DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 24 April) — I’m no dance critic. I’m just a fan of the works of our National Artist Agnes Locsin, and I was in the audience at Samsung Theatre in Manila on Friday nigh…
After I moved to Davao in 1999, I was introduced to her by a mutual friend, Margot Marfori, and soon I found myself reading poems that she had incorporated into her dance shows. I was to write “Continuing Love” for her A Love Story, a dance tribute to her mother Carmen , a poem for Sanga , and a suite of poems for Bunga —the latter two being parts of her environment-themed series. And I became part of a handful of her friends asked over to preview her annual dance shows in Davao.
I begin with opposites. They were all over the place; there was no hiding them. The reality of what is seen onstage and the wanderings of the imagination seeing what is there and overhearing the unseen. The plainness of the tall and winding Bernal staircase and the mountain that it is. The descent of the encantada at the beginning and her ascension at the end. The one and the many: the babaylan and kababaihan; the fraile and guardia civil; the Indio rebel named Estranghero and the taong bayan.
This character is an ambiguous tool for revelations in the narrative. His description as “the Indio rebel Estranghero” in the program’s synopsis, based on the libretto by Al Santos, is an absolute given. We know nothing of him except the name and a two-word description. But he is the engine of the narrative—the prime initiator of four actions in the dance narrative.
The image of the encantada receiving the imahen for the second time and not disrobing it to reveal the anito within it is for me another rich, because mystical, and ambiguous figure in the dance. The most obvious reading of it would have the encantada yielding a space for another anito and religion. My thinking is different and three-fold.
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