ESSAYS
This collection of essays collates a practice drawn from generations of creation and production by the author. The essays sum up a Dramaturgical Method tagged 3Ps (Praxis, Pedagogy, Production), evolved from a production process that engaged the collaboration of various specializations in varied settings performed to multifarious audiences.
These productions and their processes of creation derive and theorize concepts that define principles expounded in Cultural and Performance Studies.
The author shares these to set up and illustrate a production ecosystem in a creative process evolved and determined by a cultural environment.
DRAMATURGY: TRANSCREATION
From The Original to the Stage: Transcreating Ethnic Expressions for Show
To perform the dances of cultural communities is to “appropriate.” Informed scrutiny avoids rendering appropriated expressions carelessly, as many of these indigenous dances are performed for ritual and fulfill cultural functions in the source community. Transcreation is the process adapting from a source for performance on stage.
Transcreating Ethnic Expressions for Show
Transcreation presents principles that can guide performance creators into appropriately representing the cultural founts of their sources. Writers, directors, and choreographers can pick up invaluable pointers from the principles articulated. Transcreation describes the act of appropriating indigenous cultural expressions for performance in a space and context different from that of the original.
Revisiting the Ramayana
“Transcreation”—the strategy of adapting to a local community the language of a product to make it acceptable—thrived as a marketing and publishing practice in India. Rather than simply translating language to advertise a foreign product, transcreation attempted to approximate the same meanings and emotional appeal in the original for local cultures to accept.
Recommended Citation. Fernandez, Steven P. C. D.F.A. (2018) “Revisiting the Ramayana,” Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 7.
THEATER
Theater Without a Theater – Inspiring 40: The IPAG Story
How prodigiously our theater has thrived in the last forty-eight years without a theater building. Here is a narrative of how the IPAG Theater has been brought up, nurtured, and audiences (easily over a million) and the hundreds of artists and teachers who have been brought up with our theater.
Recommended Citation
Fernandez, Steven P. C. D.F.A. (2018) “Theater Without a Theater—Inspiring 40: The IPAG Story,” Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 11.
Available at: https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol8/iss1/11
CULTURAL STUDIES
Mapping performance in multi-cultural “tri-people” spaces of Mindanao
This discourse sets up a Theoretical Frame that maps the components operating during a performance where audience-communities are culturally diverse. This proposed approach to the study of “structured” performative events – formalized by practice and function-where overall form, space-time settings (including narrative), actions, interactions , and expectations have been constructed by the community, thus, claiming a ritual quality.
The Art, Music, and Performances in Mindanao
“Mindanao Art: Is there such a thing? Or “Mindanao Dance,” “Mindanao Theater,”” Mindanao Music,” “Mindanao” ad nauseam to sum up what constitutes “Mindanaon.” Such inventions have stirred my curiosity. Naturally, my propensity to humor and “investigate,” especially so if such concepts derive from persons (even scholars) outside of the Mindanao subject sphere.
Is “folk literature” Literature?
Reading and experiencing performance are two engagements with a lot of difference.
The original – oftentimes sang and performed shared among a community – had no text-reader relationship. Their metamorphoses into English and the forms they are expressed in now may have been pigeon-holed into contentious typologies clustered according to content but not to approximate their original contexts.
THE ILIGAN SINULOG
VIVA SENOR SAN MIGUEL!
These short essays chronicle the celebration of Michaelmas in Iligan City. The “sinulog”/“yawa-yawa” rituals have transformed from their beginnings in the region’s lore —- the merging of Higaunun, M’ranao, and settler lore being prominent — to its transported consumerist-determined forms today – the Kasadya towards the Diyandi — an expected consequence of world economic re-ordering, thus remolding the mindsets in our cosmopolitan orders.
My earliest research in the 1980s annotated the full diandi version including its versos, and a complete transliteration and its annotation of the San Miguel Comedia, including its music score published in Komedya, 1999 (ed. Nicanor Tiongson, UP Press).
I, too, have been engaged in these transformations as I was resource person when the JayCees (c/o the late Dito Maruhom) invited me to conduct a series of workshops in the 1990s to migrate the narrative and re-form this to a street-dance space branded “Kasadya,” if only to protect the integrity of the sources. The consumerist setting, however, with the pomp, pageantry, and price money deluged almost to extinction the original sources that carried the spiritual functions.
A documentary, likewise, has been produced gathering from the performances of the sinulog, diandi, yawa-yawa, comedia, and their complementing acts in the 10-day celebrations that begin with the pagkanaug.
The forms performed today, first branded as the Kasadya and later the Diyandi, take little note of the contexts and cultural manifestations of the original in form and narrative. There is that binding engagement among the community, audience, government leaders, education, media, business, among others, that has determined the transformations of the “sinulog,” the most dominant being the consumerist requirements that now dictate how these forms should be performed.
