Category Archive for: entablado

kultura

relevant RockEd culture: notes on contemporary Pinoy rakenrol

The noise is overwhelming. SaGuijo isn’t made for long conversations with friends, not even when you’re all outside sitting at the farthest table from the entrance, having drinks and cigarettes. The truth is you’ve been here since dinnertime when it was empty and bright. You almost forgot it was the place of noise and crowds and youth, the one you hadn’t gone to in a while.

It had been a long day and, both emotionally and literally, food was what you needed. You also wanted to get eating out of the way while it was quiet enough to have a meal. The bagoong rice, salpicao and tokwa’t baboy, and ice-cold San Mig Lite seemed about right. Except that it was already noisy in your head, the kind of noise that apparently can’t be erased by a filled stomach. You came from the Maximum Security Compound of Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa, and after two years met an old friend—one who’s been there for almost a decade, the one for whom freedom is such a remote possibility, you cannot even see it.

The NGO Rock Ed was reason for that visit to Bilibid. Every Wednesday of every week, a bunch of prisoners expect Gang Badoy to arrive and teach them some creative writing.

the rest is up at pulse.ph!

kultura

Cherie Gil, world class

<…> as with many women, Callas also just wanted love. And this apparently, was her failing. Seeing her teach this master class though, is a testament as well to her spirit. She was stereotype, yes, she was diva, as expected. But too, she’s a woman who knows not to rest on her laurels, and instead actually wants to share it. That soft spot is what’s startlingly overwhelming about her persona.

Cherie portrays Marie

One realizes two things in watching Master Class. First, that the struggles of woman, image and otherwise, public figure or private, are the same in many ways, and that as you empathize with Callas’ story, you realize how sisterhood lives, beyond death, across races, despite differences. Second, that you do not know a world class Filipino performance until you watch Cherie Gil do this play.

read all of it here!

kultura

senior moments, notwithstanding

Granted, I had paid for really good tickets, treating my mom to what I thought she would find enjoyable, as a matter of friendship (with Tita Mitch), as a matter of wit and humor, the kind that we both know is few and far between as far as contemporary Pinoy comedy is concerned. So on that tiny stage of Music Museum, on their Manila run (they’ve been touring the country, apparently), the Juicy Cat Dolls strutted their stuff. And there was a lot of good that was expected, some bad that was unexpected, plenty of laughter in between, all in all good enough. This ain’t a rave, but it’s still hopeful.

After all Mitch Valdes, Nanette Inventor and Pilita Corrales go onstage ready to make us laugh. They begin with an original song about being a Juicy Cat Doll, competing with the youngerand sexier women of this world, and putting their foot down: we are more intelligent, and that has to count for something. And boy, do they show us how!

the rest is here, via GMA News online.

kultura

brecht notwithstanding

The risk any theater adaptation takes is the fact of intertextuality. One person will enter the theater with no knowledge whatsoever of the theatrical context(s) of the play she is about to see. That person may be seated next to a theater scholar, adept in drama theories and well read on dramatic texts. At the back row are audience members who are just there for the ride, with no real interest in theater, but are there because one of the lead actors is good looking – or they’re related to him.

Unlike the spectatorship of cinema, where formulas become the standard of enjoyment or non-enjoyment, in theater many other things inform appreciation. There is the drama as written text, the text as executed onstage, and every other process that exists in between: the actors’ performances, the sounds of the stage, production design, extraneous elements of (in)formality and propriety, the communal audience experience, audience expectation.

Here lies the success and the failure of any theater adaptation such as Tanghalang Pilipino’s Madonna Brava ng Mindanao. Based on German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her children (written 1939, staged 1941), Don Pagusara’s adaptation had way too much going against it: Brecht’s original defined the epic drama, spanning at it does 12 years, and using as it does a 30-year war as context.  (more…)