Staging History: Notes on Donna Miranda’s The State of Philippine Dance 

by Angelo V. Suarez

The state of Philippine dance cld be the subject of a heated argument, surely among dance scholars & academics but more so among those more truly invested in its articulation—choreographers & dancers themselves, as well as artists in other fields who pay attention to the phenomenon of the contemporary, each in the endeavor of finding out how to proceed. The argument has in fact been taking place, but off the radars of institutional sanction—as small talk exchanged behind the closed doors of studios, as chatter shared under the roofs of homes that shelter endlessly self-fragmenting coteries, as after-show gossip whispered in theater toilets or the halls of state cultural structures.

Conceptual choreographer Donna Miranda attempts to lure the state of Philippine dance from its cave of whispers into the open, turning it from subject of hushed discussion to object of overt scrutiny. To do so she has devised The State of Philippine Dance, a solo collaged from 10 discrete works by 10 living Filipino choreographers—Paul Morales, Ava Villanueva-Ong, Jethro Pioquinto, Cristine Crame, Rhosam.Mia (choreographic duo of Mia Cabalfin & Rhosam Prudenciado, Jr.), Ma. Elena Laniog, Myra Beltran, Jose Jay Cruz, Agnes Locsin, & Denisa Reyes. Bulky as the work may seem, it is reducible to a statement or what Joseph Kosuth wld call an analytic proposition: A single body performs the state of Philippine dance, surveying choreographies across generations crucial to the emergence & dev’t of the contemporary, in a format as portable as a textbook.

Poster for TSPD, a detournement of the cover of volume 2 of Francisca Reyes Aquino's landmark 6-volume inventory of Philippine folk dances.

A cursory Google search reveals it has been almost 40 years since the contentious phrase “state of Philippine dance” last appeared in a title, owing to a 1976 article by Filipino dance historian Basilio Villaruz. That the phrase is so brazenly called attention to is expected to raise a few eyebrows, if not voices as in a shouting match. Not since National Artist Francisca Reyes Aquino’s 6-volume textual inventory of folk dances in the ‘40s has such a compendium tracing influential trends in Philippine dance been attempted—an inventory that till now is used as a reference material for compulsory reading in elementary & high school physical education, & a critical impetus for pursuing The State of Philippine Dance’s textbook-like approach. That said, Miranda’s effort is similarly anthological, & in being so it is at once sadistic & masochistic: sadistic for burdening the involved choreographers w/ the guilt of belonging to a canon, masochistic for burdening Miranda w/ accountability for the inevitable violence of canon-making.

& this violence is as physical as it is discursive. Miranda takes it upon herself to perform 10 distinct choreographies, each more-or-less 5 minutes long, inscribing into muscle-memory a multiplicity of movement vocabularies for what amounts to an hour-long variety show, as if to ask: Just how much history can one body bear? But just as any articulation of history cannot help but distort the history it desires to render—one is tempted to declare all history as no more than a generative distortion, whose melancholy consists of a dream of fidelity impossible to fulfill—Miranda’s effort too is bound to fail in its necessary reductionism.

But the reductionism is not so much a flaw as it is a condition of possibility—for what constructs an archive if not its mere indices? Ultimately The State of Philippine Dance is one such index, an index that is a gathering of indices, a reduction that is the sum of reductions. The gathering has been accomplished in 2 ways: direct correspondence w/ choreographers, in w/c they have directly supervised Miranda in studying a particular work by each of them; & resort to video documentation, viewed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines if not on YouTube. As if the representation of a choreographer’s oeuvre by one work weren’t violent enough, each choreographic work had to be subjected to the formal demands of The State of Philippine Dance w/c as a distinct choreographic work all its own functions like a kind of archi-choreography, a structure w/ its own compositional strictures.

Foremost of these strictures keeping the work together is the fact of its being a solo. The decision is simultaneously practical & polemical; in fact, its practicality—that is, its material inevitability—forms the very core of the polemic. In the essay “On becoming choreographers and the contemporary turn in Philippine dance” (https://secretdancemoves.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/on-becoming-choreographers-and-the-contemporary-turn-in-philippine-dance/)—a text that exists independently of this work but cld be said to be complementary to it—Miranda argues for the critical role the solo plays in the construction of (or the turn to) the contemporary, this format “being the point where limited resources and autonomy converge.” It has been the solo, after all, that has allowed best her generation to “produc[e] work in which the object and instrument of labor coincided in the bodies that were in our control: ourselves.” This polemic underpins the decision to present or, more accurately, to adapt the works that involve more than one body as a conventional solo.

The 1984 performance of Muybridge Frames, for instance, whose video documentation Miranda has dug up & studied at the CCP, has 7 male bodies performing Reyes’ choreography; as a component of The State of Philippine Dance, the work features a single body, a female 1 at that, w/ Miranda adapting Reyes’ choreography so it cld be carried out by her own body. W/ the quality of the audio she managed to record so bad, Miranda has had to resort to a different musical score for a proxy. Another instance: Miranda wrenches a solo from Locsin’s full-length dance drama Elias—whose video documentation from the CCP again features a male dancer playing the lead role—displacing it from that context (a narrative containing multiple dance sequences) & into The State of Philippine Dance w/ a female dancer in Miranda. The music she uses has been directly recorded from the video documentation itself, attested to by the hiss in the audio.

Possibly the most interesting formal negotiation has been w/ Cruz’s work, itself an adaptation of Beltran’s Rosas ng Maynila [Rose of Manila], w/c in itself functions like anadaptation of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s famous Rosas for having been a response to the public call for remixes of this originary text. Keeping all movement Beltran lifted & combined from De Keersmaeker intact, Cruz reduces the number of dancing bodies to 1, depriving this body not only of the chair the original has but also of visibility, shrouding the dancer w/ a blanket. The work, intended as a solo, involves a 2nd body—a naked white presence onstage, a breathing prop, machinic in its recitation of movement notations corresponding to the dancer’s movement, annotating what watchers cld only intuit based on the protrusions on the blanket’s surface & swishing of its edges. In Miranda’s adaptation, however, the naked presence becomes fantasmatic, embodied by no more than the introductory text (as each of the 10 works is introduced by Miranda w/ a script) that calls attention to its disembodied presence. The music for this, too, has been extracted by Miranda from a video documentation of Beltran’s work available on Vimeo.

Miranda’s most poignant adaptation, however, must be of I Thought. Performed in 2011, I Thought had been Beltran’s performance of protest against a piece of legislation proposed by Senator Bongbong Marcos known as the Philippine National Ballet Act of 2011 (http://senate.gov.ph/lisdata/107269172!.pdf). The proposal had sought to institute Ballet Philippines—the CCP’s official dance company in residence & arguably the country’s best-known—as the national ballet company, a designation that grants it not only prestige in addition to that already attached to the company, but increased state subsidy as well, eliminating its precarious reliance on private funding & the oppressive logic of philanthropy (the fancy neoliberal face worn by feudal patronage). The issue had been particularly delicate, for on top of its being an issue of labor in a circumstance where dancers as hardworking as BP’s cld drastically benefit from tenure & increased pay at the cost of total institutional subsumption, the dance community is particularly small (to note: among BP’s former artistic directors are Reyes & Locsin, 2 of the 10 choreographers featured in The State of Philippine Dance) & the incumbent artistic director is Morales, a former student of Beltran’s.

Screenshot of the video documentation of Beltran's "I Thought" on YouTube.

That an incongruence exists in Miranda’s adaptation needs to be pointed out. In the original, it was Beltran dancing to the rhythm of her own recorded voice, in a monologue whose anaphoric structure began every line w/ “I thought,” in a line of questioning that reconsiders the legal gesture of establishing dance’s dependence on state institutional support. Disembodied as the voice may have been in its recording, it nevertheless coincided w/ the body onstage that had been its source. W/in the context of The State of Philippine Dance, however, the audio has been lifted from a video documentation on YouTube, such that Beltran’s voice is inscribed onto Miranda’s dancing body. Inadvertently, the mis-correspondence between Beltran’s voice & Miranda’s body mirrors a difference in position: While Beltran had been against it, Miranda had been vocal in support of the proposed bill, if only as a move to shield BP from worsening precarity, contest the widespread privatization of virtually every state formation, & add meaning to a role already fulfilled by the company—for what else cld being the official resident company of the country’s official cultural center mean if not functioning as a sort of national dance company?

But the inscription is nevertheless accurate, for nothing in the monologue per se is directly a point for contention for Miranda. In framing contemporary dance’s materialist roots in the struggle for institutional independence, Miranda’s argument finds Beltran’s at its heart—“that dance,” in Beltran’s articulation of autonomy, “was its own reward and that all that mattered was the sincere passing on of dance.” Miranda traces this passing-on in The State of Philippine Dance, & by tracing it choreographically—that is, as a work of choreography—she also actively passes it on.

One powerful aspect of the original I Thought that Miranda cld not replicate was its having been performed at the historic Dance Forum, Beltran’s own studio-theater. It had been a nesting ground for the institutional autonomy that had been crucial in the construction of the contemporary in Philippine dance—a space for the pursuit of autonomy that wld lead to a chain of succeeding spaces for the same pursuit. Where Miranda learned Cruz’s choreography, for example, had been at the studio in Manila of Transitopia, the company of w/c he is founder & artistic director. It had also been at Ong’s studio at Ava’s School of Dance that she wld teach Miranda her work; & at the studio of Airdance, the company Prudenciado & Cabalfin are affiliated w/, where Miranda wld learn Rhosam.Mia’s choreography.  

Miranda rehearsing Pioquinto's choreography at home. Photo by Pioquinto himself, uploaded on Facebook.

But harking back to the originary problem of contemporary dance involving the intersection of limited resources & autonomy, the rest of the choreographers too were like Miranda in having no available studio for study & rehearsal, a question of limited resources. & so Morales wld turn to the studio of the institution of w/c he is artistic director but under whose auspices his work as a contemporary choreographer is not necessarily under; Crame wld turn to the studio of the university whose dance department she chairs despite this work having nothing to do w/ her pedagogic affiliation; Laniog wld turn to whatever space Miranda cld get her hands on—be it a studio she cld rent at a discount (for, again, the dance community is small w/c when it doesn’t translate to contempt translates to kindness) or her own cramped home, all furniture moved to the periphery to yield some workable space, 3-yr-old toddler tossed to the bedroom for extended playtime. It warrants mentioning that initial sessions between Miranda & Pioquinto were carried out on Skype before moving to the makeshift studio of her home. 

While De Singel Int’l Arts Campus’ co-production of The State of Philippine Dance has certainly smoothened this process, providing not only financial support in building the work & a space in w/c to string the work’s various components together but, even more importantly, a presentational platform that allows the work to even be visible & have an audience—the institution’s main contribution has been in making palpable the fact that the very desire for institutional independence is sustained by institutional dependence itself. Such material challenges attest to & extend her testimony that those working in contemporary dance “needed to be choreographers in order […] to become choreographers,” calling attention to the para-choreography of the multiple “administrative and organizational roles that we had to fulfill in creating an environment conducive to our propositions and practice.”

Part of this administrative para-choreography is the construction of a canon, indexing the state of the art so that every practitioner discovers how to proceed w/ composition, find out what has not been done & needs to be done. & in pursuit of what choreographically has not been & needs to be done, Miranda as a choreographer turns this para-choreography into actual choreography, affixing the infrathin that needs to be traversed for non-art to be redistributed & made sensible as art—committing as much historicizing as hystericizing in staging what has been taking place offstage. That she has made a choreographic construct that does not allow her own work to be among the canonized is not at all a gesture of humility, but the intimation of a challenge: Fact is, every choreographer is burdened w/ choreographic history; every dancing body bears the weight of a history of movement. How can one compose that w/c does not (yet) belong to the canon? To ignore this question is to turn our backs on the very possibility of the new, & one who has turned his/her back on the possibility of the new has already turned his/her back on art.

DANCE SCORES (2013)

This book is a demonstration of austerity. A mobilization of disadvantage and composition out of lack. Produced in a span of one day whilst nursing a flu, the pieces of dance in this compilation were composed as a sort of an anxious response to what are sometimes the debilitating requisites of producing a dance object. Simply put, the pieces of dance in this compilation were composed with the most minimal financial, social and bodily resources available, that is without: studio, rehearsal time, stylistic concern, producer, presenter, grant, fiscal support, culture agenda, theater, and dancing-able body. All 50 dance pieces in this book were created, produced, composed, and choreographed with no dancer in mind. And to have no dancer in mind. That is to say, this work is a pure act of choreography. An act prefaced by an open field of absences.

For orders please leave a message and we will get back to you shortly. A preview is also available here.

The State of Philippine Dance: A solo in 10 parts (forthcoming)

forthcoming



The State of Philippine Dance: A solo in 10 parts, as the title suggests, is a research and performance work depicting the current state or unstate of Philippine dance through a full length solo work featuring the choreographies of 10 of the country’s most visible voices in Philippine Dance. It is a cartographic and bodily index of the varied dance practices that are currently being presented and pursued in the Philippines. This choreography project is a critical proposal to establish a community of seemingly varied dance practices held together by a common geopolitical position, precarious identity and contested historical contexts.

Ten Filipino choreographers, from different generations, regional and aesthetic affiliations will be invited to take part in the work. Each one will be asked to choreograph a 3-5 minute solo, which will then be assembled and performed into one full-length solo piece. Underscoring the intangible and ephemeral nature of dance, the project is as much a performance work, a practice in building communities as it is an archival work. As its primary objective, the work is intended to be critical reference – a living index – on Philippine dance for the use of both international and local dance communities.

background

To date, no comprehensive survey chronicling influential movements in Philippine dance has ever been done nor attempted much less given be a central theme in a performance work in the Philippines. The last encyclopedic work in Philippine dance was a six-volume inventory of folk and social dances that National Artist For Dance Francisca Reyes-Aquino compiled in the 1940s – a monumental ethnographic work commissioned by the then Bureau of Education to become the fundamental material in educating young Filipinos of their heritage and identity and still used as mandatory text in physical education classes across the country. And yet this work has never received the critical attention or aesthetic consideration it deserves, even unfairly relegated to nothing but “physical education” and not art.

When Francisca Reyes-Aquino, National Artist for Dance, embarked on the humble task of creating a comprehensive inventory of Philippine dance, little did she know that after more than fifty years, her work remains as the single most important written work in and of dance in the Philippines. Reyes-Aquino gave to the Philippines, by way of dance and a regimen of physical instruction, a body that is to be identified as Filipino. Her brave titles -- containing nothing more than simple textual notations of local folk dances by varied ethnic communities living in the Philippines believed to be in danger of extinction -- are testaments not only of the diverse culture of the nation that has come be The Philippines but also hints at a penchant to protect that which is in danger of being lost. A loss that is not only a threat to culture, with the advent of modernization and sprawling urbanization, but more specifically the loss that is an ever-present threat to dance -- dance being the field most vulnerable to the threat of disappearance.

This project takes inspiration from the Reyes-Aquino’s work and heritage. Upholding the quality and kind of choreographic practice that she has, through her published works, laid down for current dance makers. What we can learn from Reyes-Aquino is an aspect of the choreographic so rarely articulated, if not totally taken for granted even by dance practitioners. That is, more than a field invested on the innovation of movement or development of unique gestural expressions of the body, choreography is also most importantly a means of building and cementing a community. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how she has managed to “educate” Filipino bodies of their cultural heritage and identity through her volumes of Philippine Dances, solidifying an imagined community of Filipinos bound by common traits of bodily expression. And is it not the institutionalization of her work into the county’s educational curriculum an indication that she has achieved what every choreographer aspires to? That is to have one’s work outlive oneself? As dance critic and scholar Gerald Siegmund would put it, it is “when the choreographer is absent that the choreography starts to work.”

This foregrounds the most crucial aspect of dance -- one that has been (perhaps even way too) many times pointed out as reason why dance is lagging behind all the other fields of art, for instance visual arts or literature, in terms of developing its discourse – it’s ephemerality, it's immateriality or the perception that it is “beyond language.” And this is where the field of choreography stakes its importance as a field that steps in to ‘save ‘dance from that moment of crisis or from being completely lost. For is it not only when movement is organized and set into choreography does it undermine its own loss? Is it not then that the function of a choreography or a choreographer not to create a community for dancers facing the crisis of loss?


methodology

This solo work will be comprised of 10 parts, each part corresponding to a particular choreographer’s work. Ten Filipino choreographers will be invited to take part in this project, each of who will be tasked to choreograph one part – a 3-5-minute solo material. All these solos will then be performed as a full-length solo piece entitled “The State of Philippine Dance: A solo in 10 parts.” In doing so it hopes that meaningful engagement with current crop of influential Filipino choreographers and/or dance makers through intimate artistic collaboration, exchange, one-on-one dialog and community consultations shall be achieved. Alongside this, it also hopes that this endeavor will contribute to increasing the profile and visibility of these Filipino choreographers.


* The State of Philippine Dance has received funding from the National Commission for Culture and Arts and set to be staged by 2014. Watch out for details and list of collaborators in December 2013. 

Ultimate Dance Playlist (forthcoming)

FORTHCOMING

The Ultimate Dance Playlist is a public dance project that uses the idea of a jukebox as an index for gathering people through music and dance. The project takes from the tradition of dance halls and community dance gatherings that is still being practiced in some parts of the country.

Conceptualized to be “staged” or more accurately organized in a public space where people can go in and out throughout the day or in the span of its operational hours, the Ultimate Dance Playlist (UDP) aims to transform a public venue into an institutional jukebox, playing dance music by request.

Interested parties are urged to visit Ultimate Dance Playlist's Facebook page on the days leading to the event, and post a request from any of the songs part of the publicly available playlist. All requests will be played at the event itself.

The playlist itself is comprised of songs that have the word "dance" in their titles or lyrics, and each one has been contributed by a practicing choreographer including Miranda herself. Among the contributors are Alexandra Baybutt (UK), Myra Beltran (PH), Matthew Day (AUS), Mia Cabalfin (PH), Anastassos Karahalios (GR), Noriko Kato (J), Diego Maranan (PH), Paul Morales (PH), Jethro Pioquinto (PH), Rhosam Villareal Prudencio Jr. (PH), Arco Renz (B), Emma Saunders (AUS), Erl Soriila (PH), and Iwanna Toumpakari (GR).

Facebook also provides a satellite platform for Ultimate Dance Playlist. Every song played at the designated venue during the event will be posted on the event page as it is being played, allowing audience members who are not at the venue to tune in.

Audience members are invited to listen. They may also dance to the music, but are not expected to dance.

A critical part of the modernist project in dance has been a questioning of its relationship to music. Miranda sneaks music back in, but only to make a more systemic interrogation: When listening to music, must one dance to it for him/her to dance to it, or can listening be dance? Must a dancing body even be present in a situation for the situation to become a work of dance? Is it possible that the dancing body the social corpus itself constituted by relations between choreographer, institution, and public, to which the dance--in this instance the playing of music at the space by request--is no more than an index? 

Originally conceptualized to celebrate International Dance Day which takes place last April 29, Ultimate Dance Playlist is not only an invitation to dance, but also an invitation to rethink what dance is and what networks are involved in its production.

Ultimate Dance Playlist is not only an invitation to dance, but also an invitation to rethink what dance is and what networks are involved in its production.

I have nothing to dance, and I am dancing it.

I have nothing to perform, and I am performing it.

I have nothing to choreograph, and I am choreographing it.

photo credit: James Jitsawart

A materialist take on John Cage's conceptualization of poetry, the work is a triptych lecture-performance on dance, performance and choreography in which attention is drawn away from dance as such and towards the social coordinates that frame and construct it. The lecture itself is an assisted readymade, made up of the passages lifted from John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," but with certain words replaced so the passages pertain to dance, performance and choreography instead of what they used to pertain to, which as music.

Watch the performance here. 

Meanwhile, we've also published the book version of the performance, read the foreword by Angelo V. Suarez below. For copies please leave a message and I shall get back to you shortly.

Accomplishing nothing: a foreword

One thing to say about what you are about to read is that it is a book of dance—that it is a book as dance, in w/c text is choreographed as one wld a body (of text). Another thing to say about this book that is a dance is that it is a trace, in w/c text is the refuse of a reading that in itself is a separate performance. Another thing to say about it is this trace need not be the way it currently is, tho as a trace it cannot be any other way.

What you are about to read is what is left of a lecture—a dance in 3 parts—by conceptual choreographer Donna Miranda, a performance w/ the same title as the book. Given that the work is an intervention into John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” one might as well say it is what is left of what has been left of a lecture.

1st performed in Kuala Lumpur for a residency program curated by Bilqis Hijas, Anna Wagner, & Fumi Yokoburi, sponsored by the Goethe Institut’s Tanzconnexions platform plus Arts Network Asia & the Asia-Europe Foundation’s Creative Encounters program, the work features the performer reading the outcome of Cage’s famous lecture after it has been subjected to erasure & substitution.

The substitution is simple enough: Make the lecture pertain directly to dance, choreography, & performance in the respective sections pertaining to them, by changing words that used to pertain to music or poetry to words that pertain to dance, choreography, & performance. Of course, it is not as simple to execute as it is to state the procedure. Decisions have to be made—a system of equivalences. Silences become pauses. “Silences” becomes “pauses.”

The erasure is a bit more complicated. It is as administratively demanding—in that the choreographer makes decisions—as it is menially painstaking—in that the choreographer blotches out text after text w/ her hand on the touchpad of a computer for hours. Perhaps this is the labor of the organic choreographer, if such a term cld be made: composition that is simultaneously muscular-nervous & intellectual-cerebral.  

One cld say the question of what is to be erased depends on the principle of the inverted triangle beholden to journalists: What is kept is a certain breadth, a horizontality that more or less covers the entire ground of nothing Cage sought to cover. To save the surface, details are the 1st to go. But the more interesting question is not the what but the how much, a question on w/c the what largely depends.

The how much—a vertical question—depends on how long: As most presentation platforms in the economy of global dance machinery (festivals, residencies, etc.) require presenters to conform to a particular duration, this work has been choreographed in such a way that the resultant text conforms to the demanded length of time when read out loud. The text in this book, when read out loud in the speed Miranda reads best w/ clarity to an audience, is worth 15 minutes. 

What has been erased in this current text, therefore, corresponds to what cannot be accommodated w/in those 15 minutes. The next time this work is performed, its length will change depending on what the circumstances demand. More time leads to more text leads to less erasure. Less time leads to less text leads to more erasure. 

What this work accomplishes is occupy time by talking about occupying time, by ventriloquizing Cage talking about occupying time.

This dance has nothing to say, & it is saying it. This performance has nothing to say, & it is saying it. This choreography has nothing to say, & it is saying it. & by saying so this work has said more about dance-, performance-, & choreography-making than most works of dance, performance, & choreography overflowing w/ intended pronouncements in the Philippines do. 

—Angelo V. Suarez

*"I have nothing to dance..." was first performed at Work It! Performance at Blackbox, MapKL, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last November 2012.

LAUNCH | Simple Questions for the Independent Artist: A Handbook

Capping off my three-week dance residency with Filipino poet-critic Angelo Suarez at Campbelltown Arts Centre is the launch of a little booklet we have written together with our Australian collaborators last October 29 at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia. Below is preface of the book. 

PREFACE

The recent death of Steve Jobs—visionary icon of the fetishization of rebellion that testifies to the porousness of the distinction between hegemony and counterculture, if not the latter’s complicity with the former—is as momentous a time as any to re-examine a subject position inhabited by numerous cultural workers of varying degrees of expertise that over the years has been growing more and more visible: that of the Independent Artist. The surprising number of festivals, platforms, grants, and residencies that have been sprouting all over the world that cater to the work of independent artists—in short, the amount of institutional support independent artists have been receiving of late, whether tokenist or sustainable—be it in the visual arts, music, film, theater, but especially dance, renders the task relevant not only to artists themselves and the cultural technocrats artists engage with but also to taxpayers and consumers who indirectly finance the support independent artists have been receiving and sustain an emergent economy that positions a particular mode of production within relations of cultural exchange and capital-accumulation. Simple Questions for the Independent Artist: A Handbook is one attempt at such a re-examination. The outcome of discussions between Filipino choreographer-curator Donna Miranda, Filipino poet-critic Angelo V. Suarez, and Australian dance artists Nikki Heywood, Matthew Day, Sam Chester, Alexandra Harrison, and Dean Walsh within the span of a 3-week residency—curated/provoked by Julie-Anne Long and implemented by Emma Saunders—at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Australia, the booklet is meant not so much to disprove the existence of this subject position but to investigate the conditions that allow such an aporetic construct to come into being. The investigation, however, is by no means complete, and the lack of a conclusion—consciously kept out of reach—is foregrounded in the deployment of interrogatives rather than declaratives, each question appearing simple enough to be answerable by yes or no without losing the density of critique.

The writing—let alone the printing—of Simple Questions for the Independent Artist: A Handbook would not have been possible without the support of Campbelltown Arts Centre, directed by Michael Dagostino, and its dance program, curated by Emma Saunders. Our gratitude goes to Julie-Anne Long as well, Ms. Saunders’ predecessor as curator of the dance program, for inviting Donna Miranda for participation in a residency platform whose focus is “to challenge and explore existing thinking and practices around the context of working as an independent artist, both inside and outside ‘institutions’” and for providing the impetus to critically reconsider the relationship between independent artists and institutions. That this handbook is a product of such a relationship needs to be underscored. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance extended by the Australian Embassy in Manila

The Audience Watching the Audience From 8 p.m to 8:40 p.m.

This is a work of choreography. Which is to say, this is a work of literature. The Audience Watching the Audience is an investigation into inscription—that is, how relations within a theatrical context are inscribed as well as how these relations are administered. This is a work of administration. Which is to say, this is a work of choreography. 

A series of discussions among 7 artists—Filipino choreographer-curator Donna Miranda, Filipino poet-critic Angelo V. Suarez, and Australian dance artists Sam Chester, Matthew Day, Alexandra Harrison, Nikki Heywood, and Dean Walsh—have led to this collaborative production. A fact that needs to be underscored is that these discussions were initiated by Julie-Anne Long, former curator of the dance program at Campbelltown Arts Centre, and enforced by Emma Saunders, the current curator of the said program; another way of saying it is this project was prompted by Long who then passed it on to Saunders, as per administrative procedure. The discussions are also framed within the economy of an international exchange, a type of economy that either enables artists to become mobile and productive, or disables artists to be forced into mobility when they do not choose to be mobile and into productivity where they produce works they do not necessarily choose to produce. 

As cultural workers who flit in and out of art-related institutions, the 7 artists have come up with a choreographic work in and out of the process of which they could also flit, as per administrative procedure: For 3 weeks prior to the show, The Audience Watching the Audience was conceptually and physically assembled according to a pre-set schedule that marked when each collaborator would be present—a means of allowing the work to carry on even when some of those who worked on it were absent. One could even say that part of what constructed the work—the process of construction being “a careful symphony of comings and goings,” as Harrison described it—was one’s conscious and occasional absence from it. How telling that the 7 artists have agreed to not join the audience, further administrating and inscribing themselves into the performance thru their absence. 

The Audience Watching the Audience does not consist of the halves of Campbelltown Arts Centre’s seating bank facing each other, although certainly the bank positioned that way is a sculptural sight/site to behold. Neither does The Audience Watching the Audience consist of an avoidance of spectacle, although that was certainly a thought that was considered while the work was being constructed. Instead, the work is what its title says it is: the audience watching the audience—except that the work also bares the notion that the audience in any performance is choreographed, if only by their very designation as the audience. That physically the other half of the seating bank is deployed to substitute the stage—as the locus of the watched—is meant only to underscore this gesture of designation, that the audience is administered, that those who watch are also watched. The 7 artists who have conceptualized this work will not join the audience not so much out of choice but out of inevitability: Having witnessed the work’s construction, they will end up having watched more than the rest of the audience could have watched, and therefore are disqualified from being integrated into the audience. Accommodating them into the audience will effectively change the work into “The Authors and the Audience Watching the Authors and the Audience” or other variously nuanced options. Unfortunately, an excess that the title cannot account for is the presence of someone documenting the proceedings—an excess imposed by administrative procedure—unless the audience considers the person tasked with documentation as a member of the audience as well. 

Audience members who have traveled a long way to Campbelltown Arts Centre expecting to watch moving bodies other than their own and each other’s may hopefully be comforted not only by the comfortable chairs but also by the measures of safety that have been considered—as per administrative procedure—in the arrangement of the seating bank: the sides are bordered by rails, and the steps that lead from one tier to the next have been calculated to minimize the danger of the climb. This expectation has been expected: The apparent absence of pre-choreographed bodies creates nostalgia not only for the movement onstage that audiences have become accustomed to but also the end of this apparent absence—the end being a familiar trope that signals that the performance is over. The irony of nostalgia in a theatrical context derives from the fact that “nostalgia” etymologically comes from “nostos” which means “to yearn for home,” and yet audiences leave their homes to come to Campbelltown Arts Centre precisely out of this same yearning. They come to the venue to find out that they do not have to be at the venue, but it is necessary to be at the venue to find this out. 

There was also the temptation to make the performance 10 minutes short. But as a mark of their showmanship, the 7 artists have agreed to make the work long enough to make it worth the audience’s while. The duration of the work hence is 40 minutes, starting with a cue then ending with a cue. Any member of the audience may flit in and out of the work anytime. While flitting in and out of it is nevertheless discouraged, admittedly the 7 artists would flit in and out of it themselves had they been permitted to join the audience. Who among us has not at least occasionally dropped out of a book or performance we were in the middle of reading or watching—even if the book or performance were made by ourselves? 

This is a work of criticism. Which is to say, this is a work of choreography. 

You may watch the full-length work here. 

* The Audience Watching The Audience from 8 P.M. to 8:40 P.M. is a performance-presentation developed as part of the culmination of residency at Campbelltown Arts Centre.