Staging the Precarious, the Vulnerable, and the Stranger: The Stage of Filipino Director José Estrella

Sir Anril P. Tiatco, Jem R. Javier, José Estrella

Sir Anril P. Tiatco*, Jem R. Javier**, and José Estrella***

“If I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know.” (Judith Butler, Precarious Life 49)

Ariane Mnouchkine, the founding artistic director of Théâtre du Soleil in France, disproves the word production as a term for a theatre piece. In an online interview with Andrew Dickson for the Guardian, Mnouchkine remarks, “I hate the word ‘production.’ It’s a ceremony, a ritual—you should go out of the theatre more human than when you went in.” Mnouchkine’s theatre is a religious ritual like the Eucharistic celebrations of the Catholic Church, says S Anril Tiatco in the online theatre archive, The Theatre Times. Following this, the individual in a Eucharistic ritual solemnly reflects upon the teachings of the Gospel, in which every word somehow indicates how to live life to the fullest—morally and socially. Therefore, the theatre is a rehearsal for the audience to live socially and ethically.

This understanding of theatre is seldom experienced in a city like Manila or a country like the Philippines because it is considered an alternative form of storytelling, entertainment, and spectacle. Nevertheless, a theatre in the Philippines comparable to the ceremonial underpinnings of Mnouchkine may be experienced in the theatre of Josefina “José” Estrella. Her body of work has touched on issues of war, migration, and transnational engagements – which all lead to the precarity of the human individual. Therefore, Estrella’s theatre is a rehearsal for a life lived ethically.

In Precarious Life and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler argues that the condition of the human individual is one of recognizing their precariousness and vulnerability and, on the other hand, a recognition of human dependency and interdependency that brings precarity and performativity together in public assembly. This philosophical engagement is also the core of Estrella’s theatre: “as a community,” says Estrella, “we are responsible for each other, aren’t we?”

Like Butler’s writings on ethics and assembly, Estrella’s theatre follows the relational ethics of Levinas, which states that individuals cannot separate themselves from the other. To think of the self as a singular and bounded entity is arrogant and violent; nonetheless, to recognize that our exposure to otherness is an exposure that can easily be exploited. This is something we share with everyone – with another “other.” In this sense, everyone shares a sense of vulnerability, rendering us ethically responsible for these others.

Like Butler and Levinas, Estrella’s theatre is an invitation to circumspect accountability and responsibility toward the other, which we cannot ignore. Butler reminds us:

“[P]recariousness has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself … The injunction to think precariousness in terms of equality … emerges precisely from the irrefutable generalizability of this condition.” (Frames of War 22)

In October 2024, Estrella, Jem Javier, and Sir Anril Tiatco traveled to Germany for the staging of Pumpon ng mga Gunita (Bouquet of Reminiscences), a performance of memory, retracing Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal’s reminiscences of, in, and with Germany (See Figure 1). The play was an experiential learning performance about Rizal’s affection for Germany and its people. It was also site-specific work, as the staging was specific to locations that were significant to Rizal when he was a resident of Wilhelmsfeld. Finally, the Pumpon is a “documentary” performance as it is also based on the writings of Rizal (his letters to his family and friends, his poems, and his novels) and other documents written by his peers during the period of his one and a half year time in Heidelberg, particularly in Wihlemsfeld.

Figure 1. A scene from Pumpon ng mga Rosas with Filipino actor Ross Pesigan as Dr. Jose Rizal. The scene was staged in the very room where Rizal stayed during his time in Wilhelmsfeld. Photo: Courtesy of the Philippine Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany

During the almost five-hour layover at the Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, on the way back to the Philippines, a conversation about Estrella’s theatre transpired between Estrella, Tiatco, and Javier. Tiatco and Javier, Estrella’s fellow devisers and dramaturgs for Pumpon, thought the play seemed different from Estrella’s usual theatre works. However, as Estrella answered some questions that Tiatco and Javier fired away about it, eventually, they concluded that Pumpon also featured Estrella’s signature of precariousness, strangeness, and even the aesthetic of violence onstage. Rizal’s travels to Germany were a precarious periods of his life – he had no money and was dependent on the goodness of others. He was also a stranger in a foreign land – making him more vulnerable to racism and other forms of attacks from radical nationalists. His frail body was very vulnerable to the very cold winters of Europe. Tiatco and Javier realized all of these were the very images presented by the play before the audience.

The conversation was extended to Estrella’s theatre works in the past. In this document, Tiatco and Javier examine her aesthetics and poetics; conversely, Estrella also provides a self-assessment of the productions she has staged in the last twenty-five years. The conversation at the airport en route to Manila has signaled Javier and Tiatco to think of her theatre as a rehearsal not only for an ethics of care and responsibility but also an ethics based on the recognition without reconciling differences.

The Precarious Life and Estrella’s Theatre

Many of Estrella’s theatre works feature the precarity of human life, seeing the individual’s vulnerability as the condition of the contemporary world. She remarks:

“A very important characteristic of art that is exciting and meaningful or compelling to me is when it is about, or depicts, the precarity of the human condition, at any given time. Precarity is instability, volatility, and danger. I am fascinated by exploring worlds that seem contained at the outset but are actually on the precipice of utter destruction. So the question is – how will those who inhabit these worlds face such a challenge? When I staged a Filipino translation of Goethe’s Faust (translated by Rody Vera) in 2017, Gretchen was presented as a tormented figure that, despite her deep penance, the people around her accursed her, that even the Virgin Mary, when she was praying for her assistance, scornfully mocked her (see Figure 2). In Ramon Valle del Inclan’s Divinas Palabras (Divine Words), which was staged in 2002, the community members began throwing stones at the adulteress Maria Gaila when the sacristan Pedro challenged the congregation by pronouncing the divine words in Latin: ‘Let him who is free of sin cast the first stone.’”

Her most recent production, Joshua Lim So’s Pagkapit sa Hangin (Clinging to the Air), staged for the 19^th Virgin Labfest at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in June 2024,^[1] presented the vulnerability of humanity during the pandemic (See Figure 3). She chose the material because, as she stated, the play

“ primarily focused on the more vulnerable individuals in the far-flung islands of the Philippines, where access to health facilities is lacking. Because of this, the health workers’ moral dilemmas spiraled, such that they had to determine who among the infected individuals must live and who must perish.”

Another common theme in her theatre is the presentation and figuration of the stranger – the peculiar, the different, the other. A good example is the love affair between the Boy Beetle and the Butterfly, in her staging of Lorca’s unfinished play The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. In this play, the fantastical world of the insects – beetles, fireflies, and other creatures – is disrupted when a wounded butterfly accidentally enters their mystical community. Being different, the elders are convinced that the presence of the butterfly will only bring misfortunes to their paradise. However, a boy beetle is cast under a love spell, which aggravates the distrust of the beetle community members toward the strange creature.

Figure 2. In Estrella’s staging of Faust, Gretchen was presented as a tormented figure that, despite her deep penance, the people around her accursed her, that even the Virgin Mary, when she was praying for her assistance, scornfully mocked her. Photo: Courtesy of Dulaang UP

The boy beetle and some trusted friends hide the butterfly in a nest near their village. He vows to stay until the butterfly is healed. One of the boy’s companions accidentally reveals the hiding place to the community elders. They rush to the nest to protect the boy beetle and kick the stranger out of their community. Attempting to protect and rescue the butterfly, the elders accidentally kill the boy beetle. The butterfly also dies, succumbing to her wounds. In Estrella’s version, the boy beetle and the butterfly “are sent to the afterlife where all insects enjoy conviviality in a community where everyone recognizes difference” (Tiatco, Cosmopolitanism, Theatre, and the Philippines 1). Estrella presents “a utopian vision of a community in which territorial belonging and identity are transcended” (Ibid). This reverberates Dan Rebellato’s commentary in Theatre and Globalization about cosmopolitan theatre, explaining “human beings, regardless their differences, are members of a single community, and all worthy of equal moral regard” (60). Estrella notes:

“the butterfly and the beetle are allegorical characters of the contemporary world. We tend to forget there is just one humanity despite differences. The play reminds us of three things – recognition of difference, celebrating diversity, and our moral obligation of care and respect.”

Figure 3. The publicity material of Pagkapit sa Hangin for the Virgin Labfest 2024 staged at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Photo: Courtesy of Tanghalang Pilipino

Estrella also staged a children’s play Umaaraw, Umuulan, Ikinakasal ang Tikbalang (The Sun Shines Bright while it’s Raining: The Horse-like Creatures are Married), based on a short story by Gilda Cordero-Fernando titled The Magic Circle. The main character, Jepoy, has a vivid and wild imagination. The people in their small village see him as a strange little boy because community members believe his mother is an aswang (local monster) and his father is a kapre (local giant living on a tree). Together with his only friend, his dog, Jepoy travels to a different world – the underground – where local creatures considered as “strange” and “misfits” in the real world are thriving. These creatures become his friends and he finds a home there. The creatures have made him realize that his being different is not the problem but the people around him who do not care about people’s emotions and respect the value of difference (See Figure 4).

Figure 4. Jepoy and his dog Galis during the wedding of the Tikbalangs, mythical creatures in the Philippines described to be half-human and half-horse. Photo: Courtesy of Dulaang UP

Figure 5. Rosang Taba being physically bullied during the race against the Hispancialo’s Pietrado. Photo: Courtesy of Dulaang UP

There is also Kung Paano Nanalo sa Karera si Rosang Taba based on the children’s book How Rosang Taba Won a Race by Dean Alfar, which was initially staged in 2023 and had a restaging in early 2024 (See Figure 5). Rosang Taba positions the often ridiculed obese person (especially a woman) in the foreground. Commonly, these characters suffer from excessive ridicule from others, and their needs are ignored or disparaged. Estrella noted:

“A good example is Rosang Taba. The play explores both the inner turmoil involved in fatness and the external pressures exerted on fat people to conform to the perception that fat is an issue of personal responsibility and results from a lack of self-control, focusing blame on the individual, which leads to hatred, internalized oppression, and justified bullying. And so many other figures of otherness in her theatre comment and articulate that the way the world figures the stranger today is becoming a dilemma. In such a way, the other is constructed as an enemy, a threat, and an untrustworthy individual. Complement the idea of precarity, the “stranger” could be an individual or a group of people who at first believe in the fullness of their life, only to discover that any moment now, she or he or they will be plunged into chaos. Or this could be someone or a group of people already on the margins, the outcasts, brought about because of birth or some other circumstance. This character’s journey becomes the focal point of the piece. This journey may lead to the dissolution of the old world or its transformation into a (somewhat) better or just world or even more uncertainty.”

Figure 6. One of the choreographed rape scene in Nana Rosa. Photo: Kenny Paul Tapang, courtesy of Dulaang UP

Precarious Theatre: Brutally Violent

In 2019 and 2020, Estrella directed Rody Vera’s Nana Rosa (Old Rosa) (See Figure 6). She unapologetically presented how cruel the Japanese soldiers were during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The comfort women being raped by the Japanese soldiers were stylistically staged and intensely choreographed. As she puts it:

“The staging of the rape scenes was more about the repetitions and the intensity. I tried to capture the degree of depravity, the brutality of the acts, and how these eventually reduced the women into catatonic sex objects.”

The same goes with her direction of Ang Dalagita’y ‘Sang Bagay na di-Buo in 2018, the Filipino translation of Annie Ryan’s theatrical adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (See Figure 7). This one-woman performance depicted grotesquely the horrors of domestic violence, rape, and suicide, which triggered some audience members to walk out of the theatre and others to be in total shock:

“This is why I told the production company the necessity of a therapist during the show. I knew beforehand it would trigger some audience. The audience members needed to engage in debriefing. There was a post-show conversation every after a performance. One dramaturg from the team, an invited social worker, and a therapist are part of the panel to debrief the audience.”

In her adaptation of Troyanas in 2005, she asked all women characters not to cry but instead to walk bravely and naked on a pile of clothes as they see Troy being gutted by fire and their husbands, children, and grandchildren slaughtered before Agamemnon took them to slavery.

Visually, Estrella is not afraid to show suffering, pain, cruelty, and anguish almost realistically on stage – to the point that her audience becomes divided. Some find the visuals triggering their traumas, while others see them as therapeutic. She enjoys and is passionate “about a highly visual theatre, and highly sensorial, even.” She added:

“With Nana Rosa, for example, it started with the Duterte government dismantling the Comfort Woman statue along Roxas Boulevard, under false pretenses, due to pressure from the Japanese government through its embassy in Manila. That catalyst made me decide to do the piece, which was a screenplay at the time. The dwindling number of living comfort women who were still fighting for justice, issues of historical revisionism, and new generations of young Filipinos who needed to know about these atrocities – were some of the reasons why I felt we in the artistic team needed to deal with the violence head-on. It was not part of the script but all the depictions of violence were carefully researched and devised. A lengthy process was devoted with the ensemble to create and build the comfort station, including the violent scenes that happened there. A lot of attention, care, and respect was given to ensure everyone’s physical, mental and emotional safety during the whole process. I thought it was our way of honoring the comfort women. The same was true with Ang Dalagita’y ‘Sang Bagay na di-Buo.”

In addition, Estrella believes that visuals (and other sensorial forms) may come in the form of movement or dance, projections, scenic devices, and how lights and costumes are used, separately or together. How to use sound/music in non-literal ways. She commented:

“When I study text, I always think – how else can we – the artistic team – approach this idea in the text? How can this idea in the text be more powerful than words? Actors don’t always have to just speak the text. The possibilities of an empty space.”

Theatre and War in Estrella’s Works

In 2014, Estrella entangled Jean Genet’s biography, his other works, and the present Palestinian experiences in the Gaza Strip in the staging of Bilanggo ng Pag-ibig (Prisoner of Love) (See Figure 8). For her, the precarity, the visuals, and the life story of Genet are all resonating the contemporary world, even in the Philippines:

“At that time, I was not interested in a retelling of Genet’s biography. The play took inspiration from Genet’s life and works, which I then used to present striking visuals that capture terrifying images of the naturalization of the stranger as vile and as mischief. If we think of the situation today, I think the Palestinians were and still are treated as mischiefs and troublemakers. This is how the stranger or the outsider such as a migrant or a refugee is treated in another land outside the territory of his or her own nation. There is a double displacement: displacement from his or her homeland and displacement from being treated as a human community.”

Figure 7. The Girl in Ang Dalagita’y ‘sang *Bagay na di-Buo* in the finale. Photo: Adrian Begonia

Figure 8. A scene in Bilanggo ng Pag-ibig. Photo: Courtesy of Adrian Begonia

Today, the production is considered one of Estrella’s most poetic theatre pieces (Tiatco “The Theatre of José Estrella”). The play speaks of a larger community being responsible for the persecution and oppression of those who are “not-like-us,” as she commented. Generally, Bilanggo ng Pag-ibig initiated a conversation about the strangeness of the stranger (the outsider, the migrant, the foreigner, the homosexual). One may disagree with her politics of the stranger. Still, it is a starting point for re-evaluating how racism and other forms of discrimination may begin in one’s own backyard.

Figure 9. An episode in *Recoged Esta Voz.* Photo: Courtesy of Sir Anril Tiatco

In 2004, she devised a theatre piece based on and inspired by Sepharad: Voces de Exilo, a novel of the same title by Antonio Molina that deals with the Holocaust experience of the Hispanic Jews during Nazism:

“I adapted parts of Molina’s novel with some insertions of parallel Filipino experiences of displacements. The play opened with a group of Filipino migrant workers in Madrid celebrating their being Pinoys through food sharing and storytelling about the homeland. In my mind, this opening is a way to show connections between the Philippines and Spain. At the same time, I thought that violence could be caused by transnational engagements where the migrant is treated like a stranger—the outsider who should not be trusted. This, in a way, was also my criticism of the popular concept of nationalism – particularly the territorial form of nationalism. For example, the Nazis, if you remember, justified their actions by proclaiming they were just following the orders of their national government.”

In Theatre, Cosmopolitanism, and the Philippines, Tiatco explains that Estrella staged what may be deemed the first nondramatic theatre piece in Metro Manila: Recoged Esta Voz (See Figure 9). The piece was based on and inspired by the life of Miguel Hernandez, a Spanish poet imprisoned as an enemy of the Spanish government during the Spanish Civil War in the latter part of the 1930s. Some theatre conservatives walked out during the gala night and claimed it was not even “theatre” but an extravagant poetry reading. As publicized and even noted in the play’s program, the piece was not a retelling of Hernandez’s life as expected by many. The piece was a montage of images—choreographic images of the actors, the poetry of Hernandez, shadow puppetry, and video installations. The stage was bare, except for white drapes and other surreal shadows. She recalled: “I was not interested in showing a fictive world, but I was interested in showing the horrors and violence of war”

Coda: The Ethics of Care and Responsibility Towards the Other

Esterlla’s productions are highly collaborative. As experienced by Javier and Tiatco (as his constant dramaturgs-collaborators), Estrella always listens to feedback from dramaturgs, playwrights, actors, and virtually all members of the productions before arriving at a definite creative decision. One of the striking features of her plays is how the actors destroy the fourth wall – engaging with the audience occasionally, either for comic relief or to enhance storytelling and embodied discourse. Hence, there is an attempt to reconcile the linguistic capabilities of her actors with the linguistic expectations of the characters set against the linguistic landscapes of her plays.

In Faust, for example, the actor performing the titular character creatively decided to use more vulgar Filipino (Tagalog) despite the original characterization of Faust as scholarly, academic, and well-respected. By considering the audience’s socio-linguistic background, she arrived at several decisions, such as delivery, digested philosophical lines, choice of vulgar (or more familiar) language register, and choice of silence in completing the narrative. The play then, though adapted from the original, became both a translation and an original work.

Nonetheless, one theme is common to all: there are moments in the history of humanity when the human being encounters and embraces what the philosopher Hannah Arendt calls radical evil in her opus Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. In these moments, one realizes that hell on earth is real because of the loss of communal bonds and intimacy. Thus, the theatre of Estrella enables her audience to encounter this hell on earth to show humanity’s inhuman character. This affective experience compels individuals to act, move, and be ethical—to experience the stranger as someone like us or in the philosophical world of Levinas, Arendt, and Butler to experience the stranger is to experience the self.

Estrella’s theatre persuades audiences to ask themselves how much of instrumentality reduces their encounter with the stranger for self-gratifying reasons—for one’s enjoyment and pleasure. Her theatre would like to cleanse the encounter with the stranger by recuperating the human in humanity.

Estrella’s theatre reminds her audiences that violence has envisioned the stranger as the mischief—as not equivalent to the self but an object to instrumentalize, use, and even own. In her works, she shows that engagement in war, for example, is also brought by fear, insecurity, and aggression in the face of the stranger. This premise is present in her take on Troyanas (an adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women), Nana Rosa, Bilanggo ng Pag-ibig, Recoged Esta Voz, and Sepharad. Thus, Estrella reminds us that war can reduce the stranger to an object, and it forgets the human in humanity.

One thing is clear in her theatre: she has been calling for responsibility and care for the stranger—the other. Estrella’s moral discourse in her theatre implies that moral experience is rooted in the epiphany of the encounter with the stranger—discovery of the other as another human person, not as an object of one’s enjoyment, work, or possession.

Endnote

^[1] The Virgin Labfest was founded in 2005 by Rody Vera (The Writer’s Bloc), Herbie Go (Tanghalang Pilipino) and Cris Millado (Cultural Center of the Philippines). The festival was to provide performance spaces for new plays by both emerging and established playwrights in the Philippines. The festival’s highlight is the mentorship program where young and budding playwrights are trained by senior and established ones. The festival also allows new plays to be workshopped as theatre productions.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. Faber & Faber, 1963.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.

—–. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard UP, 2015.

—–. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2010.

Dickson, Andrew. “Interview: Ariane Mnouchkine and theThéâtre du Soleil: A Life in Theatre.” The Guardian Online, 12 Aug. 2012, accessed 14 November 2024. Accessed 02 October 2024.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Inifinity: an Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonse Lingis. M. Nihhof Publishers, 1979.

Rebelatto, Dan. Theatre and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Tiatco, Sir Anril P. “The Theatre of José Estrella.” The Theatre Times, 24 August 2016. Accessed 02 October 2024.

—–. Theatre, Cosmopolitanism and the Philippines: Performing Community in a World of Strangers. The U of the Philippines P, 2018.

*Sir Anril P. Tiatco is a professor of theatre and performance at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He is a member of the collective editors of Contemporary Theatre Review, associate editor for Humanities Diliman, and contributing editor of Theatre Research International. He is a practicing dramaturg and a constant collaborator of Filipino theatre director Josefina “José” Estrella. Tiatco is a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship in 2024 to research and observe the contemporary practice of dramaturgy in the United States.

**Jem R. Javier is an associate professor of Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Currently, he is involved in the UP Monolinggwal na Diksyonaryong Filipino [UP Monolingual Dictionary of Filipino] project, based on the digital text corpus of the contemporary use of Filipino, and in a collaborative project that aims to write and update the reference grammar of Filipino, funded by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino [Commission on the Filipino Language]. He is the editor of The Archive, the Journal of Philippine Linguistics. He is a practicing dramaturg and a constant collaborator of Tiatco and Filipino theatre director Josefina “José” Estrella since 2014.

***José Estrella is a professor of directing and dramaturgy at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Directing through a Fullbright Grant at Columbia University. She served as the Artistic Director of Dulaang UP and Associate Artistic Director of Tanghalang Pilipino at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She is currently the Director of the University of the Philippines Theatre Complex. Estrella also received the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2009 to research and observe the current practice of multimedia theatre in the United States.