Angara, Alvarez present Baler zarzuela Aug. 12-15; Librettist explains plot

Baler is the “fiefdom” of the Angaras: Edgardo Angara, senator; his son Juan E. Angara, congressman; close relatives Bellaflor Angara Castillo, governor; Arturo J. Angara, mayor.

To mark Baler’s 400th anniversary this year, a zarzuela Baler ng Puso Ko will be staged by the Office of Sen. Angara and the NCCA headed by executive director Cecile Guidote Alvarez at the Baler Sports Complex Aug. 12-15, with gala night on Aug. 15.

At a press conference, Sen. Angara stressed that in this era of globalization, a return to our roots will help further establish our cultural identity. Hence, the zarzuela.

Sen. Angara, through the decades, has wielded a tremendous influence on Baler’s cultural development and on the preservation of its legacy. Baler now boasts of a children’s choir, an adult choir, and aims to establish an Academy of the Arts and an Artists’ Village in the near future.

The zarzuela is being undertaken by brilliant artists some of whom were Cecile Alvarez’s first PETA students: Librettist Isagani Cruz worked with Cecile in 1972 on the first modern zarzuela Halimaw that projected the dangers of dictatorship; composer Gardy Labad is the cultural animateur of Bohol; Mars Cavestany, who secured his doctorate in Australia, is over-all production manager; Frank Rivera, the director, founded the Sining Kambayoka. Production coup is having celebrated painter Sanso designing the sets.

The cast includes Montet Acoymo of the UP College of Music, the UST Liturgikon Choir under Eugene de los Santos, sopranos Liesel Batucan, Lara Maigue and Diana de Mesa, and Cecile’s ITI Earthsavers Dream Academy.

Herewith, librettist-literary icon Isagani Cruz explains:

“Most of my plays belong to the genre ‘speculative theater’ which is to theater what speculative fiction is to literature. Baler sa Puso Ko is my attempt to create an alternate history, with mythological characters changing what we know to be true. For example, in history the real Lt. Juan Alonzo Sayas, the Spanish commander, died in the Siege of Baler. In the play, he falls in love with Maria Amatorio, fictional daughter of the real Antero Amatorio, the gobernadorcillo who helped Teodorico Luna Novicio (cousin of Juan Luna), commander of the Katipunan forces.

“In history, the American soldiers, who helped the Spanish soldiers in Baler, were taken prisoners by the Katipuneros in one of the few Filipino victories in the Phil-US War. In the play, Americans, Spaniards and Filipinos live peacefully together, united by faith, fiesta and Christmas. To remove the reality of war casualties on all sides, a tikbalang (a demon horse but in the play, merely a lovestruck juvenile) and the dambana (nymph) interfere with human events, as gods and goddesses do in the Iliad.

“In history, a 1735 tsunami killed everybody in Baler except six families. I make Maria a direct descendant of one of the families.

“Subscribing to the literary theory of the fantastic, and having Edgar Allan Poe as my favorite author, I use Poe’s conventional technique of fantasy to suggest that everything really happens only in the mind of the narrator Maria.

“I have tried to move the terms of reference of 400-year old Baler from history to literature, a device Aristotle insisted on, saying that literature   is more philosophical than history, that literature is more true to life than life itself.

“In magical realist Philippines, history is merely a pale imitation of literature.”

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The article on me (“Cultural Icon”), in the June issue of Seniors magazine, was written by Dick Malay whose byline was inadvertently omitted.