Culture shock and awe: A diary of National Arts Month

By Jessica Zafra

ON SUNDAY we ran into Grace at the ballet at the Cultural Center, and on Wednesday we saw her again at the opening of the Art Fair. “Uyy, culture!” she said, and there has been an unusual number of arts and culture events in February. I know, because otherwise I would’ve seen Deadpool five times (You snobs don’t know what you’re missing. My favorite line: “Of course looks matter! Ever heard David Beckham speak?”). For a few weeks it felt like Manila was a Culture Capital, fairly teeming with plays, screenings of classic Filipino movies, art expositions, even opera.

Then I learned that February is National Arts Month, which means that when it ends we go back to being, as Noel puts it, culture lower-case.

IOLANTA AND BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Iolanta, the final opera by Tschaikovsky, made its New York debut last year, 123 years after its world premiere. It figured in a Valentine double-bill with Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which screened as the third offering in The Metropolitan Opera in HD series. The Met Opera in HD is the next best thing to a live performance: you get good seats (at Greenbelt 3 Cinemas), you watch the orchestra tuning up and the stagehands working backstage — all that’s missing are the diva tantrums and nervous breakdowns. Joyce DiDonato, who starred in the December presentation La Donna del Lago, chatted up the stars and fawned over them so hard I had to get a drink at intermission.

Iolanta and Bluebeard’s Castle are both one-act operas based on fairy tales: Iolanta is a princess who is born blind and kept in a castle in the forest by her overprotective father (It’s like Rapunzel without the hair and the witch), and Bluebeard is the bloody serial monogamist. Together they make a fascinating conversation between light and darkness, love and obsession, life and death. Unless you’re a musicologist you’re probably not going to leave the theater humming an aria from either one. The staging by film director Mariusz Trelinski is made for our attention-deficit times, with video and multimedia ready for the screen. Soprano Anna Netrebko is Iolanta, and Piotr Beczala is the count who falls in love with her at first sight. Iolanta is very pretty in a love-conquers-all kind of way, but if psychological thrillers are more your thing, there’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

Gone are the days when sopranos weighed 600 pounds and had to be hoisted onstage, and anyway they couldn’t star in Bluebeard’s Castle without breaking something. As Bluebeard’s latest wife, Nadja Michael runs and rolls across the stage in her lingerie while avoiding broken glass and singing her lungs out. She’s awesome. Mikhail Petrenko’s Bluebeard is scary and attractive enough so no one wonders why women would go off with a suspected murderer. Trelinski stages the opera like 1940s film noir, with shadows, erotic tension, the works.

The next Met Opera in HD is Bizet’s ever-popular Carmen, directed by Richard Eyre and starring Anita Rachvelishvili as Carmen, Aleksandrs Antonenko as Don Jose, and Ildar Abdrazakov as Escamillo. That’s on March 8, 6:30 p.m. at Greenbelt 3. For inquiries call CCP Sales (02) 832-3706 or Greenbelt Cinemas (02) 757-3862.

CONSTELLATIONS BY NICK PAYNE
Cris Villonco and JC Santos star in the Red Turnip Theatre production of Payne’s play about two lovers and their many alternate selves in the multiverse. Basically they stand there doing the same scene over and over, but with significant changes, and the two actors have the difficult task of shifting emotions at the drop of a pin (or the ringing of a bell, which is how we know the scene has changed). The material is very clever and I’m a sucker for parallel universes, but the staging is static and flat. After a half-hour it just seems like two people talking at each other and being self-consciously articulate. Constellations is onstage Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at Power Mac Center Spotlight, Level 2, Circuit Makati, until March 6.

RELIVE THE CLASSICS AT POWER PLANT MALL
Periodically the ABS-CBN Film Restoration Project headed by Leo Katigbak holds public screenings of restored and remastered Filipino films. The recent week-long screenings included Mike De Leon’s Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising and Kakabakaba Ka Ba?, Ishmael Bernal’s Ikaw Ay Akin, Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Karnal, and some blockbuster Star Cinema dramas of the 1990s. The restored movies are also screened at film festivals and on free TV and cable, and are available on DVD and iTunes. It’s always a blast to see Kakabakaba Ka Ba? a musical comedy that riffs on religion as the opiate of the masses.

OPERA BY BALLET PHILIPPINES
Opera was the title of the sculptor Gabriel Barredo’s exhibition at Silverlens last year, and Opera is the title of this original ballet choreographed by the Frenchman Redha. Barredo’s art has always had a very theatrical quality, like creatures under an enchantment, so it’s a perfect match.

Opera, the ballet, is in three half-hour acts, and it’s amazing. The libretto spins a needlessly complicated tale of God, Sex, Death, a pair of twins, watchers and the creation of a homunculus — like Pinocchio writing a term paper. I forgot all about the story and focused on the dancing. It’s spectacular! Opera is a celebration of the possibilities of movement — the company does things I did not think a human body could do. I imagine that during each intermission the dancers rush backstage and eat a kilo of rice, they would burn it in minutes. One particular bit involved the newborn Homunculus doing the most graceful seizures imaginable.

Carissa Adea plays the Mother, Victor Maguad and Erl Sorilla the Twins, Earl John Arisola the Creation, Jean Marc Cordero the Watcher, and Denise Parungao, Death. The nearly naked costumes are by the brilliant James Reyes. Opera had only three performances at the CCP Main Theater; surely there will be more. This ballet has to have an extended run, and then a tour. Contact Ballet Philippines at (02) 551-1003 or e-mail info@ballet.ph.

HELE SA HIWAGANG HAPIS
To cap National Arts Month, the Lav Diaz film Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (Lullaby for the Sorrowful Mystery), whose eight-hour running time makes it a Lav Diaz film of average length, won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. When people talk about Diaz’s work they tend to dwell on their gut-busting length: “Slow cinema,” they intone, knowingly.  “It’s not slow cinema,” Diaz told the media after the screening in Berlin, “it’s Cinema.”

Listen, anyone can make an eight-hour movie. But an eight-hour movie whose images are seared into your eyeballs, which takes you into a world that is equal parts strange and familiar, which feels less like entertainment than transmogrification — I don’t think so. Almost as thrilling as the win for Filipino cinema was the fact that the Berlin jury was chaired by Meryl Streep. That’s how many of us found out about the Silver Bear: the cast members posted selfies with Meryl Streep, with a “By the way, our movie won!”

Now the question is: If you screen Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis in Manila, will the general audience show up? Will it open at the mall? Of course Lav Diaz intended for it to be seen on the big screen, but given current technologies and viewing habits, what about making it available on streaming video, like an entire season of a TV series?

Meanwhile, it’s back to regular programming for us. Why can’t every month be Arts Month? No, really, I’m asking.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.

Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.