The Ati-Atihan is a Philippine festival held every January in Kalibo, Aklan province on Panay Island, in honor of the town’s patron saint, the Santo Niño (The Child Jesus) and, at the same time, a commemoration of the original settlers of the island, the dark-skinned Atis. The festival is believed to predate Hispanic colonialism. However, Spanish missionaries gradually added Christian meanings to it. The festival’s origin is also linked to the epic Maragtas, which tells the story of Ten Bornean Datus (chieftains) led by Datu Puti, who fled Borneo in the thirteenth century and landed on the island of Panay. The Borneans purchased the island from the Ati people. Feasting and festivities followed soon after the transaction, including a traditional Ati dance, which was mimicked by the Borneans as an act of appreciation. Today, the festival consists of religious processions and street dancing, showcasing groups and individuals wearing colorful and elaborate costumes and marching drummers. The street dancing, sadsad, is improvised where the foot is momentarily dragged along the ground in tune with the drummers’ beat. The essay interrogates the Ati-atihan Festival through its three components—a dance-drama called Maragtas it Panay (The Barter of Panay), the sadsad, and the cultural dance competition. I argued that religion (Catholicism), cultural history (the Maragtas), and the series of performances during the weeklong merry-making complicate the festival’s ontology. Entangling these aspects, the festival is explored as a celebration and, at the same time, a repulsion of the foreign (colonial disposition), which leads toward an understanding of the festival as a concatenation of entanglements: devotion and entertainment, utopia and nostalgia, and history and mythmaking. In the end, the Ati-atihan invokes a communal identity, which may be asserted as a recuperation of a pre-contact collective identity that embodies a proposition signifying how the body remembers what the archives failed to record.

This article aims to explore how the staging of Papet Pasyon, a children’s play by Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, a Philippine National Artist, impart and continues to communicate to the local younger audience an understanding of culture and an appreciation of the art of puppetry. This is then followed by the conceptualization of the actual staging of the play vis-à-vis her vision of a children’s theatre. Afterward, Papet Pasyon is asserted as a pedagogy for younger audiences. Results of the study show (1) how the pre-show conversation prepares the audience for the performance and how it provides an understanding of Filipino cultural traditions and an appreciation of the art of puppetry; (2) how the performance serves as a venue for experiential learning; (3) how the art of puppetry challenges one’s imagination in manipulating the puppet (in the case of the puppeteer) and in creating meanings from what they hear and see onstage (in the case of the audience); (4) cooperation and integration are made evident by the interactions between the puppet and the puppeteer and the puppet and puppeteer with the audience; and (5) that although puppetry is foreign to the audience, they have expressed appreciation of the art form by repeatedly watching the performance through the years.

A contraction of two words: monologue and vlog, the monoVlog is a hybrid performance genre developed during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the monoVlog is similar to vlogging and to the performance of a monologue, the monoVlog differs from vlogging because a vlog has not always been live. Several vloggers produce content by recording themselves prior to its online premiere. On the other hand, the monoVlog has a shorter duration compared to most monologues performed on stage. This article is an interview-essay regarding the monoVlog. The aim of the paper is to document the form and to produce a preliminary speculation regarding the future direction of the form. At the same time, it is intended to transfer the ideas of Layeta Bucoy, the figure behind the performance form, to academic writing. Finally, the paper aims to include the monoVlog in the archive of performance practices of the Philippines. The archiving of the form is intended for the future generation of performance artists and scholars and for them to understand that despite crisis such as the Covid-19, the resiliency and creativity of the Filipino artists continue to persist. The final section of the article is the play JonaLive, two short monoVlogs combined as a one-act play by Bucoy. An example is provided to understand the dramatic aspect of the form and at the same time, its vlog aspect.

The five essays in this chapter survey well-known and lesser-known cities around the world where musical theatre is produced: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; New York City, USA; London, UK; Lagos, Nigeria; and Manila, the Philippines. Each one reflects on different historical moments, from the nineteenth century through to the twenty first century, and on particular practitioners who contributed a range of innovations to musical theatre. Alex Bádue considers the localization and assimilation processes that have combined European, US American, and Brazilian cultures in Rio de Janeiro’s musical theatre practice. Jennifer C. H. J. Wilson uses impresario Tony Pastor’s career to explore how musical theatre in nineteenth-century New York City circulated and responded to the city’s working-class immigrant population. Laura Milburn similarly takes an impresario, producer Charles B. Cochran, and unpacks his collaborative work in twentieth-century London with both British and American songwriters. Leesi Patrick privileges a third producer, Bolanle Austen-Peters, and highlights BAP’s pioneering work in developing musical theatre as a viable entertainment industry in Lagos. Sir Anril P. Tiatco examines musical theatre entanglements in Manila to better understand the processes of returning, rewriting, and repeating that define its industry.

On 16 March 2020, then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte imposed the Enhanced Community Quarantine putting the main island of Luzon – where Manila, the National Capital Region, is located – on a total lockdown to protect the spread of COVID-19. The lockdown restricted mobility, social gatherings were prohibited, and everyone was mandated to stay inside their homes. Moreover, there was a temporary closure of what were considered as non-essential establishments, including religious institutions. Being a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, religious rituals and festivals were heavily affected by the lockdown. Many of its ritualistic and festive performances involve human contact, which serves as the faithful’s direct and intimate relationship to the heavens. This essay interrogates how cultural festivals in the Philippines, mostly organised by the Church, adapted to the global health crisis. It reflects how the adaptations challenged and recontextualised the understanding of the live vis-à-vis the context of the digital or the virtual. Finally, a preliminary speculation on the future of the religious festivals in the Philippines is provided as a concluding reflection.

The essay interrogates how the theatre is used to affirm and to problematize the construction of historical narrative and political discourse, specifically the creation of public assembly, counter- narrative and artistic activism. Through  the performance of the Filipino play Nana Rosa, it is argued that the theatre has a potential to transform personal testimonies into a radical assembly by invoking a community, whose members possess a social responsibility to  recognize the precarity of each other. It also inquires the necessity of inserting scenarios in the play even if these are not officially recognized as official historical encounters. The insertion is proposed to be an artistic mode of  countering the dominant narrative (i.e. Japan’s denial of the sexual abuses during the Pacific War). Finally, it investigates the relationship of the play and the local theatre genre drama simbolico, a subversive and highly political  Philippine melodrama during the early 20th century. Looking at the costumes, the play is a political demonstration, protesting colonial experience and oppressive narrative. In the end, through the transformation of the assembly, the  creation of the counter-narrative and the subtle revival of the drama simbolico, Nana Rosa is asserted as an example of artistic activism, featuring resistances and subversions.

The documentary playscript The Intramuros Project is based on ethnographic materials (i.e. transcripts of interviews and storytelling) collected and annotated between March and September 2019 from different stakeholders of Intramuros or Old Manila. These include security guards, ice cream vendors, informal settlers, on-the-job-trainees, padyak drivers, kalesa drivers, and government workers. The documentary performance manuscript also drew from other existing documentary materials such as the Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, news reports about Intramuros, and other resources written about the walled city of Manila. The playscript was developed and workshopped using moment work, a devising technique introduced by the Tectonic Theater Project where devisors and dramaturgs are invited to think of potential staging devices on different scenes. Generally, the documentary piece is an attempt to problematize the concept of heritage using Intramuros as a starting point. In this paper, the playscript developed is explained through the dramaturgical notes. In the end, it is asserted that creative processes of devising and dramaturgy also contribute to cultural studies discourse.

The Festival of Our Lady of Peñafrancia is celebrated on a Sunday after the octave of 8 September. Housed at the Peñafrancia Basilica Minore, the image of the Peñafrancia is considered the patroness of the entire Philippine region of Bicol. In the essay, the Peñafrancia is described as a theatricalised devotion where devotees are transformed into a frenzied ensemble that normalises masculinity as a privileged norm. However, digging deeper into the festival’s peculiarity, the normalisation of masculinity is only incidental because the gendering, in fact, idealises and celebrates a figure of a woman. The idealisation and celebration of the woman-figure is asserted to have a precolonial root. In the end, it is argued that the Peñafrancia is a manifestation of a cultural community in which the pre-colonial lifeways of its members are recuperated through expressive bodily movements. At the same time, the legacy of Hispanic Catholicism is decolonised through rearticulating an indigenous past.

This essay is a descriptive narrative of my visit in Chavayan in August 2016. The trip was originally intended to observe the cultural performance palo-palo for a research project funded by the University of the Philippines through the Emerging Interdisciplinary Research Program. The palo-palo is loosely defined as a war dance mimicking the arm struggles of the Muslims and the Christians (Tiatco, Javier, and Landicho 2018). It is often performed during the celebration of the village pista (fiesta), “a complex phenomenon, thought of as solemn yet at the same time secular; a festivity where neither the state nor the Church is in the ultimate position of authority; a parade of holiness; and a procession of spectacle” (Tiatco 2016, 130). During my visit, the Chavayan fiesta provided an interesting performative encounter. According to Josephine Habana, an informant and a cultural worker, the celebration has been in existence since the time of their ninuno (first or older generation of ancestors). He mentioned that their activities are mere repetitions of what the locals have been performing since probably around the late 1800s. This narrative is a preliminary and expository account of the Chavayan fiesta which I intend to reflect upon sooner via the locus of iteration.

On the occasion of the 2017 National Arts Month in the Philippines, José Estrella directed Faust, a contemporary Philippine adaptation written by Rody Vera. This chapter looks at Faust as an allegory of the current Philippine political landscape. Specifically, it traces how the journey of Faust in search of the most ideal and perfect knowledge parallels the contemporary political affairs in the Philippines. The chapter reads the characters of Faust, Mephistopheles/Mephisto, Gretchen and the mangkukulam (witch) as relatable figures to Filipino audience, especially since they are presented as reminders that in an era of what many have identified as post-truth, someone will always emerge to tell the real story.

 

Cultural performance first appeared in the language of the academic community when Milton Singer published his book When Great Tradition Modernizes (1972), in which he proposed cultural performance as a unit of observation in an anthropological inquiry. Since then, cultural performance has become a useful tool to provide a frame for the understanding of the self, society and culture. This essay reflects on the concept of cultural performance in a preliminary attempt to historicize and to contextualize it using Philippine culture as a starting point. The first part is a descriptive illustration on how the term evolved from being a social scientif ic concept to an important subject in the humanities, particularly in the fields of theatre and performance studies. Included in this section is a proposal based on reflections by anthropologists, folklorists and performance scholars for a model illustrating some identifiable markers that signify an activity as a cultural performance. The second part is a paradigmatic schematization of the specifics of how cultural performance may be understood in the context of the Philippines. Using the phenomena of panata, pagtitipon and pagdiriwang, this paper argues that Philippine cultural performances are artistic communications in small groups performed publicly as a community gathering, even if the intentions of many performers are personal. The preliminary arguments found in this essay are based mostly on sporadic field notes in various locales in the archipelago.

Research has shown that heritage is a contested concept which not only creates unnecessary binaries but also perpetuates essentialized First World imagery of Asian countries. To assist in its reframing, this paper proposes critical ethnography. It is argued that through it, a more nuanced and community-based understanding of cultural heritage can be developed, thus allowing the articulation of modalities of cultural heritage and the formation of alternative imaginaries. To develop this point, the essay problematizes the heritage concept, examines how governing policies and tourism frameworks define cultural heritage vis-àvis its use in the tourism industry, and discusses the theoretical sources and intellectual legacy of critical ethnography. Cases from Batanes and Marinduque provinces, the Philippines, are reviewed to serve as background. With critical ethnography as a strategic method, the essay suggests that the semiotics of heritage tourism can be broadened and possibilities for social change in Asian tourism and hospitality established.

This chapter presents the genealogy of protest performances on the Philippine stage and proposes the revolutionary rhetoric of creating an assembly is transformed into an active protestation in the process. This genealogy has created a radical figure of solidarity between the performers and the audience members by renewing a sense of community through dissent against forces of oppression. This community is forged inside the auditorium with artists commonly hoping for it to be extended outside the theatre. In the formation of a community, the stage has invited the audience into transcendence in the rehearsal of social responsibility through the presentation of the everyday social life of the Filipino people, particularly those involving abuse, repression, and oppression. In the end, the stage signals recognition of what Judith Butler calls the precarity of each other and recognition of the other as other and not as an object of one’s enjoyment, work, and possession.

The essay is a general overview of the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances. The first part is an introduction and a presentation of the archival project with emphasis on the concept of cultural performance, concretized within performance studies paradigm using Philippine society and culture as context. The second part is a discussion of how data in the archive were documented and collected using focused ethnography as primary methodology. The method is argued to be the distinguishing mark of the project from other digital archives. Also, this section provides a detailed exposition about the significance of understanding local performance vocabularies and how these terms are translated into the archive through semantic framing. In the end, it is asserted that the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances functions not only as a repository of resource materials on the study of Philippine cultural performances but also as a performative cultural memory and a pedagogical tool.

The essay inquires a general question: what is the relationship of theater and human rights? A preliminary reflection is provided using the different activities staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) on the occasion of Pista Rizalina (Fiesta Rizalina) in September 2017. The festival was named after Rizalina Ilagan, a student activist-artist abducted by the military during the Martial Law era under President Ferdinand E. Marcos. To date, Ilagan’s body has not been found. The festival is a commemoration of the victims of human rights violations encountered by thousands of Filipinos since the Martial Law era of Marcos. In the end, it is argued that performing human rights at the CCP is a tool to transmit traumatic experiences for the understanding of those who did not suffer violence, oppression and tyranny (i.e. today’s younger generation). The relationship of theatre and human rights is asserted to be a rehearsal for a community where the other is encountered with care and responsibility.

This essay is a preliminary discussion of the palo-palo, a cultural performance of the Ivatan community in the Batanes group of islands in northernmost Philippines where performers strike “opponents’s” sticks to reenact a battle of two opposing camps. The first part is a descriptive narrative of the palo-palo performance. The second part is a preliminary analysis and theorization of the palo-palo’s origin by arguing that the performance could have been based on and/or inspired by the komedya, a Philippine traditional theatre form introduced by the Spaniards during colonization which has roots in the socio-historical conflict of the Christians and the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula in Southwest Europe. Generally, the localization of the form is argued to be paradoxically an embrace and repudiation of the foreign.