Don't forget, don't repeat
When I left for an extended vacation last June, the nation was on a perfunctory celebration of Independence Day.When I returned there was another celebration, a remembrance of the day the entire country was placed under martial law.
My ears were still stuffed from fifteen hours of almost non-stop flying when I joined the celebration organized by the UP Fine Arts Students Organization (UP FASO) and Pusod (The Open Organization of Cebu Visual Artists) at the Outpost restaurant.
My contribution was to have been the screening of the video of the performance piece, 'Silence Kills,' I did at the University of Montreal on the occasion of a forum on the human rights crisis in the Philippines organized by the Human Rights Center of the same university.
This did not push through.The organizers could not find an LCD projector available for use gratis. Some people were able to view it though on the laptop computer monitor. But these were just a few who stayed on after the event.
Instead of the screening I recited a very short couplet by the Punjabi poet, Ustad Daman who wrote it in reaction to the takeover of the Pakistani Army under General Ayub Khan in 1959 whose singular contribution to political science was the justification that, “. . . democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain.”
Daman wrote: “Now each day is fair and balmy / Wherever you look : the army.”
I got this quote from my transpacific companion, the book, 'The Clash of Fundamentalisms,' by Pakistanihistorian, novelist, activist and filmmaker, Tariq Ali.
Along with my contribution, the UP Serenata sang two songs, Errol 'Budoy' Marabiles also sang his hit, 'M16,'a capella, some other friends and artistic colleagues played music, but the main event for the night was clearly the performance pieces by the UP FASO.
While realizing the need to remind ourselves of the dark days of martial law and how we must struggle againsta repeat of those days, Raymund Fernandez, fine arts professor and advisor of UP FASO, told me in a conversation days after the event that the memorial was an opportunity for the UP FASO to hone their skills in the production of
performance art.
This was part of our preparation for the upcoming MindWorks in December when, as expected, performance art will comprise the bulk of that day's activity, Raymund added. The best works will then have a repeat performance during the World Monggo Day, an annual event organized by Pusod, hopefully the day after MindWorks, he said.
Performance art as an art form is especially suited for the activist bent that UP is known for. The immediacy of its spectacle-like expression and the wide variety of its expressive material and techniques that actively encompass the audience plus a mastery of metaphoric space are elements that UP students and their professors can take the most advantage of with this form. And, this is exactly what they are trying to do.
Still, Raymund says a clear grasp of content is what the students need. The martial law memorial activity served as a good learning opportunity for them as the theme was a historical event and a national experience that even today continues to impact on politics and ideology.
Students played a central role in the opposition to martial rule at that time. Hopefully students, fine arts students among them, will once more play a critical role in the present struggle. On one hand against the militarist tendencies of the current government and the continuing efforts of the ruling administration on the other to stymie all efforts at having a real representative government by cynically manipulating political institutions to serve their own selfish but ultimately destructive interests.
No comments:
Post a Comment