Going global by staying home

Some years back, I wrote a stinging criticism on the Philippine participation at an ASEAN Dance Festival in Manila. The late Bing Roxas, president of the Cultural Center excoriated me and questioned my credentials.

First, I am a novelist whose work is now translated at the latest count into 27 language including Tagalog and my native Ilokano. But what does a literary man know about dance? Insight, even if he is not a choreographer or a dancer. All the arts share a common quality for which they are either appreciated or dumped. They must have originality – the end result of superior imagination.

As for dance, since the Fifties up to the Nineties, I have traveled extensively all over the world but most importantly, in my own country. I have seen our folk dances performed by the folk themselves in their own habitat and not as glamorized by either Bayanihan or Filipinescas. I have seen almost every great Western dancer in the last four decades, the classical dances of Asia also in their countries of origin. Any perceptive individual will appreciate good writing even if he is not a writer, excellent music even if he is not a composer. I say all these as a preface to what I now have to say: the Ballet Philippines presentation at the Cultural Center the other evening was extremely flawed, except for the solo numbers. I say this with sadness because our dancers are excellent and can hold their ground anywhere.

In the first place, Filipinos are born dancers. The Asian body may not have bigger bone and muscle than the Caucasian body, but it is more supple, and is capable of more contortion.

What then went wrong with the Ballet Philippines presentations? First, the choreography is not all that original. We need imaginative choreographers, more Agnes Locsins who are rooted in the rhythms of this country, who can translate movements from our folk dances into modern dance.

Some basics: Dance is motion/poetry so when a dancer stands still, he should not be onstage unless he is there as a prop or part of the background. All that running around, all those leaps and pirouettes are meaningless physical bravura if they do not contribute to the unfolding of an original vision.

How does one achieve uniqueness? As I have said again and again, we don’t have the classical dances of Asia which require years of training; almost all our folk dances are simply that – folk dances, but they have movements, themes, exuberances that modern dance can utilize so that a Filipino choreographer achieves originality as nurtured by his own roots, by his tradition.

Western technology, Japanese spirit – this I also repeat every so often as a very good guide for the creative and artistic effort. We use the technology of modern dance, but what we create must be infused with the Filipino spirit. And it is this spirit which is original, which we will then bring to the world.

Of the Ballet Philippines presentation, I particularly like Aku. Gopak was excellent but it is a Russian dance – how wonderful if the same agility was utilized in the creation of Filipino dance. Buhay was a disaster – it was too long, too boring, and to my mind, it lacked the cohesion and tension that were present in Aku.

So back to the drawing board so that all those wonderful young talents, those nimble and well-trained dancers can truly shine.

Also last week, I was treated to a Spanish and Tagalog poetry reading during the commemoration of the Pablo Neruda Centennial sponsored by De La Salle University, Instituto Cervantes and the government of Chile.

Ana Rosetti, the gifted Spanish poet, blew into town and before the poetry reading, we had an exchange of views about Jorge Luis Borges, contemporary Spanish literature, Federico Garcia Lorca and, of course, Neruda.

I had presumed all along that the Spanish in Spain is the same Spanish spoken and written in South America. It is not – there are several distinctions just as there are several Englishes today – the English in England, in America, and the English in Asia and Africa.

Apart from Ana who read her own poetry and those of Pablo Neruda, the poets Krip Yuson, Benilda Santos, Jose Lacaba, Marra Lanot, Joy Barrios and Marjorie Evasco also read their own.

Krip, who is one of our best poets in English, reads poetry very well – his deep baritone is reminiscent of Charles Laughton – he is certainly the best reader of English poetry today. Joy Barrios got the most ovation in the evening for her delightful rendition of her own poem in Tagalog.

I cite all these young writers for they are the generation that will carry forward our literature in English and Tagalog.

There are several others, particularly among the young women who are sure replacements for the old guard like Gilda Cordero Fernando and Kerima Polotan. Lakambini Sitoy, Menchu Sarmiento and her daughter, Tata Felix – oh so many of them are in the wings, working in spite of their knowledge that literature does not pay.

As I told Vince Groyon – one of our most promising novelists – his first collection of short fiction will be released this month – he must do better than us old fogies. That is the way it should always be – the younger generation becoming better than the old.

While it is necessary for writers to band together as a community and basically for emotional and psychological security, they must also be firmly grounded in criticism, not just of themselves but of other writers, if not in print at least in their own deepest and even recondite personal assessment.

Without this criticism, they cannot improve.

This requires of them great humility. And I don’t mean having to kowtow always, or compromise always for the sake of harmonious relationships. Hubris is reserved for the gods.

For cultural growth to be enhanced, we need not just originality and imagination from our artists, but the probing scrutiny of critics. This is extremely difficult for Filipinos to do – in our culture, criticism is often taken as a personal attack, and the artists who are criticized (even if they need such evaluation) are often too easily angered. A negative review is often the beginning of life-long enmity.

This should not be the case; any artist should be able to survive the most damning review, in fact, if he can be objective about his own work, he can even learn from it.

Through the years, the Orosa sisters, Leonor and Rosalinda (Baby) have recorded with great faithfulness the manifold cultural efforts in this country. For sure, they have helped a horde of aspiring artists, recognized their potential if not their achievements; Leonor has not only been scholarly in her cultural reporting – she is also a choreographer of distinction and achievement, just as Baby in her own right is an accomplished writer. I love them both dearly for they have been very kind to me particularly, but thinking of them as critics, I sometimes wish they had razor sharp talons and pens dipped deeply in acid so that they can put the phoneys and the charlatans in our cultural world in the muck where they belong.

Ditto with art critic, Alice Guillermo, who is perhaps the most politicized and rightly so of our art critics. And Rodolfo Paras Perez, that PhD from Harvard, why isn’t he writing criticism when more than any painter-writer, he has the scholarly legitimacy to do so?

We need strong opinions, even incendiary biases not just to liven up the cultural scene, but to weed out the imposters in our ranks. We need them to create a more original, a more creatively imaginative Filipino art. To paraphrase that old Latin injuction, Ubi boni tacent, malum prosperat, mediocrity flourishes where honest critics are silent.