E. Stewart's Café la Mama / Dapitan remembers Rizal in music, dance and drama

Literary icon Isagani R. Cruz mentioned the recent passing of Ellen Stewart. Ellen was angel to Off-Broadway’s Experimental Theater Club which is known in four continents as “Café La Mama”.

Café La Mama operates literally on nothing. Sometimes it has a stage  an empty room with chairs or pillows to sit on. Or nothing to sit on. Costumes are jeans, anything the players can get. When I went to La Mama there must have been 20 or at most 30 in the room  it couldn’t have accommodated more  come to see Esta Noche Teatro (a student group from Madrid) in two one-act plays by Ramon del Valle Inclan.

The actors were indeed in everyday clothes. They had no scenery, just a few crude props. But they were thoroughly professional, with a vitality and dynamism difficult to match. In a very palpable sense, the performers were the play.

Talent then, plenty of it, La Mama has. What its playwrights lack are wider opportunities for staging their works. It’s not the playwrights who need orientation but the producers. That’s the great divide.

La Mama goes back to Oriental wellsprings: Kabuki, Noh, Kathakali (a style of Indian dance), even Karate. Accepting every man’s eagerness to seek and establish his identity, La Mama advocates a return to grass roots, to nationalism. “It’s the trend all over the world,” said Ellen.

(Incidentally, when Cecile Guidote Alvarez went to New York on self-exile during the martial law regime, she worked closely with Ellen, keeping Filipino players alive.)

La Mama’s experimental theater is evolving a kind of opera from the Japanese Noh and Kabuki. “Extraordinary theater”. Ellen called it, and along with this predominantly Oriental approach are new trends in acting techniques.

The modern concept is toward a fuller  or the fullest  possible development of the actor. La Mama players are at the same time classical musicians or professional dancers or singers. If an actor can dance or sing, he must be able to earn his living by dancing or singing. In short, he should have one major and one minor skill and be conversant with a dozen others.

Ellen observed: “Verbal expression must go hand in hand with physical expression in movement, a skill acquired through acrobatics, mime, ballet, sword dancing, karate, judo, etc. The new acting techniques would tend to overcome problems of communication. You can’t connect when there are different languages being spoken all over the world.”

Ellen Stewart was such a motive force as Off-Broadway’s unsinkable impresario that she received, each week, more than four dozen scripts, hundreds of which are produced in four continents. Dramatists realize how much she deserved the name “Off-Broadway’s Mother Courage”, although there is nothing even remotely Brechtian about the name.

*      *      *

Herewith is the official announcement of Dapitan’s celebration of Rizal’s sesquicentennial birth anniversary: Dapitan, acknowledged as a Shrine City of the Philippines, was where our national hero Jose Rizal was exiled for four years (1893-1897). It was there he was most happy and productive as the people’s physician, teacher, writer, farmer, businessman, and environmentalist, serving through his incredibly diverse talents.

Last Jan. 24, the ASEAN flag was transferred to Dapitan, after having been previously installed in Tarlac (the ASEAN cultural capital for November), and last December at Fort Santiago where Rizal was imprisoned.

Cecile Guidote Alvarez, Philippine ITI President and 1972 Magsaysay awardee, who is with the organizing committee, announced performances giving deserved recognition to Rizal’s immense contribution to Dapitan, as also to Dapitan as the first ASEAN culture capital.

The program includes choral performances of ASEAN songs, ten dancing higantes representing the ASEAN nations and a presentation of Rizal’s works in Spanish and translations in Filipino, English and Cebuano, featuring Dapitan’s Rizal State College talents who will interpret the writings in dance, drama and music.

High school students of Dapitan and Zamboanga del Norte will join special media caravan workshops conducted by the Dep-Ed National Council for Children’s Television jointly with Earth Savers-UNESCO Dream Center, in liaison with the National Historical Commission and the Knights of Rizal.