CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE ARTS FROM THE REGION

QUARTER 2 WEEK 4 LESSON

INTEGRATING THE LOCAL AND THE CONTEMPORARY

What is meant by the word “local” and how can it be used as material for contemporary art?
The “local” can refer to material that is easily available, like bamboo. The local can also refer to wherever the
artist finds himself or herself. For Diokno Pasilan, a neo-ethnic musician-visual/performance artist and one
time art director from Negros the “local” involves various places: Baguio, Bicol, Palawan (where he resided for
a long period), and most recently Victoria, Western Australia, where he resettled. This process entails
interacting and immersing with host communities.
For example, in a performance for the Third Bagasbas Beach International Environmental Art Festival in the
Bicol region, Pasilan communicates the need to be more aware of our natural environment by painting his
body green, the color of the environmental movement. Like a bungee jumping human anchor, he thrust
himself toward gongs tied together unto a bamboo structure - bamboo being material that is still easily
available around Bagasbas’s fisherfolk communities. These communities provided information and support for
Pasilan and other participating artists to create their performance and site-specific work on the Bagasbas
public beachfront.

Figure 10.1. Pasilan, Gong Fishing (2010)

Another work which used bamboo as basic material is Digital Tagalog, a collaboration between Lani Maestro and Poklong Anading, artists who are
known for creating multi-sensory environments that come out of their research about the contexts of spaces and communities. Shown in Mo
Gallery in 2012, Digital Tagalog used bamboo to construct physical nodes and create sounds. They also used found and crafted sounds, some of
which were inspired and sourced out of the digitized audio files of National Artist for Music Jose Maceda (housed in the UP College of Music Center
for Ethnomusicology). This collaborative and combined use of the visual and musical made the work particularly interactive. The artists encouraged
viewers to be active creators themselves. Within a small room, visitors could make up playlists which not only could be streamed through personal
listening devices, but also could be amplified within the larger gallery space. This larger site was where bamboo-made music they themselves
produced could overlay the digitized sound selected by the impromptu musician-deejays working with sound in the smaller room.

Still other artists create work by reinventing not just tangible objects like bamboo, but other artforms sourced from the performing arts of ritual,
music and dance. Davao-based choreographer Agnes Locsin used the techniques of modern dance to reinterpret a component of the Moriones
Holy Week festival of Marinduque. The Moriones narrates the story of Roman centurion Longino’s conversion to Christianity upon the healing of his
blindness by the dying Jesus whom the soldier had been ordered to guard. Performed in France (as Ballet Philippines’s entry to the Recontres
Festival Du Danse) by male dancers moving to “Serra Pelada” of the avant-garde composer Philip Glass, the dance reinterprets the story through
costumes (centurions are shown without full masks, hefty breastplates, nor swords or spears) and movements not associated with classical ballet
and folk dances. Bodies of the dancers are sharply angled, with unpointed toes, contorted anatomical positions, and staccato military gestures to
dramatize the soldiers’search for the centurion turned fugitive. A clip of the performances may be found at (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Wkcn4QEaPwo). The dancers’ bodies are made to leap and address each other in flawless precision as a unit at one moment and break up into
individual cadence at another. With minimalist lighting and stage design, the dance combines the familiar and unfamiliar: audiences are still able to

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recognize the story, such as the chase scene, but at the same time, they are also viewing the story through another lens and from another
perspective.

Figure 10.2. Locsin’s Moriones for Ballet Philippines

A similar example that involves reinvention of festival is seen in a project called “Lucban Assembly/Systems of Irrigation Project.” Done during the
annual mid-May Pahiyas festival by Quezon-based artists of Project Space Pilipinas and their guest artists, this consisted of art installed along the
procession route. Curated by another independent initiative of writers called DiscLab, the works were placed strategically along that route so that
visitors and locals alike would not miss or overlook them. Some of the artists also responded creatively to these spaces by using materials they
could readily find in the area and to which perceivers of the works would easily relate to because they trigger familiar memories and associations.

The artists organized and documented the activities by combining interpersonal and virtual ways of working, including digital invites and live stream
conference segments, in effect creating a parallel virtual festival. (Check http://projectspacepilipinas.com/project/first-lucban-assembly-2/to see
more documentation of what went on during several weeks of Lucban Assembly’s activities from May-June 2015.)

We can see here that the use of new media channels makes possible the exchange of information, from instructional materials on a range of topics,
to portfolios. Collaborations may be formed: weavers find fair trade distributors, artists get to work with others beyond the Philippines, authors get
to self-publish. Technology is thus used more productively beyond trending.

The combination of “old school” events like the fiesta and web platforms illustrate how the local and traditional can converge to generate new ideas
and forms of expressing and communicating, in local, global and cyber spheres. Artists have access to less guarded, more dispersed, and more
flexible means to reach out to each other, to various publics, who participate more actively to affect not just content, but the ways in which these
channels of exchange are used and defined. So-called “end-users” can become creative users themselves.

Artists’initiatives such as Project Space and DiscLab also present us alternative support systems that provide the environment for facilitating
production and the circulation or distribution of art. Rather than becoming fully dependent on the state and private businesses, these initiatives are
largely independent. They band together and reach out to communities from which they draw their knowledge, ideas and materials. The
stereotype of the artist working alone in his studio is no longer applicable in such collaborations. Artists are reaching out to their audiences, who
have become—especially in interactive works—very much a part of the creative process.

We have also seen how artists are able to collaborate by benefitting from technology, which has become not only a tool for research, but also as
platform for disseminating their art and building and sustaining networks with their communities and beyond—from face-to-face encounters on to
virtual networks and spaces.

We also note that in the aforementioned performances, the shift from one space to another figures in the way art may be received. Note the
transformation, from the communal and private spaces of Boac, Marinduque to the proscenium stage in France and the Cultural Center of the
Philippines. We see this too in how encountering art shifts from personal listening device to a shared platform in the case of Digital Tagalog, and
from the streets of the Lucban to cyberspace in the case of Pahiyas-timed Lucban Assembly/Systems of Irrigation project. Such relocations lead us
to ask questions about the experience of witnessing the dance and the installations.

How do the meaning and our experience of the artwork change with the shifts from town to stage, with altered space,
lights, and pace; or from the streets, to installations and electronic documentation?

Responding to this question, could we now begin to appreciate how the fusion of local and contemporary can
make us realize that the two are not separate but are actually two sides of one and the same coin?
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This fusion is evident in another example, where the “local” can also refer to language, staging and techniques,
and the ways by which they can be used in adapting and translating foreign material. The playwright Rody Vera
adapted from a play for children by the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore entitled The Post Office by retitling
it Ang Post Office. First staged at the PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association) Center, this adaptation
of a tragic 1910 tale of a dying Indian boy coming to know of the world through the people he encounters in
the course of a day was restaged at TXS, Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro. Finding parallels in Philippine
contemporary society, the local staging made references to local culture: characters playing taho (a semi-liquid
soya variant) and sampaguita vendors. Music from the Kilyawan Children’s Choir rendering a fusion of Bengali
and indigenous Filipino sound pegs, Ellen Ramos’s digital animation, and a spartan bamboo set, among others,
were also introduced as new elements in this production.

Figure 10.3. Promotional material for the PETA production of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office,
adaptation by Rody Vera

In other adaptations and reinventions, local materials could also refer to folk stories. Take the case of the
staging of Fugtong: The Black Dog by the community theatre group, Aanak di Kabiligan (Children of the
Mountains) which was organized through the efforts of the Cordillera Green Network. The production revolves
around a folk story about a family ostracized for keeping a black dog commonly perceived as bringing bad
omens. On one level, we can interpret the narrative as being all about how the different is seen as dangerous
or threatening. On another level, while the story was introduced by a brief English annotation of the plot, the
narrative itself unfolded in multiple languages as the performers from Ifugao, Mt. Province, Kalinga, and
Benguet spoke in Kalinga, Kankaney, Ilocano, and Ibaloi. It was a deliberate means to keep the atmospheric
feel of the story taking place in the Cordilleras.
Fugtong was directed by theater artist, Rey Angelo Aurelio who is also behind another community theatre
production featuring Smokey Mountain-based youths rapping, dancing, and acting in Bakata: Battle of the
Street Poets, which was also staged at the Tiu Theater in May 2015. The young people Aurelio works with
come from informal settler communities struggling to deal with problems such as unsustained education
opportunities, unemployed or underemployed parents, and lack of secure housing, among others. Working
with these youths is one way by which artists may creatively respond to these conditions through immersion
and sharing their know-how about performance, movement, projection, etc. Teaching these children how to
express themselves may not bring big solutions to their complex problems, but at the very least, they could
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build a stronger sense of identity as they learn to process and express their emotions and thoughts. Apart
from checking the publicity poster below, find footage on Bakata here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?
v=RVRJe7pwCk0.

Figure 10.4. Fugtong as staged at the Tiu Theater, Makati, June 2014 Photo courtesy of the Philippine Daily
Inquirer

How does the intersection of the creative and socially-engaged provide us with a more grounded or rooted sense of
ourselves? How can it challenge our thinking to expand how and what we think about what may be unfamiliar or
difficult to understand initially?

Let us not forget that what we have been discussing so far are works performed live before a group of people.
In that case, the experience of encountering artists’ bodies physically moving through a space shared by
audiences brings an altogether different dimension to the reception of the work. The experience of light,
sound, motion would not only be felt up close but would be subject to much more immediate feedback like
applause, silence, transfixed gazes, perked up ears, and so on. We are of course only encountering these now
in a mediated version, that is through uploaded video and photographs appearing in this book.

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To further play up how the bodily senses figure in how we receive and make sense of art, we take another
work, this time something Lani Maestro produced as a commissioned project called Limen (2014) in France.
Here, she carefully considered where the work was to be placed, how people might relate with it, and what
sort of past or backstory the site had. The space is known as the Bata compound and was primarily an
industrial site. Much like in most mechanized factories, workers performed rigidly defined and repetitive,

It is in regard to works such as this in which the viewer or beholder is made to decide on how he/she can physically
interact with the work. Would it suffice for him or her to merely take the bridge in from a distance? Or would he/she
venture on to the bridge and take a chance upon experiencing it in a more sensate way—with feet touching the
boards, holding on to the supports, also able to take in the garden in more detail because he/she positioned his/ her
body in closer vantage of the work?

mind-numbing tasks. In response to the above considerations, Maestro decided to build a see-through bridge
that poetically took people out to a liminal point, as the title suggests—the verge or edge of a garden. Limen
marked off a place the artist construed as “anti- thesis to industrial space”, something that alluded to a
“landscape of everyday life” as the artist writes in her Artist Notes for her 2014 public commission in Bataville,
France. Limen was also meant to metaphorically allow the visitor’s body to fuse or extend toward the outlying
green space visible through the tunnel structure that did not have walls nor clear beginning or end points. The
bridge was also suspended from a low height so that whoever came might sit on it and not be fearful of falling
off.
Given this potential of a bodily experience, and even if unaware of the backstory of the bridge to a garden
providing a rest place for workers, beholders of the work then could still take away a physical memory. With
many installations such as this, the viewer-beholder’s decision to engage is precisely what enables art to take
on more layers of meaning, and thus makes him/her a participant in making the art experience richer and
performative.

Figure 10.5. Maestro, Limen (2014)

The “local” is dynamic, fluid, and constantly changing. It involves an integration of various media: dance,
music, the visual, digital, and electronic arts; of various geographies: local, transnational, national; and of
various spaces: the “actual” as staged, to the virtual as eternally documented or mediatized. Sometimes,
artists work alone, but oftentimes, especially in performances, they have to work in collaboration with other
artists and non-artists alike. Their work often requires interaction with their local and global audience, and
some of them have to research and immerse in the communities from which they draw material and form
from. These could include hometowns, adopted homes to which they migrated and settled in, or where they
briefly stay as visitors or transients. The image of the artist working alone in his or her studio is no longer the
only way we could imagine art being done; instead, we have researchers, community workers, quasi-
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ethnographers who use “local” materials and techniques that fuse the established, and the ever-changing
present.

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