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.

This book proposes entanglement as a useful idiom for understanding the contemporary Manila theatre. Drawing on its Tagalog counterpart, buhol-buhol, entanglement is conceived not only as a juxtaposition among elements, but also as a process of muddling and snaring. Taken together, these affirm the entangled character of contemporary Manila theatre in overlapping representations, histories, relationships and genres, while at the same time marking some problematic limitations in the treatment of chosen subjects by Manilan artists. The reason for this is that while these entanglements render Manila theatre far more complex than the accusations of mimicry and inauthenticity frequently leveled at Filipino culture, artists are often caught up in a more intractable buhol-buhol than they are willing or able to recognize. Four figures of buhol-buhol are identified in this book: pista (fiesta), kapuluan (archipelago), patibong (trap), and nangingibang-bayan (overseas-worker). In conceptualizing these figures of entanglement, the discussions start by illustrating their materiality and performativity before proceeding to reflections about how these are directed towards the complexity of Manila theatre.

A number of companies have become the gatekeepers of the Original Filipino Musical (OFM), such as Trumpets, Spotlight Artists Center, and Musical Theatre Philippines. These companies are strongly influenced by the mega-musical genre, and draw on a range of Filipino source material, including a gay comic book superhero (ZsaZsa Zeturnah, ze Muzical), an eighteenth-century Philippine comedia (Orosman at Zafira), and a novel by the nineteenth-century Filipino writer and nationalist José Rizal (Noli me Tangere).

Training actors in English-language theatre since 1967, Repertory Philippines is one of the major producers of musical theatre in Manila. Since the launch of Atlantis Productions in 1999, these two companies have dominated Filipino musical theatre. Part of the companies’ vibrancy comes from their occasional battles to license productions of the same British and American musicals.

Generally, this book is a reflection of the relationship between religion and theater. Particularly, it looks at the relationship of Catholicism and performance or the embodied world of theater in opposition to the written text. In investigating this relationship, two inquiries are identified. First, it is proposed that performance may be looked at as an analogy for the understanding of Catholicism. Second, the link between Catholicism and performance is ontological. In other words, this book is an inquiry on Catholicism “as” a performance and an assertion that it “is” a performance. To illustrate the as/is in the relationship of Catholicism and performance, three Catholic rituals or cultural performances in the province of Pampanga are used as examples: pamamaku king krus, libad nang Apung Iru, and kuraldal nang Apung Lucia.

In this essay, entanglement is proposed as a conceptual idiom for the understanding of contemporary Manila theater where pista (fiesta) is used as model and Rizal X as example. Contemporary Manila theater via Rizal X is argued to be part of an intricate entanglement: representations, shared histories, relationships and genres, which are all activated during a pista. Rizal X is used as an example because it strategically puts entanglement in an affirmative position. More specifically, Rizal X is treated as a microcosm of the pista because it has entangled representations, histories, relationships, and genres in the same way that the pista performs such entanglement. Nonetheless, the idea of entanglement often carries a negative connotation. Despite the promise of entanglement as a possible idiom towards the identification of an ontology of contemporary Manila theater, entanglement has its own limitations, especially since many artists unintentionally overuse entanglement (i.e., pastiche, fragments) in their theater. Because of such complication, there is a tendency for theater works to unintentionally editorialize their chosen subjects. In conducting a close reading of Rizal X, it is envisioned to illustrate the limitations of entanglement as a discursive concept for the understanding of contemporary Manila theater.

A collection of essays, this book attempts to continue the conversation on theater studies and performance studies in the context of Philippine scholarship. In the discussions, the trope of entablado is used as a central idiom. First, entablado refers to its literal meaning, as a space where a performance takes place. The space of the performance, however, is not only confined within the walls of an auditorium. It may also be in a street, a foyer of a huge cultural landmark, a river, or a school auditorium. Also, the space may not necessarily be a location exclusively for an artistic performance. It may be a space where people gather for the Divine, for entertainment, for a political protest, or for an academic conversation.Second, entablado is used here as a signpost for both ambivalence and exact possibility. The ambivalence is in the concept’s determinism, which, like entablado, has Hispanic origins, that seems to be suggestive of a need for an academic discipline in Philippine academia where the starting point is the space of entablado (theater and performance). As stated in the introduction of this book, theatre studies and performance studies as disciplines are emerging fields. By this emergence, there is an implicit invitation for the recognition of these disciplines as independent fields. In this regard, the entablado is a linage to the more traditional discipline of literary studies in which the stage is read as a cultural text. At the same time, it is also a departure from the literary paradigm to read the entablado as a cultural performance. This is where the possibilities of striking, initiating and beginning take place. The possibility of independence is implicit in the chapters, that there is something in the analyzed performances where the entablado (as a space) becomes a site for knowledge production and consumption. In particular, the possibility of the Filipino entablado as a starting point for socio-cultural and art theory may finally commence. Therefore, the possibility of entablado establishing a new paradigm in the humanities and the human sciences is not trivial but necessitates a reconceptualization of discipline: theater and performance studies.

This essay is a close reading of The Care Divas, a Filipino musical revolving around the struggle of five Filipino caregivers in Israel who also struggle with their sexual identities as bakla (Filipino homosexual). The analysis is both an affirmation and a critique of the performance. In the affirmation, the musical is argued to present a social reality that is intended for and in need of interrogation: the Filipino bakla. The musical implicitly features the bakla as a cosmopolitan. At the outset, this cosmopolitan disposition comes from the fact that the characters are migrant workers (caregivers). But more importantly, the cosmopolitan character is from a responsibility toward the other anchored within a genuine caring as implicated in the affective labor of these caregiver characters. In the critique, the essay marks some problematic limitations in the treatment of the bakla. In doing so, the musical, despite its attempt to present a social reality, is a problem play, a social drama touching social issues—realistic in approach, but the representation seems like an editorial. In the final analysis, The Care Divas is argued to seemingly fail because artists are not able to see the complexity of their chosen subject in a bigger picture.

Staged annually at the Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Papet Teatro-Museo, Papet Pasyon is the onlysinakulo in the Philippines performed in puppetry to date. In this essay, the puppet play is proposed to be an entanglement of three cultural forms: the literary form of the pasyon, the theatre form of the sinakulo, and the art of puppetry. The bases for the text of this puppet play are foreign sources namely a children’s Bible from Europe, the passion play from Oberammergau in Germany, and the dramatic tradition of the Western musical. Though originally a Western-based text, Lapeña-Bonifacio crafted and encapsulated the puppet play into an hour and a half show that highlights the story of Christ’s passion, is written in a Philippine language, and is understandable to young audiences. Its manner of presentation, on the other hand, was inspired by the very rich puppet traditions of Asia, particularly the Japanese bunraku and the Indonesianwayang golek. The essay begins exploring this proposal of entanglement by introducing Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, founder of Teatrong Mulat, and her vision of a children’s theatre in the archipelago with productions based on and inspired by local folktales and various theatrical forms in the Asian region. This is then followed by a narrative on the genesis of Papet Pasyon, which like most Teatrong Mulat productions, is a product of mixing and matching local and foreign influences. The bulk of the paper is a preliminary analysis and a close reading of Papet Pasyon as a cultural text and performance of entanglement because, generally, the play is a concatenation of the pasyon, the sinakulo, and various forms of puppetry.

Set in Makati, the central business district of the National Capital Region, Welcometo IntelStar is a monodrama satirizing the call center industry in the Philippines.The performance is an exemplar in positioning a diasporic consequence ofglobalization vis-à-vis nationalism because it calls on a national sentiment to theextent that the play illustrates resistance to globalization’s economic and neoliberalattachments, often perceived as the destructive force of cultural diversity anduniqueness. In relation, the performance used a recurring trope in Philippineculture, which is called in the essay as the Americanization issue: the conception ofthe Filipino/a as a master mimic of other cultures, particularly the American one.Overall, Welcome to IntelStar falls short in its criticism of globalization becauseit isolated the phenomenon within the politics of the market. But nevertheless,the play allows the Filipino body, through its protagonist Chelsea, to be “visible.”With her “expertise” at imitation, Chelsea’s visibility destabilizes the global order.Chelsea’s mimicry is not simply about wanting to be like those who are imitated,but a strategy to assert a sense of self. This imitative performance implies selfconsciousnessand intimacy to the one being imitated. In this way, mimicry as selfactualizationis a creative strategy and has the potential to overthrow hierarchies ofglobalization in neo-colonial and neo-imperial orders.