Two for the show
The Gawad Buhay! — buhay for performing arts done live onstage — is alive and kicking. On March 26, the Philippine Legitimate Stage Artists Group, or Philstage, held its 2009 Gawad Buhay! Awards for the Performing Arts at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Last year’s awards show, the first ever, was simple, even austere. This year’s show, still at the Little Theater, was a little longer, featuring more performances and awards in more categories. But most importantly, this second edition was better attended. As a result, the applause was louder, the laughter more boisterous, the good cheer more infectious. In my report last year, I said that I expected the next year’s awards show to generate a more enthusiastic response from the performing arts community. I was not let down.
The highlight of this year’s show? It’s hard to choose. Maybe it was Candice Adea and Angel Gabriel of Ballet Philippines performing Bam Damian’s “Excavation,” a modern, athletic piece that drew oohs and aahs then wild applause. (A show feels refreshingly different when your fellow viewers are themselves performers. They reacted strongly, sometimes wildly, without the diffidence typical of the theater-going crowd.)
Or perhaps it was the classy speech of Audie Gemora, who took home the trophy for Male Lead Performance in a Musical for his role in Repertory Philippines’s Sweeney Todd. Admitting he was skeptical when Philstage first conceived of the awards — Gemora sits on the board representing Trumpets — because he suspected they would only foment the division that marked the theater scene decades ago when he began his career. Sitting in the audience that night, seeing the happy crowd made up of people from different theater groups hanging out together, he realized his fears had been unfounded.
A personal highlight was Liesl Batucan’s teary thank-you’s as she accepted the trophy for Outstanding Female Featured Performance in a Musical. Last year, she was nominated for an award and lost, but you wouldn’t have noticed it by looking at her. She went up to me after the show and thanked me profusely for being a juror, then flounced about the room like a giddy child. This year she seemed just as gleeful during the show, then broke into happy tears as she went up the stage and held her trophy. She said she was glad not so much for herself but for the occasion, that her fellows in the trade were finally getting due recognition. That seemed to be the theme of the evening: gratitude that performing artists, always at a disadvantage because of the fleetingness of their craft, were getting the affirmation they rarely ever got.
It’s been a pleasure, and a wonderful privilege, to have served as a juror these past two years. I declined the board’s invitation to continue, not because of any issues I have with the organization or the awards, but because I’ve decided to pursue a different road. I will be editing an online literary magazine that will launch soon, a task that comes on top of my full-time work as an academic. I will no longer have time to watch many of these productions, and I thought it best to decline a role I would be unable to carry out.
My thanks to the Philstage board for having me as juror these past two years, as well as to the individual member-companies for their warmth and hospitality. My warmest congratulations to the winners of the latest batch of Gawad Buhay! awards, and may there be many more in the years to come.
