PURO ARTE: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (review)

Puro arte, the word, describes the “labor of overacting, histrionics, playfulness and purely over the top dramatics.” Puro Arte, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ thoughtful examination of its deployment (and cited as a 2013 Outstanding Book in Cultural Studies by the Association of Asian American Studies), is “a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippines imperial relations.” Puro Arte, then, theatricizes and historicizes puro arte. Filipinos pose a challenge for theater. The possibilities for theater’s conceit of transformation is troubled when its actors are a group of people who are often understood as forgotten, invisible or misrecognized. Spanning the twentieth century, Puro Arte broadens the stage in which the Filipina/o body is displayed and acts out in an admirable attempt to depict how these figures transcends history’s shadow.

The opening chapter, “Which Way to the Philippines? United Stages of Empire,” examines the dramatization of Filipino-American relations during the years leading to, during, and immediately after the Spanish-American War. Chapter two locates dance taxi halls as the site for the acting out of white male anxieties about labor displacement by Filipinos in the 1920s and 1930s. The third chapter, “Coup de Theater: The Drama of Martial Law,” is focused on dramatizations of Marcos’ dictatorial rule through the works of Sining Bayan (“Theater of the People”) and the first production of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) in the Philippines. The fourth chapter, “How in the Light of One Night Did We Come So Far?” looks at Miss Saigon (2000), Filipino actors, and the genre of the mega-musical as the intersection of frayed colonial histories involving Vietnam, France, and the U.S.

Expanding what constitutes the stages of performance, Puro Arte is not constrained by physical, national or disciplinary walls. Not only is the mythical fourth wall broken down, disciplinary walls are breached. When the colored curtain is pulled back, what is revealed is the Third World, the Global South, or the diaspora that make up how contemporary history is understood. Duped by Americans whom they thought were their allies against the Spanish but who turned out to be their colonizers, the Philippines is a country of false starts and multiple potential beginnings. This is evident in Cory Aquino’s 1986 “People Power” that overthrew Marcos and resurfaced in 2001 as “People Power 2” when Joseph Estrada was toppled by Gloria Arroyo who, now, languishes under house arrest in a military hospital with charges of electoral fraud and theft. On the surface, this is the recycling of struggles between the masses and the elites or the elites and the even more elites or dynastic turf wars under the guise of “democracy” (popular, cacique, or otherwise). Underneath the regularity of the people’s call to and for power is the desire for a just political system that has yet to find its proper voice or appropriate body. In the meantime, all it has is its ability to act out or to embody puro arte as a way to fight back. Until then, we also have Puro Arte, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burn’s book, that is foregrounded in deeply observed historical context and a well-measured assessment of culture and politics imbued with thoughtful and caring sentiment. Puro Arte is an important study not only for those with interest in theater studies but important for students and scholars of ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American history.