Baler Sa Puso Ko

The sarswela (Filipino musical) that Senator Edgardo Angara commissioned me to write, Baler Sa Puso Ko, with music by Lutgardo Labad, opens on June 12, Wednesday, in Baler, Aurora. Starring are actors and singers from Repertory Philippines, the University of the Philippines College of Music, the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory of Music, and other groups. The play is directed by Frank Rivera and produced by Marcelino Cavestany. Juvenal Sanso did the stage design. The play is under the auspices of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. (I will publish the full cast list after the production, since I don’t yet have the names of the performers from Baler.)

To give you a taste of how the play goes, here are four lines from the opening scene:

Taong labing-anim na raan at siyam

Unang itinatag itong ating bayan

Ang bayan ng Baler ng mga magiting

Bayan ng bayani bayang ating-atin.

Rough English prose translation: It was 1609 when our town Baler was established, a town of heroes, a microcosm of our own heroic country. (The play on the words bayan and bayani is lost in translation.)

Although I am no poet, I wrote not just the lyrics but even the dialogue in metered and rhyming couplets or quatrains. I love a challenge. The pleasure for me is in the process of writing, not necessarily in the end product. I hope, of course, that those that watch the final product will enjoy it.

Here are excerpts from my “Playwright’s Note”:

Most of my plays belong to the genre called “speculative theater,” which is to theater what speculative fiction is to literature.

Ang Tatay Mong Kalbo and Wedding Night are totally unrealistic takes on married life. Tao and Halimaw have allegorical, fantastic characters. Josephine uses transformational theater techniques to bridge past and present. Marjorie offers alternative endings. Moro-Moro uses an impossible game of contract bridge as a metaphor for war. Marissa blurs the distinction between reality and illusion. Pito-Pito is science fiction. The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos has characters drawn from Santos’s fiction to represent various sides of his personality; in fact, I call that play a Creative Nonfictional Biography.

Baler Sa Puso Ko is my attempt to create an alternate history, with mythological characters changing what we know to be true.

Since the literary theory of the fantastic that I subscribe to is that of Tzvetan Todorov and since my favorite author is Edgar Allan Poe, I use the conventional technique of fantasy developed by Poe (which I already used in my play Marissa) to suggest that everything really happens only in the minds of the narrator, the actors, the playwright, and the audience. At the end, the audience is expected to ask the question, “What if it really happened?” This is the question asked of all works of fantasy. The answer points to what is a real, not a fantastic, conclusion: the past is what we imagine it to be.

What I have tried to do is to move the terms of reference of 400-year-old Baler from history to literature, something that Aristotle insisted on when he said that literature is more philosophical than history, that literature is more true to life than life itself.

GAWAD BAYANI NG WIKA: Wika ng Kultura at Agham, Inc. (WIKA) will announce the winners of this year’s Gawad Bayani ng Wika during its annual national conference on Aug. 20, Thursday, at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

The Gawad Bayani ng Wika is given to Filipino individuals or institutions that have done the most to propagate the use of the Filipino language in their fields of endeavor.

Among the nominees are: an elementary school teacher in the Visayas who uses Filipino to teach mathematics and who tirelessly advocates the use of the language by other teachers in her school district, a university professor who has written a number of popular books in Filipino about various aspects of popular culture, and an international scholar who has written his academic books in Filipino. (The winners have not been chosen at press time.)

“WORDS OF THE DAY” (English/Filipino) for next week’s elementary school classes: Aug. 10 Monday: 1. fly/feyu, 2. hemp/fegerung, 3. orange/fakir, 4. shrimp/fakang, 5. lion/fatek, 6. mahogany/falendag; Aug. 11 Tuesday: 1. new/gabi [plant], 2. melon/gulay, 3. lime/gapang, 4. lily/gabot, 5. elephant/gibay, 6. strawberry/gagad; Aug. 12 Wednesday: 1. now/gabi [night], 2. weed/ginoo, 3. banana/gayak [decoration], 4. pandan/gunting, 5. soybean/giling, 6. mangosteen/gutom. The numbers after the dates indicate grade level. The dates refer to the official calendar for public elementary schools. For definitions of the words in Filipino, consult UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino.