Uncovering 'Uwahig' / Phil Daily Inquirer ::
The Season of Peace by Stella A. Estremera / Sunstar Davao ::
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Uncovering ‘Uwahig'

June 19, 2006
Updated 00:14am (Mla time)
Steven Patrick C. Fernandez
Philippine Daily Inquirer

AFTER NESTOR HORFILLA, GEEJAY Arriola and Mozart Pastrano, officers of Mindulani, Inc., the network of Mindanao theater artists, decided to feature an entry in the Philippine Theater Festival of the Unesco-International Theater Institute (ITI), I was invited to direct a collaborative production. I joined Singapore-trained Felimon Blanco of Pagadian's Kumbingan Theater Ensemble and Boots Dumlao of Davao's Kathara Dance Theater Collective.

We worked on an initial impetus, fire and water, opposing elements that figure prominently in Mindanao lore. Being opposites, they cultivate life and prove the axiom that new forms are shaped from contradicting elements.

Molding material

I dug from local lore and two stories took my fancy: the Indarapatra-Sulayman epic and the Bukidnon flood legend. Symbols fill these folk tales. 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.

We set rehearsals in Iligan with the MSU-IIT Integrated Performing Arts Guild (Ipag) forming the core group of eight actors-dancers and the stage management support. “Uwahig,” Bukidnon for “water,” was the chosen scenario, and water would be its prime image.

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 narrated 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.

In a distant golden city, King Indarapatra begs his brother 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 by splashing him with a magic potion that heaven sends.

I merged the Bukidnon flood legend about people who build a large raft in anticipation of a large flood. When the giant crabs fall to earth, the waters overflow and flood the land but the raft saves the people. The menacing crabs are water symbols: what better way for water to devastate the land than have it crush and inundate life.

Creative process

A stimulating creative process shaped the scenario. Verse wove unit to unit where actors spat gibberish and groans, and writhed in contortions. Along improvisations was choreography that patched portions, marked off high points, stood as posts and emphasized climaxes.

Music—atonal, multi-rhythmic and idiosyncratic, keeping the “tribal” character of Mindanao—was composed long-distance by Geejay and her Mebuyan group, with nary a music sheet to base the work on except for my flimsy scenario. But by strokes of artistic ingenuity, the music snugly fit into parts of the scenario.

Scenarios were cut into smaller units to illustrate a “musical score” of texts, with each unit enclosed in color-coded tables to visualize musical movement. Each unit ran like a motif or theme, with its own development, a climax and a resolution. The structure was classic.

I described the feel I imagined for the unit: mysterious, anxious, violent or hopeful, and it was up to the composers to fill in the musical equivalents.

“Uwahig” was designed like a musical suite. I e-mailed the scenario with a hodgepodge 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, the play had a score posted and heard in our e-groups, with the composers never having seen the show.

Rehearsals

To our favor, the performers were already a team, having worked with each other for a long time. Actors interacted in duets, triplets and among crowds to the stimuli of puppets, lights and sound. 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. A form was shaping: we were distilling meaning.

The intention was not to understand the play like in a usual story. “Uwahig” was about experience. Disparate elements combined to produce a whole final form whose meanings were captured, experienced and interpreted.

Experience, like meaning, is relative. The meaning of an experience is imposed by an audience, and pieced together on their 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 set up by the relationships of the brothers, 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, evacuation and destruction, among others.

I tore down all four walls as audiences sit around with the performers among the sets, each spectator assaulted at the same time as the performers are also assaulted.

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

Alternative theater

I'm not saying that we abandon conventional theater. On the contrary, conventional theater should enhance our experiments of alternative media as the New Theater vitalizes our theater traditions. We build on conventions. Our tradition of theater-going and understanding cannot be discarded.

But there are alternative ways of expressing. Conventional playwriting and production, many times, have been inadequate to embrace the rich panorama of life. 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 on a common point.

One experiences the stories of death not by convenient storytelling but by the piecing of parts, some of which may even be forever missing. The semiotic references of sound, color, music and other palpable elements make the spectator collate an organic experience to provide meaning to that experience.

This is the alternative theater “Uwahig” proposes. It is our theater of symbols. 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 theater will have to approximate the erratic nature of life, then life's arbitrariness should be reflected in theater.