Now, people may dismiss all these stuff about lost continents and past lives as great bedtime stories for sleepyheads but Labayen obviously doesn’t care. He says he is interested in everything – including things beyond human comprehension. At 50, he hasn’t stopped asking questions about the world and, most importantly, himself.
"I’m in constant search of answers. If there’s no question, I’d ask the question. If there’s no answer, I will still ask the question. But you know, my answers can’t really be answered by men... not anymore," he muses.
For an artist who has learned a long time ago to let go of fear, all this questioning is a step closer to that elusive union between the self and his art. And, judging from the way he approaches his greatest passion, it looks like Labayen has succeeded.
Watching him perform an excerpt from Another Butterfly, his signature solo, set to the music of Puccini, depicting an individual’s passage from despair to deliverance, allows us to have a deeper understanding of this artist’s motivations and his quest for perfection as far as his craft is concerned. Every movement, it seems, takes him further into his own truth, whatever that may be. This particular piece after all, he says, is his life story.
"True dancing is being in a trance. Nothing exists anymore but the experience. When I dance, my consciousness is so high that I can’t help but be in a trance. If I don’t get there, I’m not saying anything. I’m just showing off," says this award-winning San Francisco-based dancer who has successfully fused classical ballet with modern dance. The artistic director of Labayen Dance/SF is also a Beaux Arts Society of New York awardee and is one of the Filipinos cited in the Filipino American Faces of the Century.
While he requires total honesty in his craft, Labayen believes that fun doesn’t have to be cast out of the whole equation. He sees the need to change the way dance is taught to the younger generation. He says it’s fear – often disguised as discipline – that keeps the potential of young dancers locked in. "We have to put the fun in dancing first. Let’s not start with fear, or power, or ownership," says the 1997 winner of the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (or Izzy) for Choreography, the equivalent of an Oscar in the field of dance. Ironically, this dancer considers the performance part a "pain in the neck." For him, the fun part comes during rehearsals where exploration and discovery rule.
Not surprisingly, Labayen is not anymore tied to his audience’s reaction. He knows he can’t please everybody and he doesn’t care how he is received. As long as he is satisfied with his work, it’s enough. "Success and failure are the same to me. I don’t rejoice in the success, I don’t go down the hill with failure either," he says.
What’s important for this dancer is to be able to take his work to the edge, to not conform to societal standards, and to share these experiences with his viewers. The vision never stops, according to Labayen who left the country at 16 to join the American Ballet Theater in New York. "It’s even more urgent right now for me to have projects because I have something to say and have a deeper understanding of what I’m trying to say."
Labayen admits that he was a totally different person years before, "I was a real jerk, an egotistical maniac. It was I, me, myself. I was a big star and I treated people badly," he confesses.
It would take a near-death experience for Labayen to change from the artist with an attitude to a person filled with gratitude. At the prime of his career, he was struck by a motorcycle in New York which left him with severe head injuries and took him out of the dance world for two years.
"When you see yourself lying down on the gutter and you go thinking, ‘Oh, I guess it’s over,’ and your senses heightened, everything changes. There was no fear; it’s His will be done," he recalls of his experience. The next couple of years had Labayen turning his back on dance and mastering his other passion – food. He first worked at the Metropolitan Museum as a waiter before training to be a sous chef and then a nouvelle cuisine chef. All through that time, he didn’t want to think of dancing because "my muses are jealous muses. I can’t go to work and take classes at night. It’s unfair."
Like a cocoon, Labayen took his time reflecting, preparing for what was to come. When he decided to put on his dancing shoes once again, he was a changed man. To borrow a quote somewhere, like a butterfly emerging from a closed chrysalis state.
"When you are this close to death, you see life differently. Things that used to matter don’t matter anymore. What’s important is to be kind and true. Compassion is the key," says the staunch AIDS activist who is HIV-positive himself.
"As far as this disease is concerned, I have owned and loved it already; it’s mine. The denial part is over and I’ve embraced it. It’s the one that gives me strength. I’m not ashamed of it anymore and I use it as a fuel to go on instead of stopping and being scared to live or die," says Labayen, asking the media not to use his disease to promote his art.
With full acceptance and faith that everything is going to be alright, Labayen can go on doing what he does best. In the process, he keeps reinventing and rediscovering himself. What kind of discoveries has he stumbled upon, we ask. "It’s not one of those things that I can put in words or intellectualize. It’s beyond words. It’s something that just happens everyday, a constant metamorphosis," answers Labayen.
His simple pleasures? "Sleeping. You are in a perfect world when you sleep. After working, I die and then I live again." He dreams a lot, too, and even has a dream journal which he began since the accident. "When I dream, I create. I see colors, madness, insanity, ugliness. It’s a heightened sensitivity to such things but in a more poetic way," he says.
It used to frustrate him when he sees Filipinos not appreciating his craft and choosing to remain in the colonial mindset. "I’ve fought and I don’t have the energy anymore to fight. There are a lot of lies in here. People are afraid to see the truth. Art is about power here and not about talent. This is why I don’t play the game. They can erase me; it’s their world and I’ve no control over it. But they cannot erase me on the international level.
"Here, there’s a lot of insecurities. No one else wants to open the door kasi baka mabuko. As for me, I want to surround myself with excellence. I don’t want to be the excellent one in a room of stupidity. I’d rather be the stupid person in a room of excellence. If somebody does better than me, I’ll say, ‘Come on, let’s work together," says Labayen who further reveals that he doesn’t believe in the starving artist concept anymore. "I have starved already. My struggles now are artistic and not anymore personal struggles. I don’t rely on anybody for my art. I can sustain it by myself; I don’t do things for money. I’m an artist and I don’t talk politics."
He is clearly at peace with himself and with the world. In his own words, he says he has a God who loves him, who takes care of him, and an art which is the medium of his God’s expression. He has long ago chucked out worries as far as his art and health are concerned.
While he has accepted the talangka mentality of this culture, Labayen hasn’t given up on himself giving his countrymen a chance to see what he’s up to these days. Back in the country after a decade of absence, he is set to perform again with colleague Myra Beltran at Danceforumspace on May 2, 3 and 4, 8 p.m., in a dance concert entitled Enrico Labayen: Unbound in honor of the innovative choreographer Jean Georges Noverre. The concert will be staged with the assistance of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the MyraBeltranDanceForum and the Cultural Center of the Philippines (along with sponsors Bank of America, American Express, Fed Ex and Linden Suites).
"It takes 10 years to build anything, to explore and to deliver. It has to be fresh. I’m not here just to dance; I’m here because I have something to say," says Labayen who will be performing Another Butterfly, Excerpt from Arias: With Kindness Deep... (a contemporary ballet performed to the music of Friedrich Handel with Philippine Ballet Theater’s Ronilo Jaynario and Katherine Sanchez), Quiet Please, There’s a Lady... (performed by Myra Beltran and set to the music of Gabriele Faure’s Romances), Cloth (a duet commissioned by The Hans Otto Theater for the International Dance with Object Festival which won for Labayen the Outstanding Achievement in Choreography Award at the Izzys), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rites of Spring) (choreographed to Igor Stravinsky’s controversial score premiered in Paris in the early 20th century). PBT’s Lea Baduria will be performing with Labayen for the first time.
After this series of performances, Labayen will go back to the US to be guest choreographer with the Oakland Ballet and is fully booked the whole of 2004. No, he doesn’t see himself retiring. Not in his life – or in this lifetime. He says nobody’s going to stop him from living his life through his dance. It’s his whole life after all. "I’ll be dancing in my wheelchair, baby!" Labayen exclaims before breaking into a big smile.