Category Archive for: entablado

kultura

Love, deceit, man, woman

Juego de Peligro is an adaptation of the 18th century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the more famous version of which is the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons. The original text is transposed to late 19th century Manila and reveals it as a time of decadence, one premised on a class structure bound to conservatism and gender roles, love and desire.

It is a world of appearances, where the elite speak of reputation and expectation even as they put these into question, knowingly and otherwise, behind closed doors. Where it is in the enclosed spaces – the home, the room – that the negotiations between man and woman take place, the outside space is navigated by the indio whose predisposition to curiosity and tsismis is used by the elite as tool for deception.

That this time was imagined to cradle this story of love, desire and deception, with the decadence of beautifully made clothes and properly coiffed hair, and a mass uprising that’s imminent, is this adaptation’s gift. (more…)

kultura

The failure of capture

At the heart of Time Stands Still (written by Donald Margulies) is the crisis of capture, the kind that’s familiar to anyone who engages with more difficult, more violent, more painful current events in order to present these as honestly as possible, without intervening in its story, and in order to do justice to its telling.

Photo-journalist Sarah (Ana Abad Santos) and journalist James (Nonie Buencamino) have gained acclaim and credibility for doing work on conflict-torn territories in the Middle East. Working as individuals together, they find themselves victims of the stories that they follow. James had gone home ahead of Sarah, traumatized by having witnessed a bomb explosion before his eyes. He would soon enough find himself picking Sarah up from a hospital in Germany after she falls victim to a bombing herself. She is in a coma for weeks, and wakes up to a broken leg and scarred face.

The couple comes home to their staid apartment in America, the war they came from now the backdrop of their story, as it is the context of the relationship that is in the throes of individual trauma. It is a relationship that can now be viewed without the urgency of elsewhere. Or so they think.

(more…)

kultura

Storytelling and Dani Girl

I tend to veer away from stories that are out to clutch your heart, and then measure success by how much you bawl while watching.

Elsewhere in the world texts like these are criticized for displaying sickness and passing it off as artistic work, or using a particular claim to an ailment and then celebrating the work as “new” or innovative.

And so I could but be skeptical about Dani Girl, as I came in to see it on its last weekend, knowing full well what it was going to be about.

But Dani Girl surprised. Not that it didn’t tug at heartstrings and had me crying like a mother who knows of sick daughters. And yes it was about this staging and these actors, but also and ultimately it was about the material itself. (more…)

kultura

The Fluid re-write

It seems the only way to start this review is to acknowledge – and praise – the Technical Theater Program Batch 111 students of Benilde for having dared and successfully staged and produced 2014’s Fluid. Were the technical aspects of the production the only point, then this was quite a successful theatrical debut for this batch of students.

It would also, for the most part, be a successful re-write for contemporary times, something that playwright Floy Quintos talks about in his notes for the production. One is reminded by this re-write that many things about art making and production in this country continue to be true 10 years hence. Many things might need re-writing, but the system itself just evolves into viciousness, or devolves into the superficiality that capital demands.  (more…)

kultura

Kleptomaniacs*

I tend to imagine that these times of political and socio-economic crises demand of creative work an amount of relevance, where it is easy to pinpoint films and TV shows and writing that tends towards escapism, refusing to speak of issues that are urgent and important.

But escapism is also exactly what we need in times like these, when only the wealthy minority can live oblivious to the rising cost of basic goods and the utter lack of public services, when only the rich might navigate nation and not see the majority who are living below the poverty line. It makes sense to the rest of us who live each day struggling to make ends meet to want to escape by watching Transformers, or uh, Sarah and Coco in Maybe This Time (walang basagan ng trip). (more…)