Community Theatre

Global Perspectives

Eugene van Erven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134656356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Community theatre is an important device for communities to collectively share stories, to participate in political dialogue, and to break down the increasing exclusion of marginalised groups of citizens. It is practised all over the world by growing numbers of people.
Published at the same time as a video of the same name, this is a unique record of these theatre groups in action. Based on van Erven's own travels and experiences working with community theatre groups in six very different countries, this is the first study of their work and the methodological traditions which have developed around the world.

Chapter 1
Philippine community theatre in the 1990s

We arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport on 17 April 1997. PETA staff member Gail Billones took us in a hired jeepney through rush-hour traffic across town to the PETA office in Lantana street, Cubao, where we could safely store our equipment. The next day, we had a briefing with PETA executive director Beng Santos Cabangon, treasurer Mel Bernardo and Ernie Cloma, the energetic veteran artist-teacher who would lead the Marinduque expedition. They gave us our schedule and connected me by phone to Eli Obligacion, the coordinator there. My friend Jack Yabut, head of PETA’s marketing and promotions, then took me book shopping at the Ateneo University Press store and later his wife Hiroko, a Japanese anthropologist, showed me the ins and outs of the university library.

I spent the entire Saturday in the library before swallowing a full hit of black Manila rush-hour exhaust gas on my way to Fort Santiago, where I wanted to see PETA’s production of two Orlando Nadres plays. Nadres, a gifted writer and director who had worked with PETA in the 1970s, had died in 1991. To celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, PETA had taken two of his best-known shorter plays out of the drawer and cast several popular television and movie actors, all former PETA members, in the leading roles. Due to congested traffic and missed jeepney connections, I arrived half an hour late, catching only a glimpse of the first. The second play, Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat (‘Until Here and No Further, Thank You Very Much’) I got to see in full. It featured Joel Lamangan, now a famous film director, and an outrageous Khryss Adalia, who, I understood, had become quite a star in a local soap. Joel played an aging, repressed gay pawnshop owner. The play is set in his tastefully decorated, comfortably furnished backyard adjacent to the railroad tracks, for which the catwalk in the middle of PETA’s outdoor theatre (with the audience sitting on either side on more comfortable plastic chairs than the stiff wooden ones I remembered from 1988) was put to good use.

The play opens with Joel reading a letter from a protégé whose education he had been financing for a number of years. The student turns out to be an attractive young man, with whom Joel’s character is secretly in love. Khryss plays a transsexual houseguest, who has entered the Gay Miss Philippines contest. He displays an awesome register of mood changes and clearly is the favourite of the countless male and female gay couples in the audience. Enter the kid, who has no clue what he is walking into. Joel tries to charm him with uncle-nephew-type horseplay and beer drinking, but when he elicits no response he corners the boy for a forced kiss on the mouth, which causes the latter to escape in disgust. Equally disgusted with himself, the uncle then falls into a depression lasting several days. In the meantime, Khryss returns as the newly crowned Gay Miss Philippines, but Joel takes his frustrations out on his transsexual friend, tearing the dress and wig to pieces and humiliatingly exposing Khryss/Julie’s underwear. Having thus chased his best friend away, Joel is left to face himself in all his naked solitude. The protégé re-enters and is almost tempted to comfort his mentor, but a quick conciliatory hug is all he can muster. With lots of unresolved conflictual feelings, Joel finally symbolically releases the white balloon that Julie/Khryss had brought back for him from the contest. An obvious symbol of liberation, I could follow it for minutes as it drifted away into the night time sky over Manila Bay, while the audience around me broke into a standing ovation, reminding me what an important play this must have been for gay emancipation back in the mid-1970s in Asia’s latin, dictatorial, macho archipelago.

The Philippines and its theatre in the late 1990s

Community theatre in the Philippines has a rich history going back to pre-colonial times (Fernandez 1996). As I recorded in The Playful Revolution, it assumed explicit political overtones in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in a nationwide network of theatre workers fighting against the Marcos dictatorship. Since then, under the successive regimes of upper-class ex-housewife Corazon Aquino, of ex-general Fidel Ramos, and now of ex-moviestar Joseph Estrada, the Philippines has undergone substantial political and cultural changes, which have affected its theatre as well.

Renato Constantino (1996:99), the ageing cultural commentator of the democratic left, sounds a useful warning to ‘overrated foreign “Filipinologists”’, urging us not to ignore the unheralded efforts by Filipino intellectuals in our attempts to find local endorsement from sell-out intellectuals for our self-aggrandizing orientalist projects. Since the fall of Marcos, Constantino has continued to express concern over the fragmentation of the left as a result of the evil enemy’s disappearance while old hierarchically institutionalized inequities remain intact. By 1997, military encounters between government forces and private armies, on one side, and combat units of the communist New People’s Army or various armed bands of Muslim separatists on the other, had subsided, creating, on the surface at least, an illusion of peace. But the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates concludes otherwise:

The downtrend in politically inspired human rights abuses has been offset by human rights violations coming from other sources. While the areas of armed conflict have narrowed, the intensity of the government’s military response to the renewed armed activities of Moro rebel groups in Mindanao has led to an alarming rise in displacements. The human rights violators of the past—the police, military and paramilitary forces who were never made to account for their crimes against human rights during the Marcos and Aquino years—have not learned to respect human rights more. They have merely shifted targets: the main victims are no longer political dissenters but ordinary people in the streets; no longer suspected communist insurgents but suspected criminals and terrorists.

(PAHRA 1996:61)

And although the Philippine economy recorded spectacular annual growth rates before the 1998 Asian stock market crisis, this had not trickled down to reduce poverty or bring about a more just distribution of wealth (Buenconsejo Garcia 1994; Broad and Cavanagh 1991). Meanwhile, graft, corruption and abuse of power remain rampant throughout the archipelago at all levels of governance and business (Constantino 1996:124–132).

The Philippines of the late 1990s is a complex place, ranging from indigenous tribes trying to preserve age-old traditional ways in the Cordillera highlands in the north and Mindanao forests in the south, to rapping youngsters in the smoggy, overcrowded streets of metropolitan Manila. North American culture remains an influential yardstick for Filipinos from all walks of life, because of American-style printed and electronic media, because of air-conditioned mega malls with mirror-glass façades encroaching on the big cities, and, most importantly, because of family contacts with between 1.5 (Pertierra 1995:62) and 2.5 million Filipino immigrants in the United States and Canada (Chant and McIlwaine 1995:34, n18).

The Philippine economy relies heavily on the earnings of temporary migrants to the Middle East, Europe, and Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, almost half of whom are women (Chant and McIlwaine 1995:34). The position of many Filipinas at home and abroad is not enviable as they are frequently at the receiving end of abuse and exploitation of all kinds. To compound this, the official position of the Catholic Church, the most popular institutionalized religion in the country, remains conservative on such issues as abortion and divorce. And the fact that a woman became the first President after Marcos did little to change the predicament of the majority of women (ibid.: 40–41). Non-government-supported grass roots activities on behalf of women seem to have been more effective, although there, too, urban middle-class domination and ideological fragmentation are reported to have caused stagnation (ibid.: 42).

By 1997, the Philippine population was estimated at 70 million with almost half living in urban areas. The country’s foreign debt remained among the highest in the world and its GNP among the lowest in Asia-Pacific. Health, housing, and welfare conditions are dismal, particularly for the urban poor, at least 8 million of whom live in slums around Metro Manila but who continue to maintain cultural and kinship ties with their rural roots (Chant and McIlwaine 1995:67). Conversely, most Filipino rural residents are now connected, through migrated relatives, to life in the big city and the world beyond. For this reason, Raul Pertierra argues, contemporary Philippine cultural identity, which is simultaneously composed of ‘premodern, late modern and even postmodern elements’ (1995:14) has become ‘increasingly polymorphic and no longer confined to the accidents of its colonial past’ (ibid.: 11).

Pertierra points out that in terms of literacy levels and women’s participation in education the Philippines ranks very high internationally, but that nevertheless many schools are ‘not properly integrated with the country’s cultural, institutional, and economic requirements’ (ibid.: 75). PETA’s Ernie Cloma agrees:

There are schools in the remote areas where in one classroom there are four different grades and the teacher is teaching them all at the same time. While one is gardening, another is doing mathematical exercises, and a third is being taught how to read. What will the fourth do? Maybe drawing. All the materials come from Manila and are not adapted to regional particulars and most teachers train their students to prepare for exams, because high scores enhance the school’s reputation.¹

Ernie Cloma

Cloma, who heads PETA’s School for People’s Theatre, has been working for over two and a half decades now to change what he calls ‘the olympic mentality’ of schools and teachers, who usually do not consider creativity important:

Schooling should be about teaching you about who you are as a person and the society and culture you live in. What is the point of teaching white-collar values to people who are going to work on the land or in a factory, thereby training them, in effect, to be better and cheaper labor for the first world by not teaching them to think and decide for themselves and be critical?

PETA has been expanding its operations in the Philippines educational system since the fall of Marcos, which, ironically, coincided with the removal of drama as an elective subject from the curricula. It has therefore become an important task of PETA’s School for People’s Theatre to nurture teachers’ enthusiasm for drama through its ‘Creative Pedagogy’ programme, a special after-hours initiative designed to increase their creativity.

Ernie Cloma’s own involvement in community theatre goes back to his days as a primary school teacher in his hometown Pasig, a heavily industrialized area in Southeast Metro Manila. As a university student he had orginally been trained as a dancer, but after Martial Law was declared in September 1972 he gradually became more active in the anti-dictatorial protest movement. He remembers how several of his former pupils went on to become radical theatre organizers and some, like the legendary guerrilla poet Eman Lacaba, even went underground. He finally joined PETA in 1977 at the age of 37.

Cloma continued to teach in Pasig, acting in his spare time in PETA’s Kalinangan Ensemble productions, most of Lino Brocka’s internationally successful feature films (David, 1995), and conducting theatre workshops for children. He was politicized, he believes, through his art activism and through the radicalization in his own community:

When I was young, Pasig was still very rural; it didn’t become industrialized until the late 1960s. Back then there was still a strong sense of community, which is why the labourers were so easily organized, also because the unions came in right away with the first factories. Exploitation was rampant then. When I was already with PETA, the unions were putting up theatre groups in each barrio; these were at the vanguard of the demonstrations.

Back in the period when Ernie Cloma joined the company, PETA’s most radical members were coming up through the Metro Teen Theatre League (MTTL), a network of youth theatre groups based in different highschools around Manila. Dessa Quesada, who can be seen working alongside Ernie Cloma in the video, and Beng Santos Cabangon, PETA’s current executive director, were part of this first MTTL generation in the late 1970s.

Changes in the BITAW

From 1975 to 1985 community-based political theatre groups were spontaneously sprouting up all over the Philippines as a result of the widespread implementation of so-called ‘Basic Integrated Theater Arts Workshops’ (BITAW) in schools, progressive church parishes, universities, and grass-roots organizations (van Erven 1992:64–94). The BITAW method, a phased, modular approach to grass-roots theatre training, had been concocted from exercises adapted from Viola Spolin and Dorothy Heathcote and a philosophy inspired by the Philippine reality in combination with Liberation Theology and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But although it eventually led to a numerically strong national network of people’s theatre groups that played a significant role in the mass mobilizations against Marcos, according to Ernie Cloma BITAWs were conducted without much sense of strategy, subtlety, or self-criticism:

I first realized this in the early 1980s, when we were in Basilan helping a local group choreograph a dance for a Holy Mass. All they did were western jazz movements, Alvin Ailey and all that. So I told myself, ‘This island is so rich in authentic movements of its own; aren’t we committing cultural imperialism here?’ After that, we began to reflect more seriously on this issue and started studying local traditional theatre forms.

In the early 1980s, after several PETA artists had attended a Boal workshop in Paris, they made the same mistake once again, this time uncritically blending Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with the existing PETA workshop approach. Eventually, a hard-fought self-reflection process led to an internal split between two schools of thought. While both camps agreed that the social, political, economic and cultural conditions should always be the starting point for PETA’s theatre processes and that participants should be empowered by writing their own scripts and directing themselves, they differed on the question whether facilitators should be allowed to present their own aesthetics and perspectives. Those who disagreed were afraid they might be imposing their own ideology and artistic standards, preferring instead to only stimulate the participants’ creativity. The other camp, to which Cloma belonged, believed that it would do no harm to raise the aesthetics of the participants. ‘I give participants always an idea of my own aesthetics,’ he comments. ‘We were invited because they feel we can give them something. Growing one’s own aesthetics is also okay, but to nurture it they have to see other forms.’

PETA’s executive director Beng Santos Cabangon has a slightly different analysis of the internal conflict. She believes that in the late 1980s PETA was not really effective at integrating artist-teachers working at the regional grass roots with the more performance-oriented artists who continued to play in Manila for urban middle-class audiences:

The question arose: when you go to the regions, do you really just provide artistic consultancy and further leave it up to them, or are you intervening at the expense of imposing professional Manila-based standards on these organizations? During this period we would always invite one community organization to come perform at Fort Santiago. Some of them worked; some didn’t. But the purpose was also to show our Manila audiences what we had been doing in the regions.²

One of the most successful examples of showcasing work from the grass roots was Lin Awa (‘Wellspring of Life’), a performance by a tribal group from Lúbuagan in Mountain Province led by charismatic school teacher, elder, and performer Cirilio Bawer. To help them prepare for the Manila gig, PETA staff member Jack Yabut travelled to the tribal community, but all he did was suggest certain scenes to be shortened and adjust the blocking for the Manila stage. ‘It was beautiful and we hardly touched it,’ PETA’s artistic director Maribel Legarda recalls:

It came straight out of the community. They did their dances, which—and this is perhaps where PETA’s input could be detected—they strung together with a story. It worked, even for sophisticated Manila audiences. But later we also had a production from Laguna; a German play transposed into Komedya style, which was so forced. So, there reall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Philippine Community Theatre in the 1990s
• Chapter 2: Community Theatre in for Netherlands
• Chapter 3: Community theatre in Los Angeles
• Chapter 4: Collective Creation in Costa Rican Community Theatre
• Chapter 5: Community Theatre in Kenya
• Chapter 6: Community Theatre in Australia
• Chapter 7: Conclusion