How can artistic spaces help us negotiate our distance from a global climate threat, and what does it mean to move past the individual when seeking concrete solutions? These vexing questions animate Mga Anak ng Unos, a twin bill offered by Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas for its 47th theater season.
Having concluded last April 13, Rappler catches up with the top figures involved in its creation, to talk about art’s role in addressing climate change, and how theaters themselves take on the challenge of being more environmentally sustainable.
The staging presents two brand-new plays, one told through local mythology, the other through a whiplash of lived realities fractured by time — contrasting in approach, but both take a stab at painting an erratic yet incredibly critical, earnest picture of today’s climate crisis.
“It has always been a hope of mine to see works that confront emergent issues of Filipinos in sites of precarity on the Dulaang UP stage,” said Dulaang UP Artistic Director Issa Manalo Lopez, who first pitched the idea to senior resident director José Estrella three years ago.
“This issue is urgent now because we are in a climate emergency,” Lopez continued. “With the elections coming up, it is vital in our adaptation that we elect leaders who forward policies that reduce national carbon emissions and demand for climate finance as reparation of nations with highest emissions.”
Local mythology
The first play in the bifurcated staging is the mouthful “Sa Gitna ng Digmaan ng mga Mahiwagang Nilalang Laban sa Sangkatauhan,” about mythological beings who strike a deal with the gods to wage war against humans for abusing the earth.
Under the direction of Estrella, the play is penned by Palanca Hall of Famer Joshua Lim So, whose plotting is far more linear and tightly condensed than the act it precedes, and provides a note of levity in the show through pop culture lexicon, which may or may not work for a particular fraction of the audience.
But beyond its notions of inter-species coexistence, “Digmaan” mines deeper meaning in its interrogation of how state violence and corporate encroachment factor into our struggle against environmental precarity.
The play is also propelled by strong turns from Raymond Aguilar, Tristan Bite, Kris Caaya, Jasper Cabra, Exequiel Camporedondo, Sheryll Villamor Ceasico, Kenneth Charles Famy, Belle Francisco, Lee Lim, Sarina Sasaki, Jigger Sementilla, Genalyn Suelto, and Ingrid Villamarin.
It was Estrella who reached out to So late last year, asking if the playwright had any material tackling the climate crisis. “I only had a concept and nothing more, so I told her that I’ll try writing something, but if they find a different work, they should go with that,” So told Rappler.
“By the second week of December,” So continued, “we had a meeting with Anril Tiatco to formalize the commissioning of this play because they couldn’t find suitable material. And I agreed to take up the task.”
Throughout the material’s gestation period, though, So had an anxious time trying to approach a topic as broad as the climate crisis. “My initial concept was about a select group of Philippine mythological beings organizing their next national convention, in which the climate crisis would be the main agenda. I tried drafting this, but it was too static,” he said.
This, until his January trip to La Union, where he encountered The Pitak Project, from which he borrowed the form of permaculture farming used to shape the play. Then he realized that he had to recalibrate his early idea, while veering away from ecofascism.
“After redrafting the material with these new elements, Anril said it read like a completely new play,” So said. “In many ways, it is.”
Among the elements motoring the play is the myriad languages spoken by the characters, and So said it only made particular sense given the material’s nature. “Having them talk in a predominately Tagalog Filipino didn’t feel right. On top of this, I also thought the beings aren’t clueless with modernity, so they also knew English, and used contemporary words. They basically adjust to the times.”
So added, “I didn’t think this was going against who they are because there’s really no way of telling if how we perceive and document these mythological beings is exactly the same as how people believed in them hundreds if not thousands of years ago.”
Devised, sustainable theater
For the second play, “Climate in Crazies,” Lopez and co-director Tess Jamias intended to create “a multi-vocal piece that allows a queering of the climate crisis” through devising, a collaborative process where theater-makers develop a performance sans a pre-existing script.
David Finnigan’s mosaic-like theater piece Scenes from the Climate Era then became a launch pad for the play, which is led by actor-devisers Delphine Buencamino, Bong Cabrera, Herbie Go, and Ethan King.
Last year, Lopez reached out to Finnigan asking to read his plays on the climate crisis. The Australian playwright then sent Lopez his latest work, which the latter shared with Jamias and dramaturg Nikka De Torres.
“Our initial prompt was to develop a sensorial documentary theater performance on Mebuyan [the Bagobo deity of life and death] and the climate crisis,” Lopez told Rappler. “We started our meetings in January, put together our teams, and started rehearsing in February with our students.”
“With devising,” Lopez continued, “the challenge is to generate material on your feet, in creation sessions, and then the team pieces together moments from that. There is no one single author, everyone in our team, from actor-devisers, dramaturgs, designers, and student staff contributed to creating the work.”
But past the act of devising, another challenge is making the theatre-making process sustainable. “Being sustainable is inconvenient because it slows down processes, adds to expense, and systems (even waste management) are not retrofitted for sustainable practices,” Lopez noted. “It really was a wake-up call for us, as we see that the commitment to sustainability is a long-term process and we have hardly scratched the surface.”
The result is a deeply frenetic, loosely structured retelling of past, present, and possible futures that moves from one madcap crisis to another — from extreme heat to numbing cold, from plastic pollution to the foray into artificial intelligence, from fast fashion to online consumption behaviors. If you’re a tad confused or unsettled, you have reason to be.
What becomes a terrific feature in both plays, though, is the costume design, thanks in large part to Dulaang UP’s first-time collaborator Carlos Siongco, who previously worked on Tanghalang Pilipino’s Balete, another devised theater that’s not only among last year’s best but evoked a rare, stunning display of stagecraft.
Siongco’s costume work elevates the twinbill not only in terms of the color and life it pumps into every fabric and repurposed material, but the context and thought put into each character, from the local mythological creatures in “Digmaan” to the drag-like appeal of the Mother Nature incarnate, adorned with colored cellophane and breasts, in “Climate in Crazies.”
The details in the costume are also informed by a series of workshops on sustainable design for theater that Dulaang UP organized under the university’s Office for Initiatives in Culture and the Arts, alongside Cordillera Green Network’s Rochelle Bakisan, fashion designer Maco Custodio, industrial designer Mitch Shivers, Fine Arts Professor Mel Silvestre, and production designer Raffy Tesoro.
Art and advocacy
But apart from the staging functioning as a vessel for critique and reflection, Mga Anak ng Unos also extends its space to advocacy groups that are actively engaging in campaigns concerning the climate crisis.
Among them is Greenpeace Philippines, which set up a booth at UP Diliman’s IBG-KAL Theater, where the staging was held, to gather support from show spectators for its “Courage for Climate” drive aimed at collecting at least 70,000 signatures nationwide in its effort to hold fossil fuel companies, the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions, accountable for their complicity in the climate emergency.
The signature campaign will also be used to back up Filipinos participating in international court cases against fossil fuel companies and to lobby for House Bill 9609 or the Climate Accountability (CLIMA) Act, which could be a landmark legislation for corporate climate responsibility in Southeast Asia.
The collaboration with Dulaang UP, said Greenpeace Philippines Campaigner Jefferson Chua, first took shape in a situationer dialogue about the climate crisis held on March 18 at the Diliman campus. He noted that the partnership is only a natural extension of the campaign network’s effort to seek climate justice.
“One of the difficult characteristics of the climate crisis is its sense of distance and proximity from one’s immediate experiences,” Chua told Rappler. “This might be a strange statement coming from the Philippines, which is one of the most at risk countries due to climate change, but the reality is that most of the impacts felt in the peripheries and the provinces still don’t get diffused enough in popular culture and admittedly Manila-centric imaginaries.”
Chua pointed out how artistic spaces like theater factor into initiatives pushing for climate actions. “At a certain point suffering cannot be articulated fully, which also solidifies that sense of distance and prevents effective empathy-building. Art is important precisely because it can articulate what cannot be said, and artistic representations about climate change are absolutely essential because they aim precisely to bridge that distance to help build empathy.”
He added, “It is a challenging but safe space to ask the following questions: what is my complicity in the climate crisis? Who is truly responsible for it? Can we imagine a world where justice is exacted?”
“These questions are difficult to answer because they are difficult to imagine, because of how overarching and all-pervasive our current systems have become which have been influenced deeply by corporate powers – oil and gas companies – and to a certain degree has repressed critical thinking.” – Rappler.com