Abstract:

In this essay, Tiatco and Javier critically annotate and document Jose Estrella’s important works, making her an important figure in contemporary Philippine performance practice. Tiatco and Javier employ performative writing strategies to outline and explore Estrella’s performance works. Tiatco and Javier provide a glimpse of Estrella’s creative mind by making her “talk” about her works, particularly her dramaturgical purviews (devise, themes, and directorial principles). This way, Estrella becomes a co-author of the essay and not just the subject. The essay also provides a reflexive narration, embodied language, and sensory details of Estrella’s work to evoke the lived experience of her productions. As detailed in the piece, Estrella's works feature the precarity of human life and see the individual’s vulnerability as a condition of the contemporary world. Another important feature of her theatre is the presentation and figuration of the stranger – the peculiar, the different, the other. The essay presents such a claim by illustrating the performative experiences of encountering Estrella's theatre works. The goal of the essay is to challenge traditional modes of documentation and offer an alternative way of engaging and representing performance events. As the essay features, the use of performative writing has blurred the boundaries between theory-driven analysis and practice, incorporating creative and experimental elements into scholarly discourse. It also foregrounds the embodied and affective dimensions of performances (i.e., the theatres of José Estrella), which may be overlooked in more conventional academic writing.

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