Entablado: Theaters and Performances in the Philippines by Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco (review)

Entablado: Theaters and Performances in the Philippines gathers six essays on local theaters and performances framed by an introduction to theater and performance studies in the Philippines and a concluding chapter on the future of these fields. Using “the trope of entablado [stage] as a central idiom” (18), the book’s “itinerary” takes the reader from the performance space of the theater auditorium to the entablado of a theater festival, the streets, the river, the foyer of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), and the gathering of people engaged in an academic debate. It is a lively and critical journey: Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco assesses his chosen sites through the interdisciplinary lens of performance studies, which, consciously or not, is laden with a heavy dose of sociology’s debunking motif. In this motif existing social arrangements are not what they claim to be. Rather, these are social constructions borne out of negotiations and compromises that seek to privilege something or the other.

The first leg of this itinerary, an academic debate, sets the debunking tone. “What is Philippine Drama?” asks Nicanor Tiongson in an influential essay. Tiongson’s answer takes the essentialist nationalist position, one that dismisses foreign influences, embraces only Filipino culture, and moves people to action. Tiatco rebuts this view. He cites the diversity of Philippine theater, the heterogeneity of Philippine cultural identities, and the problem of privileging one kind of Philippine theater over others. While Tiatco appreciates the historical contingencies that shape this brand of scholarship, seeing it as a form of “strategic nationalism” that aims to “achieve certain goals against the hegemony of colonial and imperial forces” (27), he asks whether the paradigm remains relevant in the era of globalization. Shouldn’t the paradigm have changed? Can the approach remain nationalistic but still be open to other kinds of theater? Philippine-nesses, not Philippine-ness?

A similar issue gets debunked in the second leg of the book’s itinerary, one enacted in the academic halls of the University of the Philippines (UP) at Diliman where a Komedya Festival was held in 2008. The festival witnessed a move made by esteemed artists to define the komedya as a heritage marker and to install it as national theater. Tiatco again challenges the position. The call to heritage, he says, is more political than historical, an assertion that privileges the stand of influential artists and overlooks the fact that heritage is a “contested sociocultural category” (60). Moreover, despite its variations, the komedya stays anchored in the ideological battle between Catholics and Muslims. It is a theater that polarizes rather than affirms religious identities and hoists one as superior to the other. What is needed, Tiatco advocates, is the notion of a nation as home, not as a stable and fixed entity but a site of social engagement, “a community enjoying and respecting difference but at the same time attempting to situate each other on an idea of common ground” (68).

This notion of social engagement animates the third and fourth legs of this itinerary. These essays tackle two religious rituals in Pampanga that the author documents in ethnographic detail. One ritual, locally known as Apung Iru Libad, occurs on the river. The other, a Lenten ritual involving the nailing on the cross, happens on the streets. Both are performances that entail the interaction of church officials who insist on official practice and local community members who assert their own. Negotiations and compromises ensued, and these, to Tiatco, led to a sharing of power in a performance of “communal intimacy” (86). No group dominated the conduct of these events. Thus, what appears on the outside as a ritual of communal intimacy is, in fact, mired in contradictions and ambivalence. And the church tolerates them and plays its part, finding comfort perhaps in the observation of Frank Lynch, SJ, that folk Catholicism makes Filipinos better Catholics.

But what happens when solidarity never comes? The fifth leg...