Pure love and a wondrous tale

For The Philippine Star, 19 November 2012, in Art & Culture.

The third time’s the charm. Tanghalang Ateneo had staged Sintang Dalisay (Pure Love) twice before, on the Loyola Heights campus in July 2011 and February 2012, the second run improving upon the first. Now, as part of this year’s National Theater Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the production reaches a triumphant height. 

 Actually, I had already gotten to see a prototype of the play, a thirty-minute concept involving only three performers that director Ricardo Abad had taken to a Shanghai festival in 2009, performed in a conference room for a limited audience. The germ of the idea: using dance, namely, the igal of the Sama-Bajau people of Mindanao (with choreographer Matthew Santamaria), music, and a stripped-down text to tell the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The response was strongly positive. At the suggestion of the nation’s leading Shakespeare scholar, Judy Ick, Abad turned to a little-known adaptation of the play: an awit written by G. D. Roke in 1901. Recognizing that by itself the text, in a traditional Filipino form of narrative poetry, was insufficient for staging, he turned, with Guelan Luarca, to the late Rolando Tinio’s translation of the tragedy and lifted passages from it to plug the narrative gaps. (Luarca, now a college senior, submitted a play to this year’s Virgin Labfest, the CCP’s annual festival of new work. Not only was “Mga Kuneho” accepted and staged, the play was chosen with two other works to form part of next year’s “Best of 2012” set. He is an emerging talent in his own right.) Muslim names were assigned to the locale (Semporna for Verona) and the characters (such as Rashiddin and Jamila for Romeo and Juliet).