A weekend of art, culture and flowers in Baguio
Panagbenga — “season of blossoming” or the Baguio Flower Festival — has been the main cultural event and tourist attraction of the City of Pines since 1995. It is held every February, although the preparations for it start much earlier. The fact that the NCCA-led annual Philippine International Arts Festival or PIAF (Alay Sining) in February is also held in Baguio, among other cities, has added a new dimension to the already exhilarating festival of flowers and the celebration of Cordillera indigenous culture.
I missed out on some of the climactic events of this year’s Panagbenga, but at least for one weekend I was witness to or became part of some of the activities related, directly or indirectly, to the Arts and Flowers Festival of my home city.
As early as January, I received an invitation from UP Baguio humanities professor Fara Manuel to talk to her class on the writing and publishing of children’s books. It was the fine arts department’s contribution to the celebration of the Arts Festival in February. The idea, according to her, was “to encourage young, passionate visual arts students to get a sneak peek into a book publication career,” and for me as a writer of children’s literature to “present the process of developing a story, how the artist and illustrator collaborate, and on the practical side, how an artist or writer gets selected, published and earns money.” I was also asked to give a personal account of my experiences as a storybook writer and my advocacies (well, the environment mainly, as I explained to the class).
The following day, there was a fund-raising screening of indie film Amigo at SM Baguio Cinema 1. Directed and edited by American independent filmmaker John Sayles, the film chronicles the experience of fictional San Isidro, a Philippine barrio taken over by a US army contingent during the Philippine-American War which erupted in 1899 and formally ended in 1902. The film had excellent production values (such as the cinematography with touches of Amorsolo and antique postcard local color), directing and editing (a brutal cockfight cuts to an encounter between American soldiers and ragtag rebels, for example), ensemble acting by those playing barrio folk and the performances of Joel Torre and Rio Locsin.
We did not stay for the open forum because we had to rush off to a book launching, but one in our group stayed behind long enough to listen to the first comment, and critical would be understating it: “Are you trying to prove in your film that the American is superior to the Filipino? This film is bullshit!” I would not have been as brash. Overall, authenticity was served. There are scenes in the film that validate what we know about the myth of America’s “Benevolent Assimilation” of the Philippines: hamletting (earlier resorted to by the Spanish colonial forces in Cuba as reconcentracion, and by the US in Vietnam half a century later), water torture as a means of extracting information (reminiscent of Camp Crame, other prisons and safehouses under martial law, and America’s Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers), and a Col. Hardacre as an avatar for the notorious Gen. Jacob “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith, the butcher of Samar. (Look for him on Wikipedia: turns out he was a scalawag, a cheat and a felon, sent to the Philippines where he would order “all insurgents shot at hand,” a prototype for the future Calleys and Palparans of US-minted COIN or counter-insurgency.)
Still, the filmmaker could be faulted for portraying the rank and file expeditionary troops led by a moderate lieutenant as almost as lovable as the Thomasites, instead of being the veterans of the extermination of Native Americans, nearly repeating the genocide by killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, mainly non-combatants, in the three-year war. The Filipino rebels, led by a long-haired former revolutionary officer, reminiscent of General Macario Sakay unjustly executed by the Americans, are shown to be a disorganized, murderous, tax-exacting band of desperados whose guerrilla activity (such as cutting the telegraphic wire that was to carry the news of armistice) ultimately leads to the death of the main character, the Filipino barrio captain played by Torre, on the gallows.
We made it to the book launch of Ubbog, the initial publication by young Baguio writers who named their literary journal after their group. Ubbog means “spring,” where streams begin to become rivers. Indeed, the briefest of prologues defines their inspiration and goal:
“This anthology springs from moments of deluge and drought. The ubbog translated into words flows in this first book.”
The journal contains 43 poems in English, Ilocano, Ibaloi, Kankanaey and Filipino, plus a short story. The youthful voices are robust, passionate, and some of them echo the oral tradition of their Cordillera forbears, while others are given to modern experimentation in form. A proper review has to be made, but for now, this excerpt from the afterword:
“Ubbog Cordillera Young Writers was formed by the fellows of the First Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop with the purpose of nurturing and sustaining young writers’ passion for literature… From then on, members of Ubbog have actively participated in poetry readings and cultural programs in the city, attended seminars and workshops of the Baguio Writers Group, and organized mini-projects in the city and the province — story writing and storytelling for high school students, poetry performances and exhibits, and a story-weaving activity to commemorate the 1990 earthquake.”
Sunday, Feb. 20, I brought my mother to the Ipitik. This was the local celebration of PIAF, held at Burnham Park’s Rose Garden, where Baguio City’s artists, artisans and craftsmen — gathered as usual by the venerable shaman of the contemporary tribe, Kidlat Tahimik — had put up an encampment of culture that included a dome-like tent stitched together from donated old clothes and assorted sheets and fabrics. Under this multicolored dome, rituals and performances were held. Throughout the festival grounds, there were art installations such as statues made from fiber and vines as well as rubber sculptures, and tall totem-like wooden pillars that were entries to the woodcarving competition. Baguio’s cowboy culture was represented by three brown ponies and their G-stringed handlers. There was also a huge canopy for the great pinikpikan cook-off, unmissable, but we could not wait for the fires to be lit.
The installation and performance artist Rene Aquitania had built, as a kind of welcome arch, a bamboo replica of the Petcha Bridge, a structure built across a river gorge in an eponymous Bontoc barrio, symbolic of an age-old tribal undertaking to connect two mountain communities. (The actual building of this bridge, a feat of indigenous engineering, was memorably captured on film using the ancient 8-mm format by UP Asian Center’s cinematographer Joseph Fortin in the late 1970s. If memory serves, I wrote the subtitles and did the narration for that documentary.)
After the welcome speeches, invocations and the oggayam chant under a blistering afternoon sun, the festivity began with the mass beating of more than a hundred gongs by young male and female dancers, some of whom went round and round a Maypole with red and white ribbons that were made to intertwine. I was left wondering how that transcultural improvisation would have struck the gathered throng, if not the ancestral spirits hovering around. One report quoted organizers on the meaning and significance of Ipitik: “…An event of cultural revitalization that magically celebrates ritual and the old ways, even as it breaks the rules of tradition and nonchalantly shrugs off all worries about invention.”
My mother asked that I bring her next to the landscapes and gardens showcase at the other end of Burnham Park. We had to pass through Burnham Lake, with rowboats galore and a hideous wooden structure extending from bank to mid-lake, a makeshift stage for some past or future event. Commerce had taken over a wide swath of the park extending from Lake Drive to the athletic bowl, but this was the Market Encounter site, and being shopkeepers ourselves, we could not begrudge those who had put up cheek-by-jowl stalls to eke out a living. What horrified me was the fate of Burnham’s old skating rink, now covered and artificially lighted. This used to be a tree-studded, bright, circular open space where we used to glide or sprint on the old-style four-wheel Winchester roller skates of yore. There also used to be a pergola whose amazing acoustics turned it into an echo chamber of the human voice.
Despite the cramped setting of the botanical and horticultural show, my mother the gardener was in her element. The colorful flowerbeds, the designer gardens with their mini-ponds, fountains and falls, and the stalls selling cuttings, cut flowers and potted plants seemed to renew her as she ambled along, a slightly bent figure aging like a sinewy bonsai tree that has weathered so many storms.
The final treat of that cultural weekend was an invitation to a critics’ preview of Dulaang UP Baguio’s Sa Kabilang Ibayo, Rommel Rodriguez’s play adaptation of the Bikol epic Ibalon, directed by Dennis Gutierrez, choreographed by Audi Colongon, and set to music by the formidable Carol Bello of world music and Orosman at Zafira fame. That performance by the UPB group should be getting rave reviews in the days to come.
