The Wifi Body Festival on Go Magazine

I also manage an online magazine for Globe Telecom, and we have an arts and culture section. I asked Issa to write about the Wifi Body Festival for me and I published it a couple weeks ago.

The Body Evolving, Growing

by Clarissa Cecilia Mijares

Dancers and dance enthusiasts gathered once again to nurture dance and to celebrate the ever-evolving Filipino artistry in movement. The 4th Wi-Fi Body Independent Contemporary Dance Festival was held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from June 25-July 5. Ambitious and spanning two weeks, the dance festival lived up to its promise of a bigger and all-encompassing festival.

Festival Director Paul Morales together with Angel Lawenko-Baguilat and Honey Brendia –Moraga had been successful in organizing the activities for this year’s Wi-Fi. Workshops, performances and competitions were spread out for the two-week duration of the festival and brought together more than a hundred dancers and other collaborating artists.

Dancers and dance enthusiasts gathered once again to nurture dance and to celebrate the ever-evolving Filipino artistry in movement. The 4th Wi-Fi Body Independent Contemporary Dance Festival was held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from June 25-July 5. Ambitious and spanning two weeks, the dance festival lived up to its promise of a bigger and all-encompassing festival.

Festival Director Paul Morales together with Angel Lawenko-Baguilat and Honey Brendia –Moraga had been successful in organizing the activities for this year’s Wi-Fi. Workshops, performances and competitions were spread out for the two-week duration of the festival and brought together more than a hundred dancers and other collaborating artists.

Festival Mainstays
Dance companies like Dance Forum, Airdance, Chameleon Dance Theater, and UP Dance Company continue their support for the festival. These companies and other companies performed in IndepenDance and the Gala Shows of the festival.

IndepenDance featured independent dance companies and choreographers. UP Dance Company performed Pedro Kusinero, Filipino adaptation of Petroushka with libretto by Basilio Villaruz and choreography by Elena Laniog and Herbert Alvarez. Airdance staged a show featuring choreographies by Wi-Fi Body Competition winners Ava Villanueva and Rhosam Prudenciado. Japanese dance-artist Maki Morishita also collaborated with Prudenciado while the alumni of Ballet Philippines impressed the audience with the dances featured in IndepenDance and Gala shows. Having wowed the audience last year with their strength and forward-thinking, Dance=Pull led by Dwight Rodrigazo returned this year with even stronger dancers. They shared the stage with Kahayag Community Dance and Theater Company from Koronadal and Agnes Locsin’s Locsin dance Workshop.

Another main component of the contemporary dance festival is the new Choreographers Competition. This year, Ballet Manila’s Gerardo Francisco bested 12 others who vied for the grand prize with his piece “Balikbayan”. The festival organizers and judges decided to add Third place and Best Dancer awards. Zyda Baaya won second place while Johnny Amar placed third. Yasnina Jumalon took home the Best Dancer award equivalent to the previous years’ audience choice award.

The festival's Emerging Talent Showcase featured school-based dance companies and dance schools from all over the Philippines. Watching the younger dancers was refreshing and they showed great promise as the future of Philippine dance.

New Additions
New components were introduced in this years’ festival. Among the additions were 2nd Step, Uncensored Bodies, and the Dancing Body.

The dancing Body is a photo exhibit of dance photos taken by various photographers. Uncensored Bodies dance Film competition is the first of its kind to b e held in the country. Short dance films were submitted by Filipinos and foreigners alike. RR Basco bagged all the awards with his two entries, Siete Dolores and I love, I hate.

Finalists from the previous Wi-Fi Body New choreographers’ competition were given the opportunity to show new works with 2nd Step. With the guidance of Wi-Fi Body Festival’s founding director Ms. Myra Beltran, the young choreographers staged new masterpieces without the pressures of a competition. Video introductions for the choreographies were done by festival director Paul Morales.

Outstanding among the new works was Ea Torrado’s The Leg She Never Had chronicling a relationship between a man and a woman, showing the different hues of romantic love.

Growing Within and Stretching Out
The Wi-Fi Body Festival for this year happened simultaneously with Virgin Labfest. The CCP had a busy two weeks with performances. Even more exciting were the performances in the different spaces within CCP that were not usually used for performances. Restrooms and lounges busted at the seams with people crammed in to watch performances in small corners. Even elevators were spruced up with dance sequences.

Recognizing that contemporary dance has many forms and that almost everyone now is practicing contemporary dance one way or another, the festival opened its arms to the major dance companies of the Philippines. Ballet Philippines, Philippine Ballet Theatre and Ballet Manila sent representative to showcase new works.

Wi-Fi Body Festival had been successful in bringing together the movers, literally and figuratively, of Philippine Dance. The festival has become more than a performance platform for dance-artists, it has become a cause worthy rallying for. Dance artists who join the festival have grown in number throughout the years is testament that not only is festival effective as a venue for performance. It also builds ties and encourages a creation of a dance network, a healthy dance community.

The independent art scene in the Philippines is on the rise. Indie music, indie movies indie theater, and indie dance are developing audiences that are more critical and more discerning of the art that they are consuming. A growing sector, independent artists have inched their way into the mainstream, especially in the case of indie movies. With the audience trekking to the CCP for the two-week Wi-Fi festival it is evident that Independent dance is slowly gaining the recognition it deserves.

Behind the By-line
Clarissa Cecilia Mijares studies anthropology to understand what dance is all about. Until her discovery as the next big star...
Photos courtesy of Carlo Viray Valderrama


Read the actual article here.

Masterworks and meeting Alice Reyes

I saw Ballet Philippines' Masterworks last Saturday and loved that it came together nicely - a BP show I finally was able to fully enjoy after the restaging of La Revolucion Filipina last year. I'm planning to write about it for Runthru, not quite a critique but a documentation of the event and its significance - a homecoming of the company to what it once was, who the company really is.

If I were to critique it, well, I didn't like some of the works that were performed; mainly if you say "Master" works, it should be the best of that particular artistic director (each AD was represented by a work they either choreographed or, as in the case of Cecile Sicangco and Noordin Jumalon, commissioned. I agreed with a lot of the pieces performed, but Romeo and Juliet? Alice Reyes had several more important works that I would love to see today. As I had written about her extensively in my MA thesis, Alice Reyes was the one to almost single-handedly establish dance as an artform in the Philippines, to institutionalize it and to keep it at the level we enjoy today. She promoted creating your own work, using your own style, using Filipino themes. And the piece to represent her is a love pas de deux from a Shakespearean ballet?

So obviously, I'm going to say that the highlight of the evening was actually meeting Alice Reyes in the flesh. I was totally floored. While writing about her in my MA thesis, I only was able to get a portrait of her through written material, as well as interviews with her sisters, Denisa and Edna, and with Steve, who adores her. She has been one of my inspirations in wanting to get a higher degree in dance studies, because she struck it out on her own in Colorado and was one of the first to do so. So, when Denisa said, "This is my sister, Alice," like she wasn't one of the most important personages of all time, I was just caught off guard, staring at her like a teenaged fangirl. I hardly get starstruck these days, and that caught me off guard as well.

At the end of the show, the new BP artistic director called her, Denisa and Edna up to the stage to acknowledge all the important work they've done for the company. While people stood up to applaud her, Alice Reyes simply took the mic and said, "Please come to the next shows. And bring your friends." No poseuring, no basking in the limelight. Just a simple request to keep dance alive.

I am still floored. Did I say I hardly get starstruck these days?


Alice Reyes with Manuel Molina III in her Amada

2 pictures from Tanz Treffen, thank you phone cam

The dance critics from South East Asia + Franz Anton Cramer, my favorite German dance critic



The rest of the Philippine contingent: Donna Miranda and Goethe Manila's Sebastian Griese, walking with me towards the GoetheHaus

Click on photos for larger sizes. Thanks!
--

blog revival '09

The Goethe Institut organized a Regional Dance Summit for Contemporary Dance choreographers and dance critics from August 5 to 8, 2009 at the GoetheHaus, Jakarta, Indonesia. The summit brought together over 40 participants from ten different countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, of course Germany and the Philippines. For the Philippines, Donna Miranda presented her work, Beneath Polka-Dotted Skies, while I was the country's representative dance critic.

Part of the idea of the summit was networking and as I met up with a lot of critics and journalists from other countries, it became clear to me how important the online component of our writings were. Luckily for me, Malaya publishes my work on their website and they're online for at least a year; other critics either write for websites without online components or the paper they write for charges for their online readership. But it does make sense that I should have a blog for dance.

I've already been toying with the idea of a blog that's open to the public, really about my thoughts about dance that other people might enjoy and get something out of. Most of my previous blogs were private, personal blogs and while there were some important dance stuff in it, there was also a lot of stuff that I only wrote for myself. So, in the interest of sharing thoughts of dance with the general public, welcome to this dance blog.

Thinking of a new name for this blog (because the old name was very personal; yet again everything is always about me), I remembered something Donna said to me on another blog - a "magazine blog" I started years ago with a bunch of friends that we couldn't sustain because everyone was busy with their own thing. I had put up my initial thoughts on her piece, Summer Begins and Ends as You Wish in that blog, and she left me a comment which ended with, "Mabuhay ang Blog!" This is because dance writing was very sparse - it stil is - and blogs were so cool because they were an alternate means of getting the news out on dance and art to a wide audience. Spending this week with her, I am reminded of that comment of hers, our first actual exchange and thought, how apt!

And so, mabuhay!
--

choreography (part one)

"I'm teaching a choreography class this term," I half-joke to my mom. "I, who have no choreography to speak of."

"Yes, isn't that strange?" she agreed. I didn't quite expect her to agree so wholeheartedly so I wasn't able to reply and continue our conversation.

--

I'm qualified to teach the class, rest assured. I took enough choreography classes and seminars for me to know what I'm doing and what other people should be doing as well. And I have some choreography that I've done, probably buried in the memories of those that came across it. I still remember them, some of them quite clearly actually.

My earliest stabs at choreography of course were making dances for the kids in our school for recitals, and then in high school, I was sometimes asked to do an intermission number. Those were improv, even before I had training in improv. I just played music I knew by heart and let go. Once, it was Linggo ng Wika (Language Week) and I danced a short nationalistic thing with lots of chest-clutching, arabesques, whirls and leaps. By then, I had already figured out that these intermission numbers were going to need structure so that I just didn't do the same thing over and over again. There you go, choreography.

In college, we had a similar choreography class but it wasn't handled quite the way I'm handling the one I'm teaching now. The teacher was given a venue grant at the CCP and was preparing a group of her own works for a solo concert. Since she was so busy and focused on her concert, our class turned into helping her prepare for her show and we did no choreographing of our own. During that time, I didn't mind so much, being a freshman and all, but later I did feel that I missed out.

I was very good in improv though, starting with my high school escapades, then later when I formally learned about it and trained in it in the CCP summer workshops. Well, I wasn't spectacular or brilliant, but competent enough, I guess. It was a progressive thing.

I would do some solo improv numbers, quite like I used to in high school, but with the added pretense that what I was doing was "art". Most of it were forgettable, though I was proud of some of them. Some others, though not particularly brilliant, were memorable because of the situation in which I had danced them.

Like that one time, when I was a councilor in the college council, we had all these activities for Christmas, one of them being a harana sa dorms (dorm serenade), where different musician volunteers were to play at the different dorms in the campus. Of course, all the boys wanted to play at the all-girls dorm (I think Sampaguita? Am I right?) or at Kalayaan, the freshman dorm. I remember that Joey Dizon, a guitar major friend of mine, and I played in Kalayaan while Miguel, who was at one time the love of my life, played at the girls dorm. He drove me and Joey to Kalayaan and watched the first two pieces - Joey would play random pieces he knew and I would do a bit of interpretative dancing, using the emotional tone of the piece as my benchmark for the kind of dancing I would do. I remember the first pieces felt like happy-in-love pieces and that's what I danced. Or, possibly, I was happy in love because Miguel was watching.

Fast forward a few years later, still in college, in love with another boy. I was applying for a literary org named UP Quill and fell in love with one of their genius poets, Mayo. He liked me back. The org has a poetry reading that is a big deal every semester and members and applicants can volunteer to read. My friend and co-app, Ella (I don't remember her last name), and I did a performance piece entitled From a Poet to a Dancer, or something similar. The whole org was in on it because Mayo were in our first blissfull weeks of togetherness, and here I was, dancing to a poem that basically explained why the Poet (in this case, Mayo) was so in love with the Dancer (me). Reports say that Mayo was rendered speechless by my performance. Our romantic relationship lasted only a month or so, but it still is a nice memory. I think it was the only time Mayo had ever seen me dance.

I interpreted another poem for another genius poet friend, Allan Popa, when he launched his book, Morpo. He wrote a poem about Nijinsky and I danced it out, as Nijinsky. I structured out my dance according to the poem, and spoke bits of it while dancing to mostly silence, and imagined what Nijinsky would have done in my place. I was very proud of that and I think Allan really liked it, too. That was perhaps my last solo improv.

My most brilliant solo improv was back in college, for my 20th Century music class. I don't know if they still do this today, but my music literature teacher, Pat Brillantes, would require performances for each period of history we were enrolled in, under her. Same thing went for our 20th Century music class, which I was taking in lieu of Music for Dance, which was not being offered for another two or three semesters, but I needed the credit that year as I wanted to finally graduate. Since I was the only dance major taking 20th Century Music, I organized it so that the younger dance majors taking History 2 with Ma'm Pat and I were to show our dances in one performance in the studio, so two classes were in attendance of our mini-recital. After the younger kids did their Classical music presentation, I performed an improv to one of my favorite pieces of music ever, the first movement of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony for Violin, Strings and Percussion.

After the show, Nina asked me if I pre-choreographed any of it or was it all just pure improv because it looked well thought out and quite synched to the music - and well, it's not really easy to synch improv to Bernstein. I told her I just knew the music really well. She said we should have documented my solo so that I could do it again, because it was really good. Miguel saw it, too, and said it was one of the best things I had ever done. Not that I did much, but that was very nice to hear.

Which is probably why you can't get me too excited about the current wave of solo performances in gallery or studio venues, or why you can't get me to join in. I've done my share of solo improv and it's not really something I'm all that interested in. I do applaud the group works that are not improv at all, those I've seen in studio venues anyway, especially Nina Hayuma Habulan's pieces. I'd rather do those than solo improv. But I'm not really inclined to choreograph either.

--

(to be continued)