Puppet theater mom

One of my regrets in college was not having spent more time in the class of Dr. Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, who taught playwriting to both English majors and those who had the subject as an elective. There were so few of us in class, around five at the most, such that most of the time we congregated at Ma’am Amel’s room on the first floor of the Faculty Center on Diliman campus. Among my classmates was a basketball buddy whose porch window got broken when we were going for a loose ball, a minor drama during our teenage years.

I forget now the final requirement of a one-act play I passed for the semester, suffice it to say that I earned more than just a passing grade, although at the time Ma’am Amel was already a fixture in the UP national writers’ workshop, and not only when plays were discussed. The workshop itself had enough drama both real and subliminal to last the school-year, and needed such calming influences as the now acknowledged grand dame of children’s theater, who had a house on campus with a reliable blue Beetle parked under the foliage of a rudimentary garage, like a sleeping Pong Pagong.

Well, it’s been years since I last saw my old drama teacher, but during Palm Sunday there was a performance by her Teatrong Mulat of a papet pasyon or children’s senakulo using puppets held at her own puppet theater studio near her relocated residence along Mapagkawanggawa Street in UP Village. The performance was for free, worthy exposure for anyone even remotely interested in this highly meticulous art form.

I had seen Mulat perform only once or twice way back when in the early 1980s, at the Faculty Center, where among the puppeteers was an old elementary and high school classmate, Russel Palmario, may he rest in peace, and another classmate in what was then called Asian Civilizations or a similar general education subject. What a treat it was, the show made us feel like children again although we were well past a protracted adolescence.

Ma’am Amel also recently dropped off at the old homestead on Maginhawa some of her publications — four children’s books among them the pioneering Aklat Akordyon, a storybook folded like an accordion, the concept of which is similar to the roadmap series of poetry books begun by Tita Lacambra in Davao in the ’70s.

Ang Hari na Nagsasabi ng Ssshhh... or the King who Said Ssshhh is the accordion-style book containing Ma’am Amel’s amusing children’s tale about a king who wants some peace and quiet so that he can get rid of his headache. Use of animals is integral in the story that lends itself to puppet theater; already we can see it being performed in our heads. The book benefits too from the handsome illustrations of Bernadette Solina, because as with all children’s books the visuals are as important as the narrative.

The biggest in size of these books is the original folk tale The First Brown Man and the First Brown Woman (Aklat Mulat 2008), which does Malakas and Maganda one better. Dedicated to the first woman president of the University of the Philippines Dr. Emerlinda Roman, The First Brown Man evokes pride in race but with a touch of humor, since it implies that the earlier creations of Bathala — the first white man and the first black man — were virtual rough drafts. The first brown woman emerging from a bamboo node is careful not to reveal sensitive body parts, ensuring general patronage.

Two other books were published by Aklat Adarna, and seem to be a reworking of creation myths — The Origin of the Sun and the Moon and Why the Sky is Curved.

The Origin of the Sun and Moon details how sun is male and moon is female, and explains why they rarely appear in the sky together — an age old bitter sibling rivalry.

Why the Sky is Curved is like a resolution to the crisis of Chicken Licken whose sky was falling down. It explains why the sky is curved — even the angel-higantes who held up the sagging teflon blue were of different heights.

While children’s puppet theater is by no means a fledgling art — even the national hero Jose Rizal experimented with it in his time — it seems to lack enough adherents and practitioners, not to mention exposure, and this Lapeña Bonifacio’s studio theater in UP Village hopes to correct eventually.

There is only one other children’s theater advocate who comes to mind, the ventriloquist Onie Carcamo, who has performed anywhere from children’s parties to formidable stages. We wouldn’t be surprised if Onie and Ma’am Amel had in fact teamed up for a project or two, ventriloquism being an element of puppetry.

The Mapagkawanggawa studio also would fill in the gap of the long missed Batibot puppets, like Pong Pagong and Kiko Matsing. A former Batibot mainstay, indie actor Soliman Cruz aka Mokyo, has also set up his own theater project albeit for mature audiences somewhere along Kamuning Road.

But of the elemental art of puppetry — which was seen even in a sequence of The Sound of Music dealing about the lonely yodeling goatherd — there is a definite dearth.

Unless of course we consider the dancing paper cutout dolls of the shamans in Siquijor as a kind of puppet art, but that’s another story.

Look ma, no strings, and a yodelay-hee-hoo.