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The English language first set foot on Philippine stages in the first
decade of the twentieth century, with the establishment of American
colonial rule in 1901. The United States, through the American
Insular Government, introduced into its new territory American
ideals and the American way of life through a nationwide
educational system, then later through the print and broadcast
media and via film. Over the course of four decades, and beyond
the end of American rule in 1946, American forms of art, plus their
English and European counterparts, were introduced through the
language and media and became accepted, assimilated, and used as
models.
Bodabil
The word comes from vaudeville, which was the first visible
theatrical influence from America. Although a French form, it had
been adapted in the United States as a show made up of assorted
entertainments. Shows comprising song-and-dance numbers, magic
and musical acts, skits and stand-up comedy, chorus girls and
comedians were first brought in to entertain the American soldiers
around the turn of the century. They entertained the native
audience as well, who found them convenient and portable
showcases for entertainment spectacles.
They also proved how limber was the Filipino entertainer, how easy
it was for him or her to catch American rhythms, and how painless
and effective a tool popular culture was in the Americanization of
the Filipino. The songs, dances, and entertainment forms of most
Filipinos until the 1960s were undeniably patterned on the American
dream. American popular culture embodied, for decades, their
images of beauty and excellence, of life and of self.
English-language Theater
Into this place and time soon came the concept of "legitimate"
theatre on legitimate (mainly indoor) stages, as distinguished from
the temporary, open-air, built-for-the-occasion, or built-for-other-
purposes stages of folk theatre. The legitimate stage, according to
American practice, was only for drama, and for access to it the
audience purchased tickets to a play that was an event in itself and
not part of a community or religious celebration. Legitimate theatre
required not only playwright, director, and actors, but also a support
organization for production, publicity, and ticket sales. Unlike the
situation in "nonlegitimate" folk theatre, where all the above might
be provided by a community, here there was as well a clear division
between performers and audience, between stage and backstage,
and between theatre and life outside.
By the 1940s and 1950s, when drama had moved out of the
classroom and onto school and legitimate stages, and Shakespeare
and the Greek tragedies had been performed in public by the Ateneo
de Manila and the UP theatre groups, playwrights such as Severino
Montano, Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero, and later Alberto S. Florentino
developed. For them, theatre was no classroom exercise, but a real
and earnest art. Severino Montano (1915-80), who had studied
drama at the University of the Philippines and in the United States
at Yale University, still considered it a tool for education, and
established the Arena Theatre at the Philippine Normal College while
he was dean of instruction. With him as director, producer, and
actor, the group staged almost two hundred performances from
1953 to 1964 throughout the country to bring "drama to the
masses" and specifically modern drama to the schools and
communities. Realizing that many communities could not provide
real stages, he had his plays presented arena-style in auditoriums
and classrooms, in meeting halls and open spaces.
Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero (b. 1917) was the major Filipino playwright in
English, with over a hundred plays to his credit, many published,
most of them staged. Guerrero's work was authentic and proper to
the times (the 1940s to the early 1960s), because his language was
that of the people he wrote about: the educated middle class, whose
concerns were faithfully reflected in his writings for the stage. His
was one of the few Filipino voices in an era of borrowed foreign
plays.
Guerrero taught at the University of the Philippines, where the
people he wrote about were learning English, along with the mores
and manners of the Americans they read about and watched in the
movies. His most popular plays include Wanted: A Chaperone
(1940), which took a traditional custom into a setting of incipient
modernity; The Three Rats (1948), the first psychological play in the
Philippine repertory; and Condemned (1943), about a man
sentenced to death, and the loves around him. His comic Movie
Artists (1940) and Half an Hour in a Convent (1934), written while
he was a student, and his first three-act play, Forsaken House
(1938), have been staged in the 1980s and 1990s, but in Tagalog
translation.
The Barangay Theatre Guild was led by the eminent film director
(and former Ateneo stage actor) Lamberto Avellana and his wife,
the actress-director Daisy H. Avellana. The group did readings on
stage and on television (e.g., Macbeth in Black), and is best known
for its historic 1955 staging of Nick Joaquin's major play, A Portrait
of the Artist as Filipino (1951), and its subsequent film version
(1966). Although this play, considered by many critics the most
important Filipino stage work in English, has been produced often,
both in the original English and in Filipino translation (Larawan,
1969), the Barangay version is considered the most authoritative,
with the actors setting the templates, so to speak, for the major
roles. The work is about two sisters and their father, an eminent
artist, living in Intramuros, the walled city, in the years just before
World War II. Its subject, the role of the past in the present, not
only echoes Nick Joaquin's continuing concerns and themes, but
resonates as well in many other works in Philippine literature.
Modern Theater
Through the educational system was pumped in, as well, the idea of
modern theatre. Students came to be conversant with Shakespeare
and Greek tragedy, with Shaw and Barrie, and later with Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams, Ibsen and Strindberg, without ever
having heard of the sarswela. The idea of theatre that came with
these dramas included proscenium stages, box sets and hand props,
the fourth wall, Stanislavsky and the Method, and even the various
later manifestations of realism, as well as Brechtian theatre and
other trends and techniques. This was all reinforced by the movies,
and later by television shows and videotapes, as well as by material
in the print media. The images of musical theatre held by the
schooled and by the young were generally not from sarswela or
from Rogelio de la Rosa-Carmen Rosales film romances, but from
the Broadway and Hollywood musical, as exemplified by the films of
Busby Berkeley, by the Ziegfield Follies, and by movie musicals from
Singing in the Rain onward. Through the movies too would come
models of heavy drama or light comedy, the classics in traditional or
new modes, schools of acting and directing, techniques of staging
and presentation. Thus, in contemporary plays, playwrights and
directors might refer to (and were certainly influenced by) the acting
of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable or situations like those of Back
Street, Gone with the Wind, and Casablanca.
The idea of theatre, its form and content, and its social function of
education and entertainment were thus, for the schooled Filipinos of
the first half of the twentieth century, shaped according to the
American model. Because of the gap between the vernacular and
the English-language theatres, there was no consciousness of the
community base of Philippine theatre, or of the forms it had taken
before the advent of English and the educational system. On the
contemporary scene, theatre in the schools is seldom in English.
Since the nationalist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
theatre in the national language, Filipino, as well as in Tagalog,
Cebuano, and other vernaculars, has taken ascendance. In English
still, however, have been the occasional musicals staged by such
schools as St. Paul's College of Manila (The Sound of Music,
Carousel, and the like). Occasionally the Ateneo's Dulaang Sibol and
Tanghalang Ateneo, and the former Teatro Filipino at the CCP, have
staged Shakespeare (Hamlet, Julius Caesar) in both English and
Filipino, with the same actors performing in both versions.
-----. Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theatre History. Quezon City, Phil. Ateneo
de Manila University Press. 1996.
Just what is the difference between drama and theatre? The simple
response is that drama is the printed text of a play while theatre refers to the
actual production of the play text on the stage.
Are plays read the same way in which novels are read? A painter speaks
directly to his or her audience through the medium of paint on canvas. The
composer, however, requires musicians to interpret his or her work. A novel
is written in order to be read. Much like the painter, the novelist or poet
speaks directly to the reader, in this case, with words, not paint. A play,
however, is not intended for a reading audience. The playwright knows that
his or her work will only be properly received by the audience in a theatre
after it has been interpreted by directors, actors, and designers. These are
the professional readers -- the theatre artists who will transform the play
text or written words into the theatrical event which will be seen and heard
in a theatre by an audience.
The actual text of the play is much less than the event of the play. It
contains only the dialogue (the words that the characters actually say),
and some stage directions (the actions performed by the characters). The
play as written by the playwright is merely a scenario which guides the
director, designers and actors. The phenomenon of theatre is experienced in
both sounds and visual images. It is alive and ephemeral -- unlike the novel,
it is of the moment -- here today, and gone tomorrow.
We see and hear a play: The word theatre derives from the Greek
word theatron, or seeing place. In Shakespeare's day people talked of going
to "hear a play" -- Hamlet says of the Players, "we'll hear a play tomorrow."
How does one begin to interpret a play? A play consists of many elements
including characters, action, language, plot, setting, costume, lighting,
gesture, and structure. When analyzing a play text, a theatre artist seeks the
answers to many questions. This quest leads to an interpretation of the play
-- an understanding of the intent of the playwright coupled with a conceptual
approach that makes any given production of the play unique.
Among the questions asked by the theatre artists are the following:
• a. Who are the people in the play? What does each character want?
What do they do? How do they appear to each other? How do they
feel? What does each character know? What is the background of
each character? With whom do you identify? What conflicts are
there? What values does each character have? What are their
relationships? What are their personal traits? Who has power over
whom?
• b. What is the world of the play? -- Where does it happen? When
does it happen? What are the circumstances affected by the society,
economics, culture and politics of the time? What do we learn from
the setting of the play?
• c. How is language used in the play? What is the nature of dialogue?
How are literary allusions and imagery used?
• d. What are the tempos and rhythms of the play?
• e. What is the style of the play?
• f. What happens in the play? What is the difference between physical
action and psychological action?
• g. What is the structure of the play? What techniques does the
playwright use?
• h. What are the ideas expressed in the play? What is the playwright
telling us about the world and ourselves?
Elements of
Literature Search
Foreshadowing: Foreshadowing is
another important element of literature that
is applied as hints or clues to suggest what
will happen later in the story. It creates
suspense and encourages the reader to go
on and find out more about the event that
is being foreshadowed.Foreshadowing is
used to make a narrative more authentic.
Elements of Poetry
Style: Style refers to the way the poem is written. Poems are written
in various styles, such as free verse, ballad, sonnet, etc., which
have different meters and number of stanzas.
Theme: Like other forms of literature, poetry has a theme of its own.
Theme contains the message, point of view and idea of the poem.