Plenary Presentation. Towards Inter-Asian Theatre Studies Conference: Modernity, Historical Conditions, and Changing Ways of Seeing. National Sen Yut-Sen University

ABSTRACT. Staged for Women’s Month in the Philippines, directors José Estrella, Issa Lopez, and Mark Dalacat collaborated with playwrights Rodolfo Vera and Maynard Manansala to bring the children’s story How Rosang Taba Won the Race to a theatrical audience via Kung Paano Nanalo ng Karera si Rosang Taba (Rosang Taba) at the Main Stage of the University Theater. In the play, the audience is invited to witness two worlds: the present, set in a restaurant ‘Mama Rosa,’ popular for its singing cooks and waiters; and the past, recalled by the singing cooks and servers every day through a musical extravaganza. The extravaganza follows Rosa, a citizen of the imagined Lupang Hinirang and a criada (housemaid) in a mansion of an Ispancialo family whose patriarch is the Governor-General of Lupang Hinirang. Rosa is also a beloved daughter of an elderly Katao couple who used to tell her tales of the divine Lakambini, who protects the lands of Hinirang and its people. The presentation explores the relationship among theater, mythmaking, and cultural memory. In the context of historiography, mythmaking is often perceived as an overflow because of its hyperbolic nature and its potential for disinformation. In the case of the play, the overflow is argued to be necessary. Rosang Taba’s overflow is a strategy of decolonization via strategic essentialism, the process by which marginalized communities assert an essentialized identity against others and unite for political reasons. In the end, Rosang Taba is presented as an allegorical representation of the past that affects the present and is projected toward the future: an aspiration for a better community, tied by a conception / an imagination of a united people based on shared ancestry and history.