The perfect place to sit

You cannot have your cake and eat it too, the elderly post-it reminder stuck on the adolescent corkboard of things to do. Surely not when resources are constantly sparse. Not for the aspiring middle class suburban emulating all things cosmopolitan. Not for the colonial bastard struggling with language. Not with penetrative scars that temporarily heal only to be pried upon sooner of later just because of habit. Not for the dog trainers who have left town. Not for the recently orphaned. Not when habit passes off as deceitful copies of love or cheap convenient replacements. Not for the alternate waiting in the wings. Not when surfing, switching, and swinging are modalities that cannot be ignored.  Not for those force-fed with litanies and manifest destiny waiting for those who have patiently combed the road of penance. Not when I suspect a tangential hint of Jacques Lacan, “I love you, but inexplicably I love something in you more than you and therefore I destroy you.” Surely, the stubborn tendency to bypass direct confrontation with the encounter is chillingly familiar to anyone raised under the protective custody of men in white frocks. Conjuring the bloodied procession of those men who ritually absolve themselves of their yearly accumulations of guilt, under the scorching high afternoon sun–bestial and divine.

And it is precisely the void that motivates anxiety, an emptiness that the body and mind automatically fills. The way we cannot resist completing a beloved’s sentence, or connecting jigsaw puzzle pieces, or fragmentary pictures, broken lines, mending holes and patch ups. The same way the stage begs to be played on; the dancer incapable of stasis and inapproachable of change.  The submissive body easily influenced and swayed. Insecure and inept.  Partial and mutilated.  Sometimes, even over-stimulated to a point of numb.

Quip if you see so deemed. At the risk of sounding like thirty something fool too young to lash out veteran dictums meanwhile too old to be naïve, the uneasy perversion of an outside looking in position is just too irresistible to pass. A position while refreshing detached voyeur appealing is also necessarily awkward. For the prying loops of context are as inescapable the way my fascination with the stage sustains hallucinations of occupying both sides.  Whether seated as a spectator or a performer, the same reading and uttering skills apply. The theater’s frame, after all can never be underestimated. It’s far to liminal to escape. And the dance happens both from where we are watching and where the watching is witnessed because the spatial given is both its point and excess. The audience might as well be seated in the performance as performers, benevolent anarchist dictators with silent scheming plot to shift the focal point of the stage. And if this were simply implied would they recognize it, or is enunciation necessary? Or would that be too blunt? Where struggle already implied, the perfect spot could be nowhere near because it is not that important.

For again we need to ask how do we consume a performance? How to consume dance? If models do exist, will it instantly point out to the lens of a little child inside a candy store, fascinated and in awe, who goes home with diabetic saccharine-induced warm and fuzzy feeling.  If consuming were an analogy to reading then Ballet Philippines’ Masterworks must have been any dork’s Saturday afternoon nightmare. Why? Because the pieces in this program refused to be read, it defies any gentrified reading and co-optation into a content-driven world. Instead it stood tall and proud, close to saying that craftsmanship was enough. The form is the medium and hollow. Inside is Grotowski’s onion void.

Opening its 40^th season, the company looks back at its own history, possibly because they say life begins at 40 that a sense of posterity must be tackled. What is most refreshing though is not to see the range of works spanning the last glorious years but historiographic direction that this sets which could might as well be a model for other Philippine dance companies who have survived despite their country. Where dance has always struggled with the written word and document, the show fills in the void of current history. Masterworks stands as a family album of the company’s repertoire featuring the works of it’s important choreographers Agnes Locsin, Tony Fabella, Edna Vida, Alden Lugnasin, Alice Reyes, Bam Damien and Denisa Reyes.

Whether a fool-proof plan to resuscitate Ballet Philippines’ glamorous past or a last ditch attempt to catch up with the rest of the hip contemporary practice in Manila, is too early to say. Nevertheless it is no secret that the company has been for the past years, struggling to keep up–no thanks to bureaucracy, no thanks to retired dance stars, no thanks to shrinking funds for art, no thanks to decrepit national art institutions, no thanks to Youtube, no thanks Hong Kong Disneyland, no thanks to poor dance education, no thanks to the ageing body, no thanks to glossy society pages that perpetually reduce dance to ‘high art’, no thanks descriptive dance reviews masquerading as criticism. Maybe it will take more than trendy fashion magazine posturing to take dance out of art’s glamorous trap. Still, is this even a fair expectation when dance has remained solely as an expressive metaphor of an idea, aesthetic craftsmanship and affective short circuit? Never fully taken apart and ignited for their discursive potentiality.

The program opens with Agnes Locsin’s seminal work Igorot, heralded back in the 90s as the defining Philippine dance moment, with its brave attempt to fuse ballet and traditional ethnic dance. Booting out snooty old fashioned culture scholars and historians who accused Locsin of near sacrilege by donning the traditional male loincloth, bahag, on the athletic bodies of her female dancers meanwhile struggling to stay en pointe. An act seemingly vulgar but equally invested with complex condition of the convoluted postcolonial where we witness the brutal supplication of a westernized ballet body to heard as ethnic, hence Filipino.  Whilst dancing on pointe, executing the standard quick virtuous feet movement reminiscent of Swan Lake’s Four Little Swans, the dancers’ upper bodies negotiated the traditional vocabulary of the ‘Igorot dance’: flexed arms spread out to the side punctuated by aggressive upward motion of the shoulders, the torso unmoved, the head stiff maintaining the regal stance of ballet almost like muted silent witnesses to the dismembered movements of their limbs that seem to have been violently attached to its center. Is this restraint or hysteria?

Locsin’s piece hints at the hysteric rupture of the ballet body struggling with its own romantic pre-historical ethnic past or dare say identity. Practically proposing a stopgap measure to assuage the traumatic wound of colonial castration, by way of amplification–reintroducing the asexualized androgynous dancer body onstage. While this piece have been constantly nitpicked for its lack of authenticity and even cultural irreverence, taking the traditional male loincloth out of its  ‘proper’ context, Locsin manages to depict the castrated female body by plugging the genital void with its obverse counterpart. Maybe the crass fusion of ballet and ethnic dance is a sort of acknowledgement of it’s own irreproachability. The charm of Locsin’s work probably lies not in its innovative movement style, that she has been popularly known for, but in its own admission of the contingent gap between ethnic and ballet. Slavoj Zizek, on the formation of national identities come to mind: “the will to gain political independence from the colonizer in the guise of new independent nation-state is the ultimate proof that the colonized ethnic group is thoroughly integrated into the ideological universe of the colonizer.”

And if Ballet Philippines, has built a reputation of forging the links between the west’s ballet and third world colonial Philippines is best seen in Edna Vida’s pop sensibility-Manila Sounds-campy dance extravaganza suite. The rather literal dance renditions of Ryan  Cayabyab’s “Mamang Kutsero,” “Limang Dipang Tao” calls out to Manila’s retro kitschy Hollywood past. And while it may easily be construed as dated and surface entertainment it stands as the most accurate. Illustrating how our bodies are gripped not between east and west but between the retro and contemporary, modern bastards that we are. Never really finding a distinctly reduced precise identity but a schizoid whose ontological charm lies in its own crisis. And it is exactly its lollipop dance sweetness that fulfills the one-to-one correspondence of form with content and the performing body.

Manila–a teeming megalopis of 12 million people, smog, serious unemployment rates, hints of global cosmopolitanism clinging on to an idealized future is Alden Lugnasin’s Swimming in the Ilog Pasig.  Un/dressed under the metaphorical cloak of swimming fishes in the city–the dancers struggle between land and water, fails in both–becoming instead lamella. The same way our beloved Pasig River has become neither land nor water.

Tempting as it may seem, the horizon of pushing content and overcoming redundancies of narrative, the choreographic project involves a kind of writing that exhaust the structure of language itself. Here it seems that it’s almost vulgar to strip the affective qualities of a dancing event. For who does not want to empathize? Even the coldest bitch ice queen will not deny the empathic lure of crying every once in while. For what are all those tear-jerker movies for?  While Denisa Reyes’ Te Deum may easily be read to depict the “struggles and aspiration of the Filipino people” under Martial seems reasonable, to do so simply misses the dramaturgical point of the piece. In fact Reyes’ Te Deum is the truly choreographic piece in this program. Seen in the precise spatial design of the stage and temporal dialogue with the music. It’s strength lies in the form. Never mind the content. Here Reyes writes dance, in space and time, exhausting its own vocabulary that pushes the viewers to reflect upon their own experience of watching. Not because of any drama, or virtuous physical feat, or pleasing music, or fantastic stage designs but specifically because it is minimalist, Spartan and redundant.

They say it is the circumstances that interest us. And curiosity that sustains us. The perfect place to sit is obviously not in the prestigious parterre boxes of the theater nor the far reaching ends of the balcony where the partially deaf old man sits but in the in between space of watching and comprehension. To stay there is as close to saying that even if I cannot empathize with you I can still love you because I love more in you that is not you.