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Uncovering Uwahig: A Pedagogical Tour In The Creation Of Mindulanis Collaborative Production

Nestor Horfilla, Geejay Arriola and Mozart Pastrano, officers of MINDULANI, Inc., the network of Mindanao theatre artists, were exchanging a flurry of text messages in January. They were organizing a team for Mindanao’s entry to the Philippine Theater Festival of the UNESCO-International Theater Institute (ITI). What followed was an invitation from Mozart, asking me if I could direct a new collaborative production. I was part of a proposed team to banner MINDULANI.

The International Theatre Institute based in Paris is a UNESCO arm that implements culture and arts projects for social development. Manila for the first time hosted this 31st edition (dubbed “Theatre Olympics of the Nations”) joined by over four hundred theatre artists from all over the world.

Overseeing the production was a considerable challenge, considering the limitations, accepted by Geejay Arriola, veteran organizer and artist who sits as Mindanao rep in the National Committee of the Dramatic Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.

Pre-production: The initial impetus

Besides Mozart and me, the artistic team was composed of Singapore-trained Felimon Blanco of Pagadian’s Kumbingan Theatre Ensemble and Boots Dumlao of Davao’s Kathara Dance Theatre Collective. We called ourselves the A-Team.

I suggested an initial impetus: fire and water, opposing elements that figure prominently in Mindanao lore. Conflict is inherent in them. Being opposites, they spark and feed Life and prove the adage that new forms are shaped from contradictions.

Because members of our team lived in opposite parts of the island, we kept in touch via the internet which was to play not only a crucial role but an indispensable one as well. It is reason why the production was assembled in a record four days!

Molding Material

I dug from local lore and my experiences as a student of Mindanao culture. Two stories took my fancy: the Indarapatra-Sulayman epic and the Bukidnon flood legend. Symbols inherently fill these folktales and present meanings that are understood most times from a different dimension distinct from that of our objective logic. Characters fly, the dead resurrect, persons and events transfigure. These tales are our own “magic-realism,” where fancy and reality meet, where life’s plots rotate in endless cycles, where dreams combine with the palpable, where logic is experienced rather than explained, where images have more meanings than words, and where we take inspiration.

Considering our resources, we set rehearsals in Iligan. The MSU-IIT Integrated Performing Arts Guild (IPAG) formed the core group of seven actors-dancers plus Felimon who took roles as actor and as associate director. IPAG too provided the production and stage management support. I handpicked veteran artists adept in improvisations, and in contemporary and ethnic-based dancing who have had international exposures: Leilani Monterola, Melvin Pascubillo, and Amado Guinto. Kenn Velasquez, already an accomplished dancer, and Jetaime Yamut, who we picked from auditions. Joining too were Cagayan-based Hobart Savior (Artistic Director of the Liceo Theater and Performing Arts) and Wenna Balaido (IPAG Resident Artist and teacher of the Capitol University).

After my scenario was urgently dispatched via our e-group, comments were e-mailed and suggestions were collated immediately despite the distances of Felimon (who was in India), Geejay (who was in Europe) Boots (who was somewhere in the mountains of Davao), and Mozart (in Cagayan). Mozart gave the piece its fitting title: “Uwahig,” Bukidnon for “water,” apt for a scenario that drew water as its prime image whose connotations everyone understands.

Boots planned her designs in Davao and, whenever she could, faxed or e-mailed these to me. She would later bring her team to Iligan to assemble her sets.

Deconstructing lore

Folklore was the platform where expression and meaning were erected. I assembled a collage of text, poetry, images, and sounds. I was less interested in what the stories revealed but rather in what they in tandem with the other elements evoked – an effect perhaps, an organic logic, an ephemeral experience, or some meaning that the performance-audience interaction will muster.

The “fire-water” opposition was a statement of “the way things are” and folklore with its array of symbols and myths embraced many contradictions. Synthesis that grows from the conflicts of thesis and anti-thesis are truisms that define life. Humanity is shaped by these counteracting processes.

The story of the two brothers Indarapatra and Sulayman begins in a distant golden city where the older King Indarapatra begs Sulayman to help save Mindanao from great destruction. Indarapatra places a large sapling by the window and by this tree will know the success or death of Sulayman. Sulayman flies across mountains and battles the curses kurita (a many-limbed crocodile-like monster), the bird-like tarabusaw, and pah, another monstrous avian creature whose giant wing is cut off in the ensuing battle and falls to accidentally crush Sulayman. The tree wilts and Indarapatra learns of his brother’s death. In great distress, he flies to the site to lament the death of Sulayman and continues the battle against the remaining monster, the seven-headed bird. Indarapatra brings Sulayman back to life splashing him with a magic potion that heaven sends.

Deconstructing lore, I kept the semblance of a linear narrative to merge the Bukidnon flood legend with the Maguindanao-Maranao epic. In the Bukidnon legend, people build a large raft in anticipation of a large flood. When the giant crabs fall to earth, the waters overflow and flood the land. The raft saves the people until the waters recede and life begins again. The menacing crabs are water symbols: what better way for water to devastate the land than have it crush and inundate life.

The Creative Process

A stimulating creative process shaped the scenario. Verse wove unit to unit where actors spat gibberish and groans, and writhed in contortions. The essence of rehearsals laid in improvisation. The actors built on the actions directed by the text and the feelings text suggested. Choreography patched portions where one part hinged to another, to mark off high points, to stand as posts, and to emphasize climaxes. These markers signaled the start of a new movement, a change in texture, an opposing direction, a release after tension.

But even before we improvised, music – the soul of the play – had to be composed. With very little time, we sought Geejay and her Mebuyan group to create the music for us. They had the resources, the studio, and the creative panache. Music was designed to be atonal, multi-rhythmic, and idiosyncratic keeping the “tribal” character of Mindanao. Chants, gongs and a driving rhythm dressed the overall musical panorama.

There was a problem, though: the composers lived hundreds of kilometers away from rehearsals in Iligan. Music was to be composed with nary a music sheet to base opus on except for my flimsy scenario. Besides, the music artists never had a glimpse of the production. By strokes of artistic sensitivity, the music juxtaposed snugly to the parts of the scenario. This composing process is another story left best for Geejay and company to share.

Long distance composing

I met the challenge of long-distance composing by cutting the scenario further into smaller units to illustrate a “musical score” of texts. Each textual unit I enclosed in color-coded tables to visualize musical movement in a matrix whose parts approximated separate musical themes. It was like following a script in progress moving in boxes from left to right. Each unit ran like a motif or theme, with its own development, a climax, and a resolution; these small parts add up to larger climaxes and resolutions. The structure is classic.

Correspondingly, under these “boxes of script” were indicated the number of measures or approximate durations each unit may take to perform. I indicated whether the unit required some basic musical theme, or a variation of a second theme, or a repetition and CODA. Then I described the feel I imagined for the unit: mysterious, anxious, violent, or hopeful. It was up for Geejay and company to fill in the musical equivalents of the emotions. Running parallel with the scenario were directions that indicated the gaps between weaves, the hinges between the units, the silences of transitions, and the release of tension from tautness.

Years in the theatre have allowed me the dexterity to sculpt words, sounds, and movements. Being a musician myself, I know that musical structure is akin to that of a script or to choreography and that structures have a universally similar plan. Segments have their own highlights, their little climaxes. “Uwahig” was designed like a musical suite. Its musical structure therefore was not to be different.

I e-mailed the scenario with a hodge-podge of directions in red arrows, inserted balloons, and marginal notes and the matrix that indicated the run of the score, the measures, duration, and the quality of music suggested. Texting settled inquiries and in a week, Geejay had a score posted and heard in our e-groups.

Rehearsals

The four rehearsal days before the preview represented only half the effort. Off the surface, we spent equal effort in planning that included not only the composing, the scheduling of per-unit rehearsals, the organizing of a staff, the assembling of sets, and the sharing of a directorial vision which we agreed on in a meeting in Iligan two weeks before rehearsals. The performers were all familiar now with the script; it took expected effort to transform script to the stage.

To our favor, the performers were already a team who’ve worked together for a long time. We assigned roles and their relationships. Text transcreated to music, then transformed to performance. Actors interacted in duets, triplets, and among crowds. Actors reacted to the stimuli of puppets, lights, and sound. We pre-determined what portion was to be improvised and what was to be choreographed. We marked the emotional context of each unit and dug up the appropriate feeling from our own emotional reservoirs.

The body followed, and whatever sense and feel the actors dug transformed to gestures and sounds. The performers worked on contact improvisations, in bio-mechanics as they dissected movement dynamics, and on the nine rasas (essences) that enhanced their own studies of acting methods and dance techniques. The Theater-of-Mixed-Means progressively unfolded and a form was a-shaping: we were distilling meaning.

(“Distillation” is a process I continue to explore. It is my own creative pedagogy, a process that attempts to squeeze out the purer forms of subject and of the performer. Distillation is both a director’s and a performer’s process. This requires a separate treatise to explain.)

The intention was not to bring out an everyday kind of logic, like understanding a usual story. Logic is relative. The symbols are relative in as far as the spectator perceives them. Logic is formed after images are collated and the reactions to various stimuli (like a menacing bird or the color red) merged.

“Uwahig” is about experience. Disparate elements combine to produce a whole final form whose meanings are captured, experienced, or interpreted. Experience, like meaning, is also relative. Meaning of an experience is imposed by an audience. Meaning is pieced together on the spectator’s terms. Like in understanding dreams, one is incited to think; feeling is evoked through the merging of separate parts to produce an organic and complete impression.

I drew images and narrated events between the relationships of brothers Indarapatra and Sulayman, of Sulayman and the crowd, among three groups of people, of the brothers and the monsters, of the crowd and water, and in other numerous instances. The play is littered with sights and sounds: water, flood, fire, the crabs, the seven-headed bird, costumes, faces half-decayed by virus, and films of war, famine, and destruction, among others. I tore down all four walls as audiences sit around with the performers among the sets, each spectator similarly assaulted as the performers are also assaulted. When audiences take their spaces in the arena, events already unfold.

The spectator assaulted by myriad elements now chooses whether to simply feel or to think. Or to do both.

Post Modern Media: An alternative

This essay does not say that we completely abandon conventional theatre. On the contrary: conventional theatre should enhance our experiments of alternative media as experimental theatre revitalizes our theatre traditions. We build on conventions. Our tradition of theatre-going and understanding cannot be discarded.

What I say here is that there are alternative ways of expressing. And in some times, conventional playwriting and production have been inadequate to embrace the rich panorama of life, if one’s intention is to envelope all. All too often, meaning is conveniently spoon-fed when in fact meaning can never be swallowed in a single mouthful. The real is too complex to be simplified by a singular narrative. In life, events and their meanings unfold not in singular linear manners but from multiple directions even without converging to a common point.

The story of refugees, for example, does not begin with the attack of para-military groups in a barrio and ends with the military controlling the situation. The story of refugees extends beyond the first volleys of fire or their happy return to their homes. The story of refugees interrelates with other events. One experiences the stories of death not by convenient storytelling but by the piecing of parts, some of which may even be forever missing. Not only do images tell stories, but the semiotic references of sound, color, music, and other palpable elements make the spectator collate an organic experience and to provide meaning to that experience.

This is the alternative theatre we have proposed. It is our theatre of symbols. It is a theatre, I feel, that comes closest to revealing and experiencing the real. Life is an assault of images, smells, sounds, events, and experiences not conveniently arranged for us for our comfortable understanding. We have to distill meaning. Real stories are not events arranged in chronological order. If theatre will have to approximate the erratic nature of Life, then Life’s arbitrariness should be reflected in theatre.

Source : http://mindanews.com/

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