and Lea Sicat-Reyes, small enough not to arouse much of our pandemic paranoia. That small event became the catalyst to holding bigger physical events—including a reading of the graphic novel ZsaZsa Zaturnnah for Pride Month 2022, still at 451°F Books and Café, with author Carlo Vergara as special guest [over Zoom]. Later that month, in July 2022, the local Department of Trade and Industry [DTI] held its annual 6200 PopUp creative expo and culinary fair, for the first time in two years—and part of it was a day dedicated to literary arts, curated by Dum.Alt.Press, which came complete with authors’ talks and panels, a creative writing workshop with Daniella Spontak, a screening of Dumaguete short films, and a poetry reading hosted by the Renaissance Youth Leaders Forum and Ang Sandigan. Ms. Spontak herself curated several spoken poetry exhibitions at Shelter Gallery and MUGNA Gallery in the succeeding months before leaving Dumaguete for London in 2023.
There were literary awards again. When the Palanca Award returned in 2022, it was my honor to win first prize for the short story in English for “Ceferina in Apartment 2G,” something I wrote loosely based on my mother’s brief experience as an immigrant to the U.S., where she came to live with my brother Rey in Los Angeles. [She promptly returned to the Philippines within two years.] It was a story I labored in the doldrums of the pandemic, in 2021, when all I felt was being bereft of anchor and only storytelling felt like the only thing that could save me. A few months after I finished that story, I also received the KSSLAP Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which recognized my contributions to literary arts and cultural work—a prestigious award that I had received even when I was completely mired in a mental health spiral, and I could not see the future beyond the emptiness I saw in that empty Luce Auditorium where the awarding ceremony was being held. But winning the Palanca the next year felt like a jolt of hope, a window to seeing that I was being recognized for work I had done in the middle of my pandemic darkness—and perhaps it also served as my necessary push into believing that things would be fine.
There were workshops again, the SUNWW going on to host two editions online.
And there were books being published again. The Sands and Coral, Silliman’s literary journal founded in 1948, brought out an Editor’s Issue in 2021, featuring works by all the editors of the journal, from pioneering writers Aida Rivera Ford and Cesar Jalandoni Amigo to latter editors including yours truly and Misael Ondong. In February 2023, it brought out two issues, Pandemonium [for Sand and Coral 2022, edited by Albertha Lachmi Obut and Patch Puengan] and Pagsubang [for Sand and Coral 2023, edited by Pia Alvarez, Isabel Torres, and Yudi Santillan III], which also included winning fiction and essay pieces that touched on the timely theme of “Hope, Transformation, and Rebuilding after the Pandemic.” [Jon Paculba won first place for fiction, and Paul Donaire won first place for essay.]
Zamboanga writer Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, who had moved to Dumaguete right before the pandemic and finally left to teach in Davao in 2023, used her lockdown in Dumaguete to teach mathematics online, and to put together her first collection titled Laut: Stories, published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2022. Of the book, poet Marjorie Evasco writes: “This first collection of thirteen stories by Sigrid Gayangos brings us back to the primal waters of the imagination. In the Malayo-Polynesian language of seafarers, laut is the name for the ocean on whose currents they rode to reach thousands of islands scattered in the Southern Pacific Ocean, some of them so small, and from time to time disappearing with the flow of the tides. In the thrall of stories inhabited by humans and more-than-humans, we echo Sigrid Gayangos’s praise of the seas and the oceans ‘for rolling relentlessly around the world, for reminding us of our smallness, for showing us how things are connected, for instilling a deep sense of wonder, for the air we breathe, for food, for the singing of the waves, for literally and figuratively everything. May we be better stewards of this water planet.’ To read each of these stories with care is to joyfully say yes!”
But even earlier, a history teacher in Bayawan was moved to do something with the pandemic, and resolved to put on paper her recollection of the simple life in a small barrio in that southern Negrense agricultural city—and somehow managed to weave these into tales that showcased heritage which she felt was fast disappearing. Her name is Dara Tumaca-Ramos of Malabugas, Bayawan, who studied to become a teacher at St. Paul University Dumaguete, and later worked as a social studies instructor at the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod. The book she managed to write is titled Sang Una: Stories From the Barrio, and in her introduction, she writes: “Life is not always filled with grand and extraordinary events. More often, it is filled with ordinary and mundane daily occurrences which give life to life itself. It is in the ordinary circumstances, in the daily grind, as one might say, that culture is lived and passed on to the younger generations. But with the fast-paced, technology-driven world we live in, most of what we have treasured that form part of our heritage as a people are also rapidly disappearing in front of our very eyes. So many of these treasures are forgotten with the passing of years, or lost with our older folks passing o to the next life without being able to share these legacies to those left behind.”
“And then the pandemic happened,” she continues. “As people got cooped in their houses and food was rationed, there seemed to be especially among city dwellers, an awakening in the longing for life in the province. A life where social distancing was not a concern, where growing your own food was the norm, and playing outdoors with cousins and neighbors until dusk was a daily pattern of childhood.” She provides an answer to that longing with poignant observations of farm life, including the various processes of rice farming—from uprooting seedlings [panggabot] to planting [patanom], from harvesting [paani] to threshing [mapalinas]; bamboo cutting [panggama]; bamboo-weaving [manglag-i]; buying fish from the shore [panugbong]; catching crabs [panulo]; catching flying fish [pamanse]; and gathering tuba [pananggot]; as well as detailing stories of specific personages such as the aswang and the manugluy-a [the barrio doctor]; and traditions such as a wake [bilasyon] and games played at wakes [bordon], dancing [bayle], and firing bamboo cannons, among others. Sang Una also takes care to situate its stories in the unique language of the Malabugas community [Kiniray-a, from the Panay immigrants that settled there], and always minutely observant of the specific traditions it chooses to describe. Ms. Tumaca-Ramos would independently publish Sang Una in May 2021.
The visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero and I also released a children’s book, The Great Little Hunter, a picture book and art book put out by a local publisher, Pinspired, in April 2022—which also inspired an exhibition at MUGNA Gallery later that year, in December. In recollection, I have no idea how I came to put out this book, and to put out a Palanca-winning story, even when I remember the pandemic days to be an endless span of three years with gaping nothingness. How did that happen? Where did those specific bursts of tangible creativity come from?
Tackling these questions to make sense of my own literary output during the pandemic actually makes me nervous. Truth to tell, what has always remained clear to me, as I conclude this series of essays about the creative arts in Dumaguete in the throes of the lockdown, is that I really had no choice but to put the essay on the literary arts last—simply because I knew somehow it would limn the edges of autobiography, even the confessional. But I have written about this before, when I noted that writing in the pandemic became my savior as it deepened, and with it the stability of my mental health even as I spiraled outside of it. To make it easy to understand, here is my summation: when I was writing, I was fine; when I was not writing, I was lost in the storm. Not writing was often my status quo. But when I wrote, I was happy—and rewarded for it. But keeping at it was not easy.
Take the confessions of other Dumaguete writers.
From poet Simon Anton Diego Baena: “The pandemic period was my most productive year. I was living on the edge because I had nothing else to do. I never knew what could happen. And the pervasive presence of death fueled my desire to write more and more poems. I was also depressed for half of that first year because my wife was in Iligan and I was stuck here in Bais, which I dubbed Ciudad de los Muertos. [Strangely enough], the news of [pandemic] deaths on TV encouraged me to write about a more personal subject—specifically about my father’s passing—that I couldn’t let go of. It was like a shadow that never left me. It was like a noose around my neck.”
From poet Lyde Sison Villanueva: “I was productive during the first few months. I planned [and started] a couple of writing projects. I completed the Written Comprehensive Exam for my MFA. I revised old works and submitted them to various publications. And was published once. A year or so after the start of the pandemic, I got exhausted and I couldn’t focus on writing again. Life happened, and I had other priorities. But this year, in 2023, I’m starting to write again. But I became more selective and conscious of how I was using my time. I’m committed to take care of myself more, health-wise. I now strive to spend more quality time with family and friends. I don’t let my work compromise my mental health and personal life.”
From medical doctor and fictionist/essayist Justine Megan Yu: “During the pandemic, I went back to a previous idea for a longer piece: a personal piece about a year in my life where I wrote three eulogies. I wove these together into an essay and submitted it to a creative writing workshop specifically for doctor-writers. I was accepted into that workshop and spent a few weekends happily being in the online company of doctor-writers. Most of us were readers growing up, and wanted to write, but didn’t have the courage to pursue a career in writing or were encouraged to do something ‘more stable’ or ‘more realistic.’ It was nice to know there were others like me, who loved to read and write, who went into the medical profession and still had this urge to write and share what we wrote. But the pandemic gave me the opportunity to slow down. My medical fellowship training was paused because my specialty center that catered mostly to non-urgent, outpatient cases closed. I still went on duty at the hospital but I had less paperwork to do. This freed up my mind to go back to reading non-medical things and back to writing for myself again. However, I was not productive, writing-wise, because I only came up with that essay. But after years and years of not writing anything, I think that was productive enough for me. Still, the pandemic brought a clarity to my choices—what I really wanted to do with this one life, what kind of person I wanted to become, what kind of person did I want to spend my years with.”
From health worker and poet Andre Aniñon: “Surprisingly, I was productive! I didn’t write every day—but I was able to pen two stories in the first year of the pandemic. Still, it was definitely more productive than the years of not writing I spent prior. [The last formal piece I finished prior to the pandemic was in 2018.] I could attribute my pandemic productivity to the little ‘quarantine book club’ my friends and I had set up to try and give structure to our otherwise shapeless days. We started with novels, but seeing that most couldn’t commit to reading hundreds of pages within a week, we moved to short stories. One of the stories we read during that time was the late Luis Katigbak’s ‘Subterrania,’ where I found a comrade in one of the characters, Kaye, who at one point in the story, said: ‘I love these [stories] ... because even the worst of them, in their own way, are perfect. Better than a life of uncertainty. They have beginnings and endings. I get the world distilled in its purest form.’ I saved the entire passage as a note in my phone. Early in the pandemic, when so much of the world was upended, I was left, as a healthcare worker, to struggle navigating this ‘new normal.’ All I wanted at the end of every tiring shift and commute was a sense of structure and certainty. Reading gave me that. And when I was not content with finding that structure and certainty in reading, I took refuge and I tried to understand things, and I found solace in writing.
“But perhaps the greatest effect that this pandemic had on me was this realization and dread in thinking that nothing was so certain anymore. It was common to hear, every day, especially early in the pandemic, that the days were the same because of work suspensions and quarantine and endless hours of ‘staying at home.’ But I found that sentiment further from the truth. Life then was so unpredictable: one day I’d hear of someone I know being hospitalized due to COVID-like symptoms, and the next day I’d hear of their deaths. There was this grief that surrounded everything. And on some days, I’d keep on thinking: my God, what if COVID would get to me? And what if I’d pass it on to my loved ones? What if someone in the bus I rode to and from work carried the virus? What if the patient in front of me was infected but just asymptomatic? Working in a small laboratory at that time, we weren’t really given that much assurance and protection as to what would happen if we did contract the virus. Even coming from bigger hospitals, some of my friends felt the same way. So much of COVID and its manifestations were, as of then, unknown. And as a healthcare worker, I couldn’t exactly ‘stay at home’ until we were given answers. We had to continue despite it all. The fact that people thought all of COVID was a scam for us to accumulate money—the irony, given the realities of healthcare workers in this country—didn’t help. So even though I was ‘out and about’ in the world, because of this grief and uncertainty, I still felt cooped in some form of enclosure. It was in this darkness that I tried to find solace in reading and writing.”
From student and poet/fictionist Junelie Velonta: “Before the lockdowns of 2020, I was able to qualify for my first writers workshop in February of 2020. It was my first exposure to everything ‘creative writing’ so I did a lot of catching up during the first year or so of the lockdown. A panelist at the workshop gave me a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Steering the Craft’ and I spent time reading that during the early [months of] lockdowns. Some of the finger exercises recommended by Le Guin became seeds of stories, and I’ve turned two into actual short stories. From then on, I’d written three stories—one, a fantasy; another, something noir-ish; and another, a screenplay for a period short film. The first two I was able to submit to the SUNWW. The screenplay was the result of a two-week-long screenplay writing workshop organized by the De La Salle University. I’ve submitted the fantasy piece for publishing a few times now but the most I’ve gotten are two personal rejections, which I frame positively in my mind, since I have only started writing seriously over the last four years or so.
“Perhaps one of the reasons that I have been writing actively in the last three years is the exploration that I’ve been able to do because of the pandemic, not just because of the spare time, but also because it allowed me to see, converse, and observe people who I would have not met if I had turbo-ed through my STEM education and holed up in the third floor of the Science Complex [at Silliman]. Seeing the good and the bad, the moral and the questionable, the selfless and the self-serving sides of people—family, relatives, friends, politicians—educated me on the kinds of people in a community. In turn, they inspired me to create characters. The semi-constant presence of the radio broadcast in our home revealed to me that storytelling, the way Nicky Dumapit and Anthony Maginsay from DYWC do it, can reveal softer, ‘unworded’ truths that hard journalism can sometimes gloss over. Thus, my experiences during the pandemic solidified my ‘purpose’ on being serious about writing.
“But to frame how the pandemic affected me as a person and as a writer, I must mention that I am a STEM student, and a son, and a brother. My father retired right before the lockdowns, but developed TB at the height of COVID, and had a stroke and heart attack a year or so after that TB diagnosis. All of his retirement benefits were suddenly gone, and we had to sell our plot of land in Valencia where we had planned to build a house. These problems piled on top of doing online classes, and there was filial pressure to finish early so I could fund the education of my siblings. With the ever-worsening economy as manifested by the rising prices, the pandemic both radicalized and paralyzed me. I have developed a deep anger to the state and the status-quo, but also an overwhelming pressure to persist within it to build a future for those I treasure most. I can’t see myself developing radical beliefs and doing extremist actions, even in writing, simply because my sisters and brother look to me for guidance and support. The pandemic has made me an angry individual, student, and writer, but I have to make this anger die down because I can’t let the pot boil over.”
From fictionist Tara De Leon: “As the only able-ish bodied member of our household, I became the quarantine tribute–keeper of the barangay pass—and so, between having to wait at checkpoints and at hour-long lines to get into the grocery and sanitizing said groceries and cooking while struggling with my contamination anxiety, there wasn’t much time to write. The elaborate ceremonies drained me physically, mentally, emotionally. I checked out. It didn’t help that all ‘my year’ plans for 2020 were canceled. My partner met my family during my sister’s wedding in January 2020. Later that same year, I meant to travel to meet his family where we would officially announce our engagement. But borders closed globally. The pandemic felt eternal. Not knowing when borders would open, or if they ever even would, brought about new worries. So in June of 2021, he ended things. And I couldn’t do ‘girls’ nights’ because there was a pandemic out there and an 8 PM curfew. And I couldn’t book a ticket to fly to him to try and win him back because I couldn’t even leave the island! I had no outlet for all my feelings so I finally turned to writing. There was still a lot left unsaid in that relationship, but I cut off all communication with him—so I wrote letters I’d never send. It was cathartic. I don’t write letters anymore, I don’t feel the need to. Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still reeling from the changes, even after almost two years. My pandemic story isn’t typical I guess but, it is what it is.”
And from the great Cesar Ruiz Aquino: “Pandemic or no pandemic, I was waning in my capacity to write poems. It feels like our species is paying for our meanness.”
* * *
The stories feel like a mix of somber reflections and surprised productivity. But there are bright spots, especially in terms of another marker of literary success: book-selling. For some reason, before the pandemic, there were only five “bookstores” in Dumaguete—a heritage establishment that has, frankly speaking and even though I love the store, has seen better days [Caballes Bookstore along Perdices Street], two that sold “pre-loved books [XIQ Books in the bowels of LuPega Building along Locsin Street and BookSale at Robinsons Place], a Christian outfit [Philippine Christian Book Store along Calle San Jose], and a tottering mainstream behemoth [National Bookstore, also at Robinsons Place]. Truth to tell, many would not even consider these establishments as “real bookstores,” and even NBS closed its doors for good the moment the mall was locked down because of the pandemic. And then, for the longest time, the feeling was that—for a place like Dumaguete that sometimes calls itself a “city of literature”—it was sobering to note there were no bookstores around. Can a literary city be “literary” when there are no bookstores around?
In 2020, right in the middle of the first year of lockdown, something in that status quo changed: a new bookstore opened shop. Ikaduhang Andana [Binisaya for “second floor”], located in the attic of the Solon house in the compound right behind the SUMC Medical Specialty Building, was the brainchild of 19-year-old Natania Shay Du. And for a while, it felt like water quenching thirst in a literary desert. “In the process of building the bookstore and connecting with the community…we realized that, because of the pandemic, there is an immediate need for more accessible education in any way,” Ms. Du told Renz Torres in an interview for MetroPost the month it opened. What’s more, her focus on Philippine publications felt like a gift. But then, the bookstore quietly closed shop within a year. And that felt like a heartbreak. [It has to be noted, however, that two more bookstores opened in its wake: PhindBooks along Aldecoa Drive, which caters to foreign trade books, and 451°F Books and Café, which caters to comic books and graphic novels.]
Enter Gayle Acar almost two years later.
Born and raised in Manila, she graduated from the UP College of Fine Arts, and had worked as a musician, a store supervisor, a personal stylist, and a graphic designer. In April 2022, Ms. Acar moved to Dumaguete with her husband Ernest and their two girls. “But I’ve been coming to Dumaguete since 2009, when I first met the parents of my husband [then my boyfriend] in Bais. Since then I would visit a few times a year, for gatherings or holidays,” she says. “My husband and I have always talked about moving to Dumaguete, for the slower pace and to be closer to nature, but couldn’t, due to my husband’s office work.”
But the pandemic hit, and work switched to a hybrid set-up. “And after spending too much time indoors, we just decided to finally relocate,” Ms. Acar says. “I was also homeschooling my kids and part of it was spending time studying nature, which was a struggle in Manila. Now we can go to the beach or mountains whenever we feel like it. We also live within walking distance to the bookshop.” There were other things she loved about Dumaguete: “The environment and stress-free living just inspires you to create,” she says. “And I’ve heard of writers workshops here before. But it was when we moved last year that we saw a lot of newly opened galleries and artist hubs.” These were incentives to the move.
In August 2020, prior to the Dumaguete move, she started LibrAria Books on Instagram. “It was primarily to sell books that my kids have outgrown. It was a blink decision to call the enterprise ‘LibrAria,’ because I was initially selling my daughter Aria’s books. We were beginning homeschool as well, and were trying to source books for our curriculum. It was hard to find most of the titles here, and I somehow found myself developing a skill for finding rare and beautiful books. I documented them through photos, and soon LibrAria became my visual playground.”
She ended up falling in love with bookselling, and pursuing it full time. She started with thirty titles, which became a hundred, to almost a thousand over a week-long drop. On ordinary days, she would post about two hundred titles on her Instagram account.
But it helped that she had always loved books. “Books have always been my companion,” Ms. Acar says. “Being surrounded by them makes me feel like I belong. I spend hours scouring and flipping through them at thrift shops, my kids browsing alongside me. Years before that, my husband proposed to me in a bookshop, and we got married in a library. Even more years prior, while in college, you would find me seeking solace within library walls and stacks of books.”
Establishing LibrAria in the middle of the pandemic felt like the right thing to do. “It was a time when we were confined and stifled, and LibrAria provided us with an opportunity to pass our time in creative ways, and try our best to live in spite of fear. It was just like any clean-up/garage sale but turned out to be my ikigai,” she says.
There was also the fact that running the bookstore combined all her interests. “It’s my love for retail, customer service, and visual merchandising that inspires me to make the online experience as personal as possible,” she says. This includes the process of curating titles [“meticulously selected, relentlessly hunted”]; putting them into themes like Fairies/Japan; arranging them into a teaser [“focal point, levels, balance”]; doing the photography [“the teaser, each book’s content, illustrations, flaws … my love for documenting books in a romantic flat lay plus dramatic lighting”]; scheduling [“sequencing, invoicing, shipping”]; designing graphics [“schedules, glossaries”]; custom wrapping [“stamps, stickers, flowers”]; and book recommendations [“I keep track of preferences”].
LibrAria on Instagram proved an instant success. Part of it, as mentioned above, was her attention to detail in her retailing of the books she was selling. “I am also passionate about retail and the customer experience, so I made packaging as personal as possible, with stickers, ribbons or lace, and flowers. It was also a way of connecting with the outside world during a time that everyone was indoors.”
Moving to Dumaguete meant moving the business as well—but it was easy to do, since the enterprise was mostly done online. But the more she thought about it, the more she felt that LibrAria needed a brick-and-mortar equivalent at this stage of the business. And so, in December 2022, the Acars opened their first physical store in 58 EJ Blanco, a collective enterprise of artists and entrepreneurs in Dumaguete.
“I used to keep my stocks at home, but it seemed more practical to keep them somewhere else. And I’ve been coming to 58 EJ Blanco since we moved to Dumaguete, and I loved the community there,” Ms. Acar says. “One of the artists showed me a space—which inspired me to create a hidden bookshop, with a shelf for a door, something that would transport you to a different time once you are inside. I also wanted it to represent my store on Instagram, how it would feel when you would expand the flat lays with flowers and antiques. It is also a representation of my introverted self.”
But it was a challenge opening the bookstore. “We only had less than a month to build, because we wanted to open in time for the art bazaar at 58 last December. So we did the essentials first, and refined details after the opening.” Another challenge for her was balancing and bridging the online/offline experience of LibrAria. “We are also learning about different customer profiles online and offline, and their preferred titles and genres,” she says.
Now, the bookstore has grown, including its curation of titles. “I would like to provide beautiful educational books for homeschooling families,” Ms. Acar says. “Also Filipiniana selections for transient guests, antiquarian titles for collectors, and a showcase Dumaguete-based writers’ and illustrators’ works. We are more than a bookshop, we also want to build a community of readers, through literary events and customer engagement.” The aim is “to become a source of inspiration for writers and artists, through books, or meeting colleagues and enthusiasts,” and to do that she envisions LibrAria to host a variety of activities to expand their community, including storytelling for children and families, workshops that would promote books on local culture and history, and others. “We are learning as we go along,” Ms. Acar says. “It was initially a passion project. But now, meeting the writers’ community in Dumaguete, we are exploring how we can give support or be a platform for their voices and their work.”
That last bit, a focus on Dumaguete writers in her bookstore, is the best draw—and one of the pandemic’s best gifts to Dumaguete literary arts.
7:00 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 12: The Reel Life
Curiously enough, the best film of Dumaguete in the pandemic was made just right before the pandemic—and in that regard can be then taken as prophecy. The short film A Wakeful Sennight, made in the last months of 2019 by Andrew Alvarez and Stanley Alcala, asks us to picture the world in disarray: the sun is inexplicably in a standstill, and the world’s population—or at least the segment we see representing it—are tortured by the endless brightness and cannot sleep. When the film begins, we see a man—Mr. Alvarez directing himself—traversing a bucolic neighborhood, looking up at the sky and seeing the sun shining brightly in noontime splendor. He checks his watch—and that’s when we know of the film’s conceit: it is past 8 in the evening, and the sun has not set. There is no ensuing panic, only puzzlement. Our man tries to go to sleep and finds that he can’t. The days pass, and he and everyone else succumb to a zombie-like existence of wanting sleep but are forever deprived of it. The world becomes desolate, and when we see people about in the streets, they are in a stupor. And so it goes, on and on—until sunset eventually comes, and our man has finally gotten his need of night, but has collapsed on the street in much-needed slumber.
It’s a simple film, done without dialogue, and unspooling in its absurdity carried only by its musical motif [a French ballad the filmmakers composed themselves] and the comic work of everyone involved. When the filmmakers collaborated on it in 2019, it was the culmination of years of filmmaking done piecemeal—acting work here, editing work there—until the duo of Alvarez and Alcala, friends since childhood, finally joined forces as a directing/editing/producing tandem. A Wakeful Sennight was the product of that first collaboration—but no one saw it as the prophecy it turned out to be: a showcase of Dumaguete in desolation, its people afflicted by a phenomena bigger than themselves and walking around like trapped rats. It was a “comedy” when it came out in late 2019, and virtually a “documentary” when reviewed in the light of 2020—and it demonstrated one sure thing for both filmmakers: no one really knows how the days will go, so they might as well do film.
But is Dumaguete a filmmaking hub? And did the pandemic affect it?
“Dumaguete is home,” says Mr. Alvarez. “I grew up in Piapi; Stan in Bantayan. Our late grandfathers [Rev. Proceso Udarbe and National Scientist Angel Alcala] were well-known personalities [who helped] put this city on the map.” That familial affinity assured a strong bond since they met in grade school at Silliman, and lasted even with almost divergent paths they took in college and right after. Both alumni of Silliman University, Mr. Alvarez graduated with a degree in public administration but currently works as a content editor for a digital marketing company. Mr. Alcala, meanwhile, studied medical technology and eventually went on to finish medical school at Silliman, and is now a resident physician at a local hospital [and recently got into a training program for pathology in a Cebu hospital].
Their lives are totally different, but the arts always had a strong pull on both of them. “I started out in my creative career as a theater actor and occasional songwriter,” Mr. Alvarez says. “I’ve also joined a number of workshops, [with] the Philippine Educational Theater Association and the Elements Singer-Songwriter Camp.” That is how most people in Dumaguete know him: as a reliable mainstay in many plays and musicals in campus, and as a musician who has recorded and performed with the Belltower Project. On the other hand, most people see Mr. Alcala as someone devoted to his medical studies and career—but what many do not know is that he has dabbled frequently in film simply because of his love for the medium. “My first major foray in the creative scene was in a film that my fraternity/sorority sister asked me to edit,” Mr. Alcala says, thinking back to Tigway, a short film by Maya Jajalla, which won Best Film in the 2015 Silliman Film Open or SFO. [The SFO started as Dumaguete Shorts, an exhibition of locally-made short films in 2007, marking it as the first film festival in Dumaguete, but twice changing its name as its concentration expanded and changed over the years: the 61 Short Film Festival in 2010 and finally the Silliman Film Open in 2014.] “I have no formal training in filmmaking,” Mr. Alcala continues, but jumped at the chance to edit a film anyway—and subsequently won the Best Editing award for Tigway in that year’s SFO.
Mr. Alcala is aware that Dumaguete actually has a heritage of filmmaking—even if nobody knows or acknowledges it anymore. He cites, for example, the National Artist for Cinema Eddie Romero as a major influence, a Dumaguete filmmaker who parlayed his creative writing passions as a high school senior at Silliman into a mentorship with the great Filipino director Gerardo de Leon, eventually cementing his own reputation as a maker of solid Filipino film epics [such as Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kaayo Ngayon and Aguila] and schlocky Hollywood B-movies [such as The Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Black Mama White Mama].
But there’s also the equally distinguished Dumaguete director and screenwriter Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, who penned the political tragedy The Moises Padilla Story [1961] and won a number of FAMAS Awards for his screenplays. And there’s also the fact that in the 1950s, at the height of the Golden Age of Visayan Cinema, a film company based in Dumaguete named Visayan Films—founded by Don Luis Arnaiz and Don Serafin Teves, whose family owned Park and Main, the two main movie theaters in Dumaguete for many decades—released a “musical extravaganza” titled Dumagsa in 1950, directed by a Cebuano director named Tura Rodriguez, and starring a popular Cebuano starlet named Rosita Fernandez. [Dumagsa was the story of a school teacher who falls in love with a hacendero. It had its premiere in 1950 in Park Theater and was a tremendous success, which led to its second offering, Leon Kilat, about the revolutionary hero hailing from Bacong. This was directed by Sat. A. Villarino. But after Leon Kilat’s release in 1952, the company no longer made any other movie, although other titles that Visayan Films was planning to do included another musical by Tura Rodriguez titled Miss Smiles, a society drama by F. Borromeo titled Karnabal, a musical by M.P. Velez titled Sa Kabukiran, a drama by G.C. Abdula titled Layawan, and an action drama by Mike Calumpang titled Bartender. The two films made are now considered lost films—possibly lost in the fire that engulfed Main Theater in the 1970s.]
But for the most part, except for actual filming done by Mr. Romero in his hometown—for The Passionate Strangers in 1968 and for Kamakalawa in 1981—Dumaguete has not really pursued an active filmmaking scene.
But the beginning of a real film culture—with movies made by locals, using local resources—began as a trickle, starting in that first Dumaguete Shorts exhibition in 2007—and soon there were animated films by Ramon Del Prado and Xteve Abanto, and documentary films by Carmen Del Prado and Anthony Gerard Odtohan, and short live action films by Jonah Lim, Mahogany Rae Bacon, Melissa Bernas Pal, Jo Simone Vale, Raymond Vincent Cutillar, Henzoly Alboroto, Jose Adrian Miraflor, Francis James Kho, and Carl Ivan Caballero, and the genuinely avant-garde curiosities by Razceljan Salvarita and Hersley-Ven Casero. [Mr. Salvarita’s I Am Patience, about a caterpillar making its way through a forest of leaves, was ultimately nominated in the best short film category of the 2013 Urian Awards.]
Mr. Miraflor’s Voldemort Must Die, an action/comedy short about love lost in the vein of Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino, won Best Film in the 2012 61 Film Festival—and signaled the start of a production company that he and his friends named DumbFights Productions, which would go on to release a number of short films over the years, including Jake Villegas on a Bridge with the Dancing Dragons, The House The Dead The Ugly, Ang Lansang ni Jake Villegas, and Ang Paghibalag sa Kalibunan—films that would more or less define the “Dumaguete short film” for many seasons in the regional film festival circuit as stories made with a cocky flair, always in the service of comedic action, and with a lot of fantastical elements, and edits, thrown in. [The House The Dead The Ugly, a story about a bunch of killers and gangsters who wind up in a mysterious house where they’re thrown for one violent loop, remains, for me, as their masterpiece.] DumbFights would gather an increasing number of collaborators since that first outing, including Von Colina, who would come to direct [and star] in most of their later films after Mr. Miraflor semi-retired from filmmaking due to health reasons, Alex Gascon [as cinematographer], Jetmore Banot [as actor and director], Louie Villegas [as actor], Mr. Alvarez [as actor], among many others—including Jomar Solania, Paul Benzi Florendo, and Ruel Joseph Tabada, who would also make significant directorial contributions to local film.
In 2021, DumbFights would release You, their take on the pandemic and the casual indifference of people towards impending danger by recasting the health crisis as a zombie apocalypse. That year, it was a finalist at the Lutas Film Festival, which also fielded Mr. Alvarez’s Best Mayo, starring Mr. Banot as a man in desperate search for a jar of mayonnaise to the point of madness, destroying his house in the process, and angering his wife. In a small role as Mayonnaise Girl in an Ad is Ara Mina Amor, also a film director [and occasional actress]. She would also have a film in competition that year at Lutas, a horror-adjacent story titled Masulob-on, a melancholic tone poem in stark black and white about depression and desperation and temptation. But Ms. Amor’s most pandemic-centered film is the comedy short Pisti Pandemic, made in 2022 for Eksena Cinema Quarantine, which follows a naïve young man who has just wisened up to the strictures [and dangers] of the lockdown and finds himself fighting zany battles to stock up on provisions with people panic-buying everything. [The funniest bit is the introduction to his yaya, played by an actor with a considerable beard—depicted to seem like a side-effect to the vaccine.]
A cursory observation would immediately pick up on the fact that these filmmakers constantly work with each other—and especially during the pandemic. In many ways, this collaborative spirit is the lifeblood of current Dumaguete filmmaking. Almost all of the filmmakers, especially those who started doing films in the early years of Lutas and the SFO, cross-pollinate their film productions with each other’s contributions, sometimes with these collaborations spilling into the storylines themselves. [Ms. Amor’s Finals, for example, include a cameo from the fighting gangsters of Miraflor’s The House The Dead The Ugly.] They act in each other films. They do sound design for some, and production design for others. Cinematography and editing are constantly on a round robin. For Mr. Alvarez and Mr. Alcala, this is the norm for current local filmmaking—and the smallness of Dumaguete makes it a necessity. “Dumaguete contributes to the growth of our artists,” Mr. Alvarez says. “I don’t mean this career-wise though, since there isn’t much of an industry here yet. But the city has this appeal that helps clear our thoughts and prepare ourselves to be inspired. The locals foster this [and] celebrate this, and the city itself grows from it.”
“The arts scene in Dumaguete is ever thriving,” Mr. Alcala says. “It’s easy to collaborate with different artists in the creation of cohesive art, and the city has actively endeavored to develop the scene through art exhibits, film contests, and music festivals.”
To which Mr. Alvarez adds: “There’s always something to do to help express ourselves and our backgrounds. And year after year, someone new joins in our circle. Someone young, hungry, and almost always willing to open up and collaborate.”
That openness for collaboration was what drove them to pair up in the first place in 2019. They both wanted to submit a film for Lutas—and then they brought in the Gonzales cousins [Gerick and Dhen Dart] to help out with the music and cinematography, and Renz Torres [who had made the D&D-themed short Primordial Witt] as production manager, and that was it. The collaboration, now known as Potlight Pictures, would go on to produce A Wakeful Sennight in 2019 and Best Mayo in 2021, pausing only in 2020 because of the pandemic lockdown. Their latest production, released in 2022, is Trash-Messiah, a fable about a man who finds a way to get rid of trash via a rip in the time/space continuum on his kitchen table—but to unexpected repercussions. It fits right in with their previous efforts—stories that are “dark, macabre, and odd,” that give one “an unnerving feeling that something is wrong,” where “symmetry and order [exist] amidst the chaos.”
“In developing films,” Mr. Alcala says, “I usually conjure a barebones concept and Andy [Alvarez] fills it up. Occasionally, it’s vice versa. The major challenge in the process is us—our conflicting ideologies—but we’ve never failed to arrive at a compromise, and the product is almost always magical with everything seemingly fitting in place.”
Interestingly enough, they found the pandemic to be a minor hiccup in their film productions. “Shooting during the pandemic wasn’t too foreign to us,” Mr. Alvarez admits. “We already work with a skeletal team. It was just the matter of making sure we were all doing things with health and safety protocols in mind. It helped that Stan’s a doctor as well. It certainly was meaningful to me, at least, that we got to work again on a film even with all the restrictions. I loved getting out of the house with more purpose.” To which Mr. Alcala adds: “If anything, [the pandemic only] added to our process. Limitations [somehow] provoke creativity for us.” Part of that provocation to creativity was the fact that most of the online film festivals they joined during the pandemic’s peak had guidelines requiring them to add themes centering on the pandemic lockdown into their storylines, “so that was definitely a factor we had to consider during pre-productions,” Mr. Alvarez adds.
There were in fact a number of film festivals local filmmakers gravitated to during the pandemic, even if only online, chief among them Foundation University’s Lutas Film Festival, which was established in 2014 and bills itself as “the Negros Oriental film festival,” and has since gone beyond annual screenings to also cater to lectures, workshops, and mentoring sessions on film production, as well as outright grant-giving to help local filmmakers in realizing their film projects.
In September 2020, with the pandemic still raging, Lutas was left with no choice but to modify its programming to host a Facebook screening of “The Best of Lutas,” featuring previous winners of the festival, including the late Mark Lifana’s Bugas [2016], Geraldine Acibron’s Tubod [2017], Mr. Lifana’s Abag [2018], and Mr. Alvarez’s A Wakeful Sennight [2019], and selections from Komedya, including Mr. Colina’s Ang Lansang ni Jake Villegas, Mr. Florendo and Mr. Banot’s Ang Paghibalag sa Kalibunan, Mr. Banot’s Hobo Ramon, and Mr. Florendo’s Karlo. That year’s edition, sponsored by the Film Development Council of the Philippines and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, also included master classes on screenwriting with [soon-to-be National Artist for Cinema] Ricky Lee, and on “pursuing film in the time of pandemic” with Achinette Villamor [producer of Balangiga: Howling Wilderness and Ruined Heart]. It also included a film pitching competition—from which three winners emerged: Kent Cadungog’s Kuan, Puhon, Daniella Spontak’s Cotton Candy Dreams, and Von Colina’s Three sa Mountain, each of them granted a sum to realize their screenplays. Later that year, in October, Lutas would field Abag, Tubod, and A Wakeful Sennight to be part of the Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino, together with the Bacolod-based Sine Negrense Film Festival, which fielded Belle Loyola’s Dalit, Kurt Soberano’s Jameson, and Mark Raymund Garcia’s Buding: Ang Babaye nga Naglitaw.
By the following year, in 2021, Lutas participated in the 10th Annual Moviemov Italian Film Festival, and also in Cinema Rehiyon, fielding Mr. Tabada’s Pamilya, Mr. Lifana’s Tagbo, and Kaira Maureen Downard’s Daman as the Negros Oriental representatives. In November, Lutas returned to its competition format, and premiered the winning films of the previous year’s pitch competition, as well as the nine entries to the main competition—out of which emerged a new winner, Ella Louise Salomon’s Ang Bunga sa Tiyan ni Adam, a film about a gender-switched story of a pregnancy. Salomon’s tragicomedy—which features one of the best scenes of swearing in Binisaya ever captured on film—swept most of the awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography—leaving the Best Editing award to Mr. Alvarez’s Best Mayo. Salomon’s film also led the Negros Oriental roster in the 2022 Cinema Rehiyon, which also included Best Mayo, Cotton Candy Dreams, Kuan Puhon, Masulub-on, and Ramon Del Prado’s Why the World Needs Coral Reefs.
Later in 2022, Lutas finally returned to a physical festival, screening its new slate of competing films at CityMall Cinema Dumaguete. Among the finalists are Emmmanuel Noel T. Navales’ Habwa, Marco Simpao’s Kawat, Carina Simpao’s Taknaan, Fredrick Tan’s Ang Panagdagit sa Dakong Dagat, and Von Colina’s ITI E.T., and fielded a spread of new winners including a special jury prize for Daniella Spontak’s Serial Influencer, Best Cinematography for Chris Jan Vergara’s Makasasala, Best in Editing for Mary Joy Real’s Panganti, Best in Screenplay for Alfonso Adrian Cerna’s Taymsa, and Best Film for Pawlo Lasmarias’ Hatud. The previous year’s pitch winner—Mr. Alvarez’s Trash-Messiah—was also screened, and the new pitch winner announced: Ms. Amor’s forthcoming Sad Bananas. Lasmarias’ Hatud, which follows a young man who walks to school with his younger brother, only for the latter to discover that his older brother is harboring an unpleasant dilemma, would also win Best Director and Best Actor [for Lasmarias himself] at the Nabunturan Independent Film Exhibition in September 2022, and would be invited to several national and international film festivals.
. . .
Into this swirl of local filmmaking enters Edwin Dalisay Jr.—JR to most people who know him. Born and raised in Cubao, Quezon City, he was not exactly a stranger to Dumaguete. He would regularly visit his girlfriend Shyr Keene Aragones over the years, and gradually came to know many of the city’s creatives, if cursorily in the beginning. And whenever people asked about what he did, he would say he was trying to be a filmmaker, which was always the dream.
He recalls: “My parents worked abroad so I was raised by my grandmother and my older brothers. I was always hanging out with my brother, JC, who introduced me to many things, including heavy metal music, music videos—and film. I admired my brother because he was a superb graphic artist. So I chose to study Fine Arts and Design at the UST to become an artist like him. It was during our third year when we had a class in video production, and that became my first exposure to filmmaking. I fell in love with it and became obsessed with telling stories with the camera. Filmmaking became my passion. I would mostly spend my free time watching movies, music videos, and documentaries. I didn’t know where to begin at the time, and it seemed impossible for me to work in the film industry. Making films back then was expensive and we had little or no source for equipment. So after college, I worked as a web designer for a real estate company—a desperate move because it felt like the better recourse than be a bum. But at the back of my mind, I kept telling myself that, whatever it took, I was going to be a filmmaker someday. After working for about three years, I stumbled on a film school in Ortigas called Asia Pacific Film Institute, which wasn’t too expensive. I thought to myself, I can probably find a few sidelines to pay for my film education. I can work in the morning till afternoon and go to school in the evening.” So he quit his job at that time, found a few weird online jobs, and got himself to film school—a brave choice that would mirror a later, pandemic-related decision.
After film school, he found himself working for the U.S. Embassy as their multimedia specialist. The Embassy soon brought him to Siquijor for a documentation project of the Lazi Church. “It was the first time that I’ve heard of Dumaguete and Siquijor, to be honest,” he says. “On our first day, we went straight to Siquijor, so I didn’t think much of Dumaguete. But the moment I stepped foot in Siquijor, I fell in love with it. It was really the first time in my life that I was in a rural province.”
He spent four days in Siquijor, and then spent one night in Dumaguete before flying back to Manila—which was when, like the fates, he decided to go around the city alone, taking pictures with his camera. And then he met Shyr.
“I noticed her in a coffee shop and asked her for suggestions on what to do in and around Dumaguete,” he says. “It was already late in the afternoon, so I didn’t really see much and I didn’t really get to explore the place. But that evening, Shyr invited me to hang out with her friends—and getting to know them was a wonderful experience. Despite the fact that I was a stranger, they were really welcoming and friendly. I had a terrific time getting to know Shyr.”
So he kept returning to Dumaguete, to court Shyr while she showed him “the beauty of the city and how amazing Negros Oriental is.” He fell in love—with Shyr, and with Dumaguete. Slowly, he came to know the city’s artists. First, the musicians—he would watch live gigs in Hayahay and El Amigo. Then, the visual artists—he would meet Jana Jumalon, who would show him around the art scene in the city. Then, the literary artists—he would meet me, and immediately he knew I would ask him the question: “Are you related to Butch Dalisay?” [He doesn’t know.] He would meet more people over the years.
When he would return to Manila after his Dumaguete visits, he would get back to his Embassy job—and to his abiding desire to found his own production company. He called it DWNTWN Films, which he started with his best friend Phish, and his cousin Joel. “We often hung out on the rooftop where I was living and talked about movies, music, and whatever topic came to mind,” he remembers. “That’s all we ever did, hangout and talk about life and our passion for filmmaking. Then, since I had the equipment that I could borrow from work, I would sometimes find side hustles as a freelance camera operator on the weekends.” In 2013, a friend who had a band was in need of someone to shoot a live performance. “He asked us if we were up for it, and of course we were game!” Mr. Dalisay remembers. “That was our first project as a team, the thing that started it all. Even though we really didn’t know what we were doing, we were definitely having fun just experiencing the craft.”
They came up with the name DWNTWN Films, because the place where JR lived was a bit of a rough neighborhood. “When we’d be on the rooftop, we could see establishments in Cubao, including Araneta Coliseum, Gateway Mall, and other high-rise buildings,” he says. “We referred to that part of Cubao as ‘UPTOWN,’ and we would call our neighborhood, ‘DOWNTOWN.’ So that’s why we called ourselves DWNTWN Films. There’s just something about the name that feels so punk rock, so underground. That’s why I fell in love with it and stuck with it.” Their efforts paid off, and soon they were getting regular gigs.
And then the pandemic happened—and with that, a kind of spiritual crisis for Mr. Dalisay. “The pandemic made me realize that life is short and we can lose everything in a snap of a finger,” he remembers. He made a sudden choice that scared even him: “I decided to move to Dumaguete during the pandemic, because I wanted to wake up every day feeling happy.”
For him, Manila was becoming too chaotic and he was missing Shyr too much. The stress of the separation was killing him—and on a lark, he contacted the Dumaguete LGU and told them that he was a Local Stranded Individual [LSI], wondering if that gambit would make them give him a certificate to travel. And it worked!
Still, it was a challenge to make the move, because travel was almost an impossibility at the peak of the pandemic. His airline kept cancelling his flight—“I got cancelled five times!”—and his plan to make the move in April 2020 eventually became a reality only in August. Getting the requirements to travel was also a huge hindrance—with lines to get a doctor’s certificate that lasted six hours. “And because my flight kept getting cancelled, my doctor’s certificates also get expired—so I had to go back and line up again,” he remembers.
And yet, moving to Dumaguete still seemed to Mr. Dalisay to be a no-brainer of a decision—even if it was a considerable gamble: “I had no plans of what the hell I was going to do here as a career, but because I had experience in filmmaking, I was confident enough to just take a leap of faith. I knew that if I moved to Dumaguete City, I’d just figure it out and find clients that will need my service. I told myself that whatever happens, I know that I have enough talent and experience for me to survive. I mean, I was a punk ass kid back then with no money and no idea what I would do in life, but I survived that and put myself in the right path to pursue my passion.”
He remembers reading an article once where he stumbled on a line he could not forget: “It was something like, ‘Remember, after the black plague, came the Renaissance.’ That quote really inspired me, and moving to Dumaguete, hands down, was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life, seriously.”
And Mr. Dalisay feels that at this juncture of Dumaguete’s growth, the city will still be able to give him so many opportunities to fulfill a lifelong dream of being a filmmaker. “Here, I could write, direct, produce, shoot, edit, color grade, and even talk to clients,” he says. “For a full production, Shyr and I usually just work as a two-man crew. Of course it’s hard work but we’re really enjoying the experience.”
That faith in Dumaguete being able to give back to him has proven fruitful so far. Already, sometimes in collaboration with Paul Benzi Florendo’s Higantez Films, he has made several well-received pandemic-era videos for the Dumaguete City Tourism Office, including Kanus-a Man?, a video chronicling the hopes of local Dumaguetnon during the pandemic and encouraging them to get vaccinated against COVID-19, released in October 2021; Everyday Dumaguete, a video showcasing a Dumaguete slowly opening up, released in April 2022; and Celebrate Life in Dumaguete, a video showcasing the full beauty of the city emerging from the pandemic, released in August 2022. He has done videos for local businesses. And he has done many of the exhibit videos for the new MUGNA Gallery—a project that is close to his heart. One of these is a short documentary on the terra cotta art of Jana Jumalon, one of his first friends in Dumaguete.
“Lately, I’ve been doing short documentaries for artists here in Dumaguete,” he says. “I love projects like these because it’s really inspiring to get to know a person who’s passionate and creative. I believe that’s another appealing aspect of documentary filmmaking: once your subject begins to trust you and open up to you, you develop a strong bond with them.”
Mr. Dalisay dreams of doing narrative films eventually: “I wish to tell heartfelt stories through captivating moving pictures. I want to work with local talent, shoot in the neighborhood, and present stories about Dumaguete. Representing the magic and beauty that this city inspired in me. But, given my limited experience, I want to focus on making short films first. Then in the near future, I will eventually create full-length feature films here.”
Part of that plan is collaborating with Potlight Pictures—for whom he has already lensed Mr. Alvarez’s Trash-Messiah.
Mr. Dalisay moved to Dumaguete for love.
He plans to stay to capture the city fully on film—also for love.
7:00 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 10: Diving Into Dance
Picture a space—a narrow corridor, a hideaway, a cloister—and then picture a flood of darkness filling up the frame. With the striking strum of a melancholy guitar, a figure wakes up in it, drenched in a cascade of water. We get snippets of her body in the dim light, awash in rivulets of liquid, and then the dance begins. She senses the claustrophobic space she is in, and there is a pained acceptance of that on her face—and then she moves in and out of the shadows, her hands and her body in a flurry recalling Martha Graham or Alice Reyes, in an acknowledgement of the confinement and in rhythm to the plaintive guitar score.
The dance is sad, moving, and transfixing. The music is by Dumaguete composer Hendrix Paul Tubil, and the dancer/choreographer is Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco. The short piece is titled “Salom”—Ms. Limuaco’s winning entry to the 2020 edition of the WiFi Body choreography series for the solo/duet form by the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which for the first time since its inception held its competition online—an acknowledgment of the pandemic still raging like wildfire in the middle of 2020. WifiBody director Myra Beltran rethought the competition for that year, and decided that 2020’s virtual edition should focus on the domestic space or the lockdown site of their participants—thus “stretching the possibilities and visions of budding choreographers,” as well as “questioned the modes of production brought about by the pandemic.”
Ms. Limuaco’s piece, a thesis on swimming [literally and figuratively] against the odds, was a perfect capsule of lockdown anxiety, but in its magnificent execution provided a light into how dance could be done with all the restrictions—physical, psychological, and spiritual—that the pandemic demanded. In response to her piece, Nes Jardin, acclaimed dance artist, educator, and arts manager, observed: “The piece won for its solid composition, and powerful cinematic imagery based on a concept marked by simplicity and raw emotion. It is also outstanding for its effective and dramatic use of limited space and its innovative interplay of movements, light, and lilting guitar music.”
Innovation was truly the gamechanger for dance artists in Dumaguete during the lockdown. For many of them, the usual performances they had always relied on were suddenly taken away from them. Most of them also relied on teaching for their livelihood—and just like that, their schools were closed down, and the question that loomed for their survival became, “Can I teach dance through Zoom?”
The Kahayag Dance Company, for example, had always thrived as a folk dance group with constant invitations to participate in many festivals nationally and internationally. In Dumaguete, they spearheaded a community program for the City Tourism Office titled “Bansayaw,” which regularly showcased their repertoire through mini-concerts in public spaces around Dumaguete—particularly the Pantawan fronting Silliman Hall. For Arts Month in 2020, they performed for a series of “Bansayaw” presentations, culminating on February 23. And then the long wait for the lockdown to be over began—but if all one needed to dance was space, then virtual space was enough.
By April 29, on International Dance Day, they embraced the restrictions and put on a dance concert, with participants dancing Philippine folk dances in their bedrooms, in their salas, out in their gardens. They would do an encore by the next month, this time together with dancers from the MEV Dance Studio, Dance in Motion, Dauntless Brothers, Skip Dance Family, and others—dancing up a storm in a concert video in their lockdown spaces. Aiken Quipot, Kahayag’s creative director, would say: “This pandemic has greatly affected the dance industry and the artists who solely rely on dance as their means of living. It’s a big challenge to keep our passion burning as we find alternative ways to earn and get through each day at a time. Despite all of this, we continue to dance. We refuse to let this pandemic put out the flame, and we will not allow it to take away the only thing that keeps us happy, alive, and sane. Dance in your room, the backyard, the streets, wherever you want—because when this is all over, we will celebrate and dance together!”
They participated in KapitTinig in June, virtually, and celebrated their 16th anniversary in August with the no end to the pandemic in sight. A break from the virtual realm came in September, when the Dumaguete City Tourism Office decided to showcase Dumaguete culture and the arts in Paghimamat—joining other cultural groups at an empty Luce Auditorium in a videotaped performance to bolster the sagging spirits of Dumaguetnons. They launched videotaped concerts with better production values—such as the Pagliwaliw sa Lupang Hinirang in March 2021, out of the DIY confines of lockdown spaces into venues more attuned to artistic flourish.
But 2021 was also cocooning time, with many elements starting to fall into place behind the scenes—a permanent rehearsal and performance space is finally secured [which also served as venue for classes once lockdown restrictions relaxed] and a continuing alliance with other dance groups and artist collaborators is strengthened, paving the way for a fruitful return to form in 2022.
The Sidlakan Dance Company, meanwhile, had just returned to Dumaguete after a successful participation at the 2019 Horticultural Exposition at Beijing, China [dubbed as the Flower Festival of the World], which closed on October—basking in the flush of that international invitation. The group, led by artistic director Vic June Rich Nocete, would carry that excitement into their participation at Kisaw 2020, the National Arts Month celebration of Dumaguete—and then when the lockdown happened, there was nothing. There was some stirring by November, when the group was included in the Visayan line-up for Dance Xchange on Air 2020, a program by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts—appearing on Episode 11 of the video series. [They would appear again in the 2022 edition.] But by 2021, there was a restlessness to regroup, to take part in shows—which resulted in a video series they produced titled Suroy a tenth anniversary production that aimed to “travel” the various regions of the Philippines via the medium of folk dance. That undampened spirit paid off, and in January 2023, they were chosen to be the official Philippine delegate to the 19th Nova Prata International Folk Festival.
Its institutional foundation has always made the Silliman University Dance Troupe luckier than most dance groups—because for as long as Silliman University exists as an educational institution, SUDT will always be along for the ride as a vital part of the university’s cultural mandate. Led by choreographer Angelo Sayson, SUDT remained a reliable mainstay in many cultural programs put out by the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council, and just right before the pandemic lockdown, it participated in the 2020 edition of Musikapuluhan: Himig at Sayaw the annual cultural showcase of traditional music and dance at Silliman. A lull immediately followed the pronouncement of the pandemic—with SUDT finally surfacing when it took part in the virtual staging of the musical revue The Story of Dumpawa's Lullaby in September 2020, and then at Silliman Performs also performed online. They would participate in NCCA’s Dance Xchange 2021, and launched a virtual dance concert titled Salingtuod in February 2021. They also participated that month in Bailar Sin Arco, a concert featuring the Silliman University Orkestra Sin Arco and Kwerdas. By March, they also participated in CCP’s Tuloy Po Kayo—an online festival meant to encourage Filipino artists to continue to create during the pandemic. Throughout most of 2021, SUDT would also present assorted videos of their repertoire on their Facebook page, with student dancers in full Filipiniana regalia performing dances in various spaces on campus—culminating in a concert of Visayan folk dance and music, Bisayaw, in October, together with the Silliman University Rondalla, and representing the Philippines at the Sarawak International Festival of Music and Arts in November, together with the SU Orkestra Sin Arco. On February 2022, SUDT would up the ante by presenting a rigorously produced online dance concert titled Musika Mo, Sayaw Ko, with a repertoire inspired by Original Pilipino Music [OPM], and then, on the same month, took part in CCP’s Pasinaya, a showcase of various folk dances from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao featuring selected video productions from the 2021 Kalinga ng Sining [KNS] Subsistence Grants Program. This led to their participation in AirAsia Super App’s Fiesta Series in April. They would also perform in Cantate Domino, the 2022 edition of Silliman Performs in August. By November, they would return to a live performance at the Luce Auditorium with Babaylan, billed as their 60th dance show.
Negros Oriental State University’s Kabilin Dance Company, meanwhile, started 2020 in high spirits, with new members to invigorate the group and brandishing new official rehearsal shirts to bolster the vision of artistic director Stephen Labrador Intong. What differentiates KDC from their counterparts in Dumaguete is a repertoire consisting mostly of street/hiphop and contemporary dances, and when the lockdown hit, many KDC members hit TikTok to showcase their dance moves in that vein, often giving messages of hope and resilience through dance. They even opened a dance competition on online video platforms with a nod towards frontliners, and with the organizers recognizing that “dance [can be] used as [a medium of] communication between body and soul.” But TikTok could only do so much, and KDC would soon join other Dumaguete dance groups in participating in various online dance festivals, including NCCA’s Dance Xchange on Air in 2020, and Sayaw Pinoy Goes Virtual in 2021, usually performing “Inagta,” which had become the company’s signature folk dance—and all in the name of perseverance. As Intong explained then: “For the last two years, life has been tough and times are changing. But instead of looking at life hopelessly, let’s continue to give life and colors to our culture and the arts.” In May 2021, they presented a special dance performance titled “Bagani,” in tribute to frontliners during the pandemic. By June, they would host a series of video dance performances in tribute to Jose Rizal, choreographed by various members of the troupe., and in July they would organize a competition, Kabilin Dance Company Got Talent—Goes Virtual, over Google Meets. The group would also open auditions for people with disabilities [PWD], and one of their members would go on to found the Dauin Dance Artists group.
Prime Machine perhaps Dumaguete’s most well-known modern dance group [primarily due to an appearance in ABS-CBN’s Showtime in 2011], had always been a main draw in many local events—such as cultural shows in fiesta, beauty pageants, school presentations, and the like—and 2019 had ended with their slate full of the usual invitations, including a stint for Pasko sa Kapitolyo for the Negros Oriental Provincial Government. There would be more of the same at the beginning of 2020—but by the time lockdown hit, most of the members would spend the long beginning stretch of the pandemic invading TikTok, foremost among them Ralph Allen Piñero, Teamoy Caluscusan, Rock Vincent Viente, and Jay Lou Rapana Merced. [Prime Machine would only officially launch itself on Tiktok in March 2021.] Some dance gigs would trickle in, like school events such as the Silliman University Senior High School Online Acquaintance Concert in September 2020, with Prime Machine sharing the virtual stage with other modern dance groups such as Corps D’Elite and The Lifestyle. By 2021, they went for something a little more polished: dancing in well-polished music videos, such as “The PUNKdemic,” which they launched in Hayahay in February 2021.
The dance video, with the group dancing to Suzi Wu’s “Eat Them Apple” in a routine choreographed by Don Mar Teves, is a full-scale production perhaps never before seen among Dumaguete dance crews, made with assist from the Dumaguete City Tourism Office. The ambition paid off in a handsome production that begins ominously with a stranger walking the lockdown-ravaged Dumaguete downtown at midnight, and then witnessing a facemask-wearing gang converging to do their dance moves. The result was electrifying; it was also a much-needed jolt in the doldrums of the pandemic. When they posted the video on social media, it went viral. That video led to commissions with the group doing video dances for private parties and other bookings, or doing backup dancing for local musicians such as Chuckoy Vicuña, who would release his “Hilas” music video on July 2021. There were competitions to join, too—not always successfully: that October, they signed up to join the Buglasan Festival Modern Dance Competition [Open Category], but had to back out when one member contracted COVID-19. They would be a mainstay in city-sponsored cultural events such as the Tayada sa Pantawan, and they kept busy with bookings for various gigs, including dancing for an election-related music video for politicians running for various offices in Bacong town and others, or dancing for openings of business establishments like Miniso. On 26 June 2022, Prime Machine would celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Prime Machine, of course, is not the only dance crew in Dumaguete. There are a host of others, many of them priming themselves during the pandemic. For many years they regularly converged to compete in the annual Negros Best Dance Crew competition, which bills itself as “the biggest dance competition of its kind around Negros Island.” But the sixth edition of the competition, slated on October 2020, had to be cancelled “due to a rise of COVID-19 cases in Negros Oriental,” per the statement released by organizers, maintaining that “it is our best interest to prioritize the safety of the community.” Two years later, in 2022, they announced their return, scheduling auditions for both Negros provinces in November—and eventually announcing the following participating dance crews: AOG6100, Super Villains Crew, Skip Dance Family, Chicana, Galaxy Dance Tribe, Prime Machine, The Majesty, BNT Just Vibe, Coco Brandy, Quicksound, The Lifestyle, Menace Dance Crew, Nice One Family, Dauntless Brotherz, SD6 Explosion, Royalty, D-Acceptance, Assassin Dance Family, and Classical Dance Crew—with the first thirteen qualifying for the finals, slated on 28 January 2023 at the Macias Sports Complex. Skip Dance Family, a dance crew founded in 2007 in Dumaguete by Jeffrey Regalado, emerged as the champion.
Skip Dance Family has built a steady fandom before the pandemic by winning many dance crew competitions, and posting dance videos regularly on their Facebook and Instagram pages and YouTube channel, often to songs by local groups like Daro Boyz. They’re savvy online, and produce even their own merchandise [such as print shirts]—and their 2020 began with them expanding to include more members, and had spent January in team-building efforts. When the pandemic hit, they would ramp up the video productions more, like many other local crews—but with a regularity that’s daunting, sometimes 3 to 4 videos a month, in the middle of a lockdown. Most of these would be simple, no-frills dance videos, with the crew dancing on the street and other public places, but they racked up considerable likes and shares, an increasing number of admirers with each new video posted. They would do this for the rest of 2020, culminating in their joining of Domination PH Reload, a nationwide dance competition held online, where they ranked #7 out of 37 dance crews participating. They would do more of the same in 2021, joining online dance competitions when they could, but also making time for community outreach programs. When they would prepare for upcoming competitions—such as the HappyFive DigiTv Hataw Dance Competition and World Supremacy Battle—they would post videos of their progress online, gaining more fans. They would place second runner-up at the HappyFive contest in June 2021, their first pandemic-era award. They would also place the same at the cell division for World Supremacy Battle in August 2021. There will be other competitions, and more placements, including championships—and growth: they would form NEOS, an all-boys hiphop group, and Chicana, an all-girls hiphop group, during the pandemic. In 2022, they would dominate several categories of the World Supremacy Battle Visayas-Mindanao qualifier in Cebu, and started joining competitions in other cities in the country, winning second place in the MassKara Hiphop Challenge in Bacolod in October. When they won the sixth edition of Negros Best Dance Crew, it was like a coming home—they were also the champion in 2018, in the competition’s fourth edition. With the successful return of the Negros Best Dance Crew competition in 2022 also comes the hope that street/crew dancing has weathered the worst of the pandemic, and is back.
It is with such events that we gauge a return to normalcy. In 27 November 2022, the Limuaco-Gaston Dance in Motion Company, the Dumaguete City DanceSport Team, Kahayag Dance Company, MEV Dance Company, Kabilin Dance Company, Sidlakan Dance Company, and the Silliman University Dance Troupe came together at the Pantawan for a showcase of Dumaguete dance titled Hiusang Sayaw, an unprecedented—and live—performance spearheaded by the Dumaguete City Tourism Office. The pandemic was still raging in the world, but the dancing had returned.
* * *
One specific dance showcase borne out of the pandemic is Lapyahan, an occasional performance exhibition spearheaded by the Dance in Motion Company of the Limuaco-Gaston Dance Studio, sometimes in collaboration with Kahayag Dance Troupe. First staged on 27 February 2022, it astounds with the fullness of its conception: a small-scale show by a handful of dancers, often in limited space with limited capacity for audience members who are invited to be in intimate reach with the performers, and allowed to range around the venue, sometimes following the lead of the dancers as they take the audiences to witness specific numbers from one spot in the venue to another. What’s more, each show is virtually performed on the fly, with the dancers armed only with broad strokes of dance moves, some choreographed movements, and the general knowledge of what music will be playing. In one series in 2022, specifically titled State of Limbo, three performances choreographed by Ian Nick Gelladuga Tiba, Jonee Rodriguez Jibes, and Dylzaree Recentes [under the artistic direction of Cheenee Limuaco] were announced—August 27, September 3, and September 10 at their permanent studio at the Catarata Compound along Calle San Jose; but avid audience members would soon notice that it was best to see all shows, because each one was vastly different from the one that came before. That uniqueness was by design—a concept Ms. Limuaco insisted on, bearing in mind the unexpected flows she had to bear to make her dance studio stay afloat in the worst of the pandemic months.
Cheenee Limuaco hails from Bacolod, Negros Occidental—but her parents were loyal Silliman University alumni, which meant going to school in Dumaguete. She had spent her formative years studying at St. Scholastica Academy in Bacolod until high school, and she found herself in Dumaguete pursuing a nursing degree. It was what was considered practical—something her parents insisted on—although Ms. Limuaco knew her heart was not in it. She loved dance. She had studied ballet at the Lydia M. Gaston School of Dance from the age of six, falling in love with it because of how “princessy” ballet was. “I loved the costumes, I loved how I was taught to hold my head up high. I loved the whole package, the ballet experience,” she tells me. The tuition was expensive, but her lola paid for it, and when she finally couldn’t, the school director herself, Lydia Gaston, stepped in. “She saw potential in me,” Ms. Limuaco said, “and she offered me a scholarship.” The intense training did not start until she was in first year high school. She loved the challenge. Remarkably, Ms. Gaston also began training her to teach dance—how to teach it, and what to look for in a ballet student.
She gravitated towards dancing at Silliman, joining the Kahayag Dance Company [which was the new name for the Silliman University Dance Troupe, before Kahayag members left the corps and formed an independent dance company bearing that name in 2013]. Kahayag’s then artistic director, Ronnie Mirabuena, approached her and asked her if she could teach ballet since he knew she had been teaching it in Bacolod. This was in 2006. She agreed. She had fifteen dancers to teach, and persevered with her nursing studies—two extremes that were clashing in her life. After three years, she was sent back to Bacolod, and was given an ultimatum by her parents: if she wanted to dance, she had to come back to Bacolod, where you could continue her ballet training, and study nursing at the same time. She needed to finish her degree and pass the nursing board—and only then could she do whatever she wanted. So agreed, simply because she wanted to continue dancing.
But there was a snag: her heart was in Dumaguete.
“I love Dumaguete,” Ms. Limuaco says. “When I came here for college, I fell in love right away, and I did not want to go home to Bacolod, even during summer vacations. It was just so chill, so me—wearing just shorts and a shirt and a pair of tsinelas. The people here are really more gentle and loving, especially with children. This has been my experience. It’s the vibe that made me want to stay here in Dumaguete.”
As soon as she finished her studies in Bacolod, she ran right back to Dumaguete, and get right into dancing. She found herself teaching ballet for the College of Performing and Visual Arts at Silliman, the ballet studio at the Luce Auditorium her base. But she maintained a dream of founding her own school: “I kept telling myself that with my own company, I would work it in a way that would make Dumaguete truly a center of dance. Manila is already crowded, and many of its dance artists are looking for other places to do their art in. Dumaguete can be that place. And we have many resources here. And it is possible that the dance scene here will really bloom.”
In 2019, she made a choice to quit Silliman University, inching her way to a dream of having her own company. She remembers the instance of conception: “I had a friend who’s from Likha PH, he’s from Iloilo. One time we were talking where I shared that I wanted to set up my own studio because I had so many ideas. They were overflowing. And I wanted to be able to do them na, because I felt I was ready. He asked me: what is it that I wanted to do? What is it that I wanted my studio to accomplish besides just teaching dance steps? And I said that I wanted my prospective students to discover and understand that in every movement that we do we can convert that to dance. Hence, Dance in Motion.”
That conversation propelled her to take concrete steps towards her dream, trepidation aside. She named her studio Limuaco-Gaston Dance Studio, “Gaston” being the family name of her business partner, the son of her mentor Lydia Gaston.
“I was still with Silliman at that time, but I was already looking for a studio,” she says. “I felt like I had to have my own place because I had all these ideas, and I needed to let them out. Or else I was going to explode. And then I saw a sign for a space rental near UCPB [along Real Street, fronting City Burger] and just for a lark, I called the number. And someone answered, and told me he was ready to meet me in five minutes. And just like that, I got a tour of the place—and things just flowed: the tour of the place, the rental agreement, the contract signing.”
The way things happened fast scared her, but she was determined to follow through. “I also asked for things I needed for a workable dance studio, and the owner agreed to everything I wanted,” she says. “And I thought: is this a sign? I couldn’t say ‘no’ anymore. Financially, I saved up a little for this eventuality. But it still remained a challenge—but my partner was very supportive.”
Dwight Rodrigaso, another mentor, also gave her some useful advise because he saw she was overflowing with too many ideas. “You can’t hold it in,” Ms. Limuaco remembers. “You have to share it. If you don’t share it, it will just die. And he really pushed me to open a studio.”
When the studio opened, she was overwhelmed. She was soon overseeing sixty students, so her recourse was just to train, and then to go into competition.
“This was my initial goal when I opened the studio. But then the pandemic happened,” she says.
The pandemic realigned things for her—and Ms. Limuaco realized life was far too short to just keep training people for competitions. “I lost the sense of fun,” she says. And so the pandemic halting everything around her became a kind of a blessing. “I realized how much I was missing when I was so much into just training. I realized the kids would learn more if they had fun. So I had to reset the program. I made another syllabus that would encourage kids to dance and to move, but also to have fun. I knew they would learn better that way. And so we began doing unconventional classes. Sometimes, we use tambourines in class, for example. Classes became memorable. We’re still working on this, but it has been really nice to see the bright faces of my kids.”
But the realities of the pandemic immediately bared its fangs. She had signed a 5-year lease with her first studio, but operations in that venue did not even reach a year because of the lockdown. “All the investments I made were suddenly gone,” Ms. Limuaco says. “I went into depression at that time. Why was this happening to me? Why did I invest in this? But I couldn’t see the full impact of the pandemic yet. We were still renting, but we couldn’t use the space because of the pandemic restrictions—so we had no choice but to close up. It was heartbreaking.”
She ended her contract in December 2020, and then went into depression mode for a few months.
But by March 2021, an unlikely savior came in the form of sound and light designer Jerry Angelo Z. Catarata. “He came to me,” Ms. Limuaco says, “and he was offering me a space—a garage in their family compound in Taclobo which he was trying to convert into a studio. He asked if I could rent the space out—and I cried. I knew it was God-sent.”
Slowly, they made plans for the space—and thought that aside from it becoming a venue for training and rehearsals, they could also use it as a space for public performances. The venue was the spark that started the new Dance in Motion Company. “The pandemic took out a lot,”she says in hindsight, “but it also paved the way for a lot.”
With the Lapyahan series, she has found a new way to connect with people through dance. “It was incredible. Not only were the audience members crying, so were the performers. When I look back to that, I still get teary-eyed. It was our first performance during the pandemic. While we continued havng classes during the pandemic, it came to a point where I began asking myself: What am I doing? What is this for? But because of the discipline that we learned, we just told ourselves: just keep on training, chill lang. But then, when we started preparing for Lapyahan, it felt like we had a purpose again. The studio felt alive again. It was like we were asleep during the pandemic, more or less, but it was really hard to find purpose. But with Lapyahan, we felt like our heart was jumpstarted: this is performance. This is live work. It really was memorable for us, the performers. And it felt good to get people’s feedback.”
The Dance in Motion Company is still in its infancy, of course—but Ms. Limuaco envisions it as a group of artists they can train for the international stage, whether a competition or performance or workshops. “We would like to show the people of Dumaguete that there is a future in dance, because we want to counter the long-held notion that there is no future in it, no career in it. But there is,” she insists. “We want to train dancers so that when they’re ready, they can move on to audition for international companies, for Broadway, for cruise ships, and others. At the same time, we want Dumaguete to be known as a hub for budding dance artists. Who knows, we can soon get young artists from Mindanao, from the rest of the Visayas, even from Luzon to come here and train. Who knows?”
Her dreams for the studio and for the company excite her. “I knew what I had to do: the dance school first, for the training, and then the dance company next,” she says. “Then we can create shows with a regular season, and I want to reach a point that when visitors come to Dumaguete, they can expect shows like this, which they can watch as part of their travel itinerary. And for the locals as well.”
What a journey it has been for Cheenee Limuaco in the pandemic years.
In a way, her WifiBody piece, “Salom,” is actually her story of what she had gone through because of the pandemic: “I felt like I lost everything. I lost my studio lease. But a friend came around, offering another space. And I had a choice: to stay floating in that space where I was, or to dive once more into a new chapter, a new adventure, a new place. I chose to dive. To ‘salom.’ It was my dance testimony. It bore witness to what the studio was going through because of the pandemic. It was a good decision nga ni salom ko. The studio is doing well now. We finally have face-to-face classes. We have programs once again. We have auditions for the dance company.”
3:58 PM |
Ardor for Arbour
