Contributions to the Development o Cultural Productions, Education, and the Creative Resources of the country
Creative Production
- Produced over 50 full-featured multi-media productions as conceiver, playwright, composer, music director, and artistic director—from the national cultural wealth, staged and acclaimed in over a hundred cities worldwide, in many parts of the Philippines, reaching over a million audiences in over four decades
- Represented in Philippines in major festivals and world summits, including a Command Performance for Prince Albert (Monaco, 2002), the India-ASEAN Summit (New Delhi, Kolkata, 2018), the ASEAN Plus Festival (Bangkok, 2017), the Mumbai Ramayana Festival (Mumbai, 2019), US Philippine Centennial (Hawaii, 2006), US Migrant Heritage (Virginia, 2018), and a hundred other festivals worldwide
- Enriched Philippine Performing Arts realizing and establishing a signature performance style based on indigenous sources. This performance style has developed an aesthetics that has been accepted into the mainstream of Philippine Arts and Culture through his national and international performance tours, lectures, and publications
Institutionalizing a Method and principles for the appropriation of cultural sources
Developed principles in Theatre and Dance aesthetics and praxis notably transcreation and distillation, concepts published and disseminated in international and national forums and workshops, and among practitioners of Philippine Performances
Academe and Education
- Founded the pioneering Culture and Arts Studies Center at the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology with a degree-granting program resetting paradigms in the discourse, research, and practice of art, its production, and its ramifications with culture
- Published books and numerous essays and papers with international readership
- Keynoted and/or lectured in international conferences here and abroad
- His pedagogy and paradigms have reached thousands in universities nationwide as Visiting Professor and Consultant of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and its education arm, the Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP), in collaboration with the Commission on Higher Education and the Department of Education
- First Filipino to have graduated with a Doctor of Fine Arts degree (DFA, 2005) from the only Philippine University (De La Salle U) granting such.
Social Development through the Arts
- Propelled Iligan, Mindanao, and the Southern Philippines to international prominence through his works and through the organization of artists and groups. Philippine Theatre and Letters acclaim his body of creative and scholarly works which have recognized him as a major contributor in the development of Philippine Arts and Culture. (He founded the IPAG in 1978 which is recognized today as the Philippines’ most traveled integrated arts company with a string of recognitions.)
- Established Iligan, and consequently Mindanao and the Southern Philippines through his advocates, as a center of culture through its productions and a philosophy by: building a self-reliance in cultural resources developed through the institutionalization of training programs since 1977 in the grassroots level, among teachers, students, out-of-school youths, and community leaders. His programs have produced hundreds of graduates and teacher-leaders and a list of satellite cultural organizations. These programs have institutionalized cultural programming reinforced by a prolific number of productions and activities that use Philippine cultural materials that has relied solely on local resources reaching hundreds and thousands of audiences worldwide in hundreds of performances.
- Facilitated national and international exchanges of performances, artists, and scholars
- Articulated the needs of local artists by representing them in national bodies as the NCCA, CCP, and the Iligan Arts Council which he founded. This representation has produced numerous endowments, scholarships, and opportunities that have uplifted the stature of regional artists.
