Why My Passion for This Theater

Why My Passion for This Theater

by Marilie Fernandez-Ilagan

One afternoon, on my way home from school, I was attracted by the noise coming from the church by the sea. I went in and saw David, a well-liked gay church worker in our small town of Mati in Davao Oriental. l. He was talking and moving about like a real male. I realized that he and the rest were doing drama. I took note of the one who was directing, who, I would know very much later as Karl Gaspar. It was 1972. At seven, it was my first theater exposure.

It took all of seven years before I found myself performing onstage – in high school dramatics. In college at the Ateneo de Davao, I was expectedly also active in theater. Later, I joined a theater group of a social development agency. It seemed like there was no turning back.

Then one day, in 1982, I learned a man was arrested by the police. He was unlike most captives. He stood proud. It was Karl Gaspar becoming a political prisoner.

In the 1980s in Mindanao, community theater was already thriving, thanks to artists like Karl Gaspar. The Mindanao community theater was the great drama school where I honed my artistry. There could not have been a better one, because here, theory and practice merged, instilling in me a commitment to the arts that was rooted in the social value of theater.

Instead of running away from theater on account of Karl’s arrest, I kept my faith. At that time, I was already active in Kulturang Atin Foundation, Inc. (Kafi), a big name in the mass-based cultural work in Mindanao in the 1980s. Kafi then was a well-run cultural institution that put a premium on theater in community education and development work. It had a regular theater season and summer workshops.

I also became active in the Mindanao Community Theater Network (MCTN), an impressive theater coalition in the island, whose cultural workers and popular educators had a favorite slogan: “Magkoryo tayo kung paano mag-akyo” (Let’s do plays, songs and dances the way we use acupuncture),” in the sense of “healing our social ills.” MCTN explored and mastered cultural action programs in the communities, combining education processes with advocacy work through theater. My work in these organizations taught me theater’s relevance to the day-to-day life of the people to survive and find meaning in their poverty and misery.

This is not to say that my college learning of Western classical theater did not amount to something. In fact, I was glad that I had a taste of the West End before I did agitprop. Now my vision had become broader because I went surrealist and expressionist to realist; my experiences ran the range of “My Fair Lady” to “Nukleyar” to “Pilipinas Circa 1907” to “El Fili” to “Sinalimba (Airboat)” to “Nag-alintabong Kabilin (Burning Legacy)” to “Road to Mindanao” to “Siak sa Duha ka Damgo (Crack in Two Dreams)” to “Oya! Arakan” to “Ang Babae sa Ating Panahon” to “Langaw sa Isang Basong Gatas.”

My theater since the 1980s, however, concentrated on folk traditions -- particularly on indigenous forms, and women’s issues. I chose to focus on these because I wanted to catch up with my appreciation of my indigenous roots at the same time that I was being stirred up by the women’s liberation movement.

My passion for this kind of theater was all the more encouraged when in 1990, my colleagues and I in the Kaliwat Theater Collective interacted with Dr. Julie Holledge, chair of the drama center of Flinders University in Australia. She took the occasion to encourage us to do theatre about and for the women, a kind of theater that was then novel to us. I realized for the first time the extent of retrogressive teaching about women and saw the connection between past and continuing attitudes toward women.

My interactions and immersions with the virtuosos of the indigenous communities of Mindanao afforded me a new high on indigenous forms. In my first visit to a B’laan village in Sultan Kudarat, an elder woman told me and my group, “You’ll never know how we write our own epics, songs and riddles, and how we move in our own dances until you come here and live with us . . . until you settle down with our Mother, the Earth.” Not even my experiences in doing theater overseas – a different high altogether -- could negate the wisdom of these words.

All told, I found challenge and freedom as I grew up in the Mindanaoan theater. Perhaps because theatre -- the way we define it in Mindanao, like oral traditions, didn’t impose rigid standards even as it required one to hew close to the heritage and not stray away from Mother Earth and all that it meant through the generations.

When some say that theater using indigenous forms and tackling women’s issues has remained largely on the fringe, I become impassioned about my desire for this kind of theater to break through the barrier of the experimental. Also, I wish to show that theater could both be art form and platform. Politics needs the theater as much as the theater needs politics. As long as I live it, as long as I am clear about my development as a theater artist through reflection, self-discovery and assertion, I’d be impassioned about this kind of theater that serves beyond the entertainment.