Manila Zoo by Eisa Jocson (review)

Entering Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall, built by the Japanese in 1936 during their colonization of Taiwan, I joined about 200 other spectators to watch a Zoom performance of Manila Zoo. Protocol dictated that we had our temperatures taken at the door, our hands sprayed with alcohol wash, and that we provided our names and telephone numbers so that the authorities would have a complete record of all who attended in case someone later became ill. The cancellation of live performances and the transition to online presentations has made us in theatre aware of what elements are fundamental and what can be tweaked and attenuated to suit another medium. This was still a communal event attended by a live audience in Taipei, even though the performers were physically separated from us and from one another. It was my first Zoom performance, for the government had recommended avoiding Zoom because of its vulnerability to surveillance from the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—something that we are hypersensitive about in Taiwan. While the masked audience filed in, five performers in onscreen boxes were doing warm-up exercises. The piece itself had grown out of such exercises, as the dancers who were quarantined in their individual homes worked out together on Zoom, and choreographer Eisa Jocson noted that the repetitive movements resembled the neurotic behavior of zoo animals. The performers proceeded to introduce themselves by name, but each was also described by Jocson as a kind of endangered animal.

Each in a bare white room, they engaged in noises and movements on all fours that were quasi animal-like, both naturalistic motions as well as the stereotypies of zoo animals, such as pacing, scratching excessively, turning in circles, and convulsing, in addition to dancing manically to the incessant beat of German electronic composer Charlotte Simon and four Filipino musicians. It is likely that if I had been watching at home by myself on a computer screen, I would have turned it off after several minutes of this. But I was with a sizeable audience that had gone to some effort to be there, and no one was moving.

Then there was what seemed to be a break, but in fact turned out to be a surprising moment of interaction between performers and audience. While the performers took a rest from their exertions, drinking water and toweling off, they directly addressed the spectators in Taipei. When the screen suddenly revealed us sitting there, some people gasped, for they had not realized that they were watching a livestream rather than a prerecorded video. The dancers asked the audience to make animal poses and sounds but received a tepid response, perhaps muffled by masks. Nonetheless, the performers’ direct contact with the audience changed the atmosphere in the room; we were now sharing the experience together in the middle of a pandemic storm whirling outside the theatre. Billed as a pandemic work-in-progress, Manila Zoo was not transformed technically to adapt to pandemic conditions, but adjusted to address those conditions and the impact they were having on Filipino performers.

To stimulate discussion and take advantage of the technology that allowed for a new combination of distance and intimacy, the actors asked for feedback. One woman asked why they were speaking in English. After a quick consultation among themselves in Tagalog, one replied that it would take too long to explain the history of the US colonization of the Philippines. I then asked them about the real animals in the Manila Zoo, which had been closed for over a year. They said that they had visited it in December 2019 to study the animals, because Jocson initially intended to draw a comparison between zoo animals held captive in cages and Filipino workers performing as cheerful pseudo-animals in Hong Kong Disneyland, but COVID-19 intervened. Instead, the comparison became one between captive animals and humans in lockdown. Jocson surmised that the animals might be coping better.

Manila Zoo is the third part of Jocson’s Happy-land series, which satirizes several aspects of...