Leonor Goquingco’s book launched at CCP

Last Wednesday, we attended the launching of Leonor Goquingco’s book, Curtain Call, Selected Reviews 1957-2000, and when we got home and read the book, it exceeded our high expectations. Thomas Fuller said, "Good dancers have mostly better heels than heads." That certainly cannot be said of National Artist in Dance Leonor Goquingco. Dance as an art form has had a lot of detractors. In his Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales wrote, "I have the same opinion of dances that physicians have of mushrooms: The best of them are good for nothing." We wonder if St. Francis was aware that dance was the earliest form of prayer. Is a medium that gave prayer its original expression good for nothing?

Dance is the act that tells you about a country and its people. And not only is it the oldest art form, it is the only art of which our bodies are the very stuff of which it is made.

Goquingco’s dance creations and her selected reviews dispel all the negative views on both dance and the dancer. We are not exaggerating when we say that if we were to choose the National Artist who most truly represented all the varied aspects of Philippine culture, we would unhesitantly say, Leonor Orosa Goquingco. People credit me, for instance, for writing about stories on the Filipino national past time which is cockfighting. The truth is that Goquingco captured cockfighting in her Filipinescas. The same thing is true of many of our Filipino fiestas. She has even interpreted Rizal’s novels in dance.

Earlier we mentioned that dance is an art form that tells you about the country of its origin. This explains why our best known art export has for decades now been the PWU Bayanihan Dance Group and Leonor Goquingco’s Filipinescas.

To see the Bayanihan on Goquingco’s Filipinescas is to get a glimpse of the Filipino soul.

In Curtain Call, Goquingco shows another facet of her many talents. Goquingco is a great critic and writer. When she reviews a show, you see many facets of the show that you failed to see till Goquingco pointed it out. Then, you wonder how you could have missed something so obvious.

No Filipiniana collection will be complete without Goquingco’s Curtain Call. Her talent as a critic is as developed as her gift for choreogprahy.