Integrated Performing Arts Guild

ON TOUR. EARTH, WIND, FIRE, and WATER

We are blest to perform not in constructed spaces but in Nature’s own environment, the origins of beginnings. The audiences have morphed from persons in cushioned seats seeking spectacle to persons in multiple spaces seeking oneness with Life.  The privilege to perform demands that we preserve Nature’s pristine surroundings. Life will only be as good as the ways Humanity treats its environment. Nothing can be more correct than the adage that the World is a Stage. We are all actors performing to preserve these environments the best we can because, without this stage, all performance ceases.

To collaborate with a mining company on issues regarding climate change and the environment is a milestone mark. IPAG has deconstructed the theater of stage and audience delving into a setting where devastation and threats are real conflicts. Where the resolution is a denouement that has yet to be formed.

Our first post-pandemic roadshow begins in a most propitious and meaningful manner.

Pandemic conditions produced this live-streamed preview. The production was originally scheduled for a live-audience engagement but the threatening surge of the Delta variant in mid-2021 forced alternatives.

IPAG previews here the re-scheduled live premiere in mid-October 2022. Original scenes and the excitement of Live Theater have been reincorporated in this year’s premiere. The production will be performed in non-conventional performance spaces in an outdoor garden.

The production portents the anxieties of our times. We experience imagined narratives, and the inevitable that is bound to happen. Filmed from a live performance minus the audience, the production attempts to understand how meta-narratives shape our consciousness and dictate our present circumstances. This explorative transmedia performance is set in the context of real events such as the 2017 Marawi Siege.

IPAG’s 45th will be full. We have survived the crests of the pandemic and now look towards the shore to continue our storied journeys.

We launch our 45th Season on August 10, 2022. Our Summer Season training for applicants and apprentices begin in the last week of June.

Watch for announcements.

Performance is intrinsic to Life. We all perform to survive.

Performance is intrinsic to Life. We all perform to survive. This is a human, thus Cultural, need.

Theatre will never disintegrate. The pandemic was a transition, a palate cleanser to neutralize the taste fatigue that overwhelmed our productions. Pandemics and major disruptions far worse than what we have gone through have hounded Human History. Many of Humanity’s best works were created during these times: Macbeth, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, Newton’s “Theory of Gravity,” the iconic “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, Bocaccio’s “The Decameron,” among many others.

Crises allow us to see beyond our satiated conditions, rousing us from our apathies, allowing us deeper meanings, and making us realize that life is a constant struggle.

Like our complacent lives suddenly jolted, the pandemic confronted conventionality, our Theatre staled by repetition and contentment, pandering to mere entertainment. The disorder opened life’s meanings exploring innovation through new modalities. New meanings, new representations. So will be our Theater in the post-pandemic.  

Expressions will merge, new mediums appropriate to new meanings. The digital and virtual realities integrating with live action, settings both real and mythical, characters imagined and seen, experience in and out of the imagination — a “trans-brid”.

As Medium is meaning, the merged forms that are real, mythic, and virtual navigate. Our engagements in performance will be simultaneously real, virtual, and even mythic. The pandemic allowed us to mix, and experiment in attempts that were crude. This rawness we have slowly shaped, learned, and added to our storehouse of expressions. Theatre will thrive in the post-pandemic — richer, the explored rawness of new means now taking a course towards refinement.

STEVEN PATRICK C. FERNANDEZ, DFA
Founding Artistic Director

We are alive; we celebrate! Imagination and creativity can never disintegrate. These gifts sustain us all active and alive. The anguishing circumstances have provided us the setting to explore, navigate, create. And rightly so – we continue in the most active ways.

February is National Arts Month. We mount new productions. We launch programs for 2022 as we complete our 44th Season #stayingalive journeying to our 45th. Navigating the pandemic crests, we sight the shoreline!

#stayingalive #inspiringIPAG #ipag

(design: Archibald G Pacana)

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2021 was Awesome!

The pandemic never gave us a break. In normal times, we would use time to prepare for work, take breakfast, and drive to work. But now, we cut off dressing up and move straight to the PC even in our house wear to start work. We rode the crests, survived, won.

Creativity matched generosity; to our communities our sharing became even more prolific. Three repertory productions beamed through social media in various world events: Sita, Tales From Mindanao, and SugaTula.

The NCCA-supported Hulmahan Program engaged hundreds counting over 50 webinar and lecture sessions spread over eight months. Playwriting, dramaturgy, and performance skills of 16 playwright-dramaturges, over 50 participants in theater and dance workshops, and theory classes were mentored by some of Philippine’s leading theater makers and dance artists. All these, further strengthening our international networks.

Basic performance training produced new dance productions in a recital last July after a month of training. In October, TranSCRIPT, the playwrighting workshop, produced eight one-act plays, developed in collaboration with apprenticing dramaturges. We broadcast a music video “Ea” composed and produced by our music ensemble (composer Meshaq Dangel, choreography Kenn Velasquez) shot on location.

#backlog: The Myths of our Lives, a postmodern narrative previewed in December testing responses of a select audience before its world premiere in the February 2022 National Arts Month. In their final stages of composition, a film documentary chronicling the Tales From Mindanao creative process and its transcreation sets its premiere also during the Arts Month with duyogAgus, the IPAG Music album of original compositions from its musicals. (Grant: CCP Cultural Exchange)

Performance pedagogy and an institutionalized process are documented in two books Directing on the Fringes and Performance Level (prefaced by eminent Aubrey Mellor) launched last February.

Our pedagogy engaged major Philippine universities, among these U.P. Diliman, St. Benilde, Liceo U, Don Mariano Marcos (La Union), and the MSU-IIT as we spread our presence. Knowledge portals opened by way of various keynote lectures in international confabs, the iconic UP Writers Workshop (giving tribute to National Artist Amelia Lapena Bonifacio), and as Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies of four other Philippine state universities.

Still, the MSU-IIT Center for Culture and the Arts, a paradigm-shifting institution I founded in 2016, continues with its courses and programs, a slow but steady stream of graduate students completing their degrees hopefully changing mindsets in the academe.

With substance comes the intent to remold values and influence mindsets. This has always been the course of the Humanities, where the best works of Mankind are emulated.2022 will come as we equip ourselves with more dynamic deliveries.

Even as Odette and deaths have continued their deluge, we balance ourselves amidst the roaring crests!

The Divine Powers will always guide our company! 2022 — Year of the Water Tiger — will roar loud!

#inspiringipag #inspiring2022 #roar2022
(Photo credits: Bryan Lindio, Ronald Salazar, Hermie Dico, Archibald Pacana, IPAG)

We rode with the crests of the pandemic, and survived

We did not confront the pandemic. Rather, we rode the crests with it.

Drowned by anxiety, we cautiously navigated for opportunities. Breaks poured in! Creativity that birthed imagination through innovative mediums has never been this prolific. New productions, innovative means even in their raw states, shared craft and knowledge to hundreds, publications in print and digital formats, a wider reach because of the digital modality, interactions among communities possible now because of the new mediums, experiments in their raw states, the establishment of new modalities, and the performances in digital formats acknowledged to be temporary in this state of transition.

We look forward to 2022 equipped with more dynamic performance and creative deliveries. We are hopeful even as Odette and deaths have continued their deluge as we balance ourselves amidst the roaring crests! God has always been in our company!

May this Season of Blessedness inspire our lives in 2022 and onwards!

#inspiringipag

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