ART, MUSIC AND MOVIES

Sundays I used to spend going to listen to an African bishop delivering his impassioned sermon on the passages in the Bible as these relate to life. Then I just completely stopped although I wish i could still listen to him, for reasons that are difficult to express but they have to do with the interpretation of the Bible by one of his bishops.

Actually long before I went to his ministry, I used to go to the Rizal Park Open Air Auditorium to watch the Concert at the Park and watch live cultural presentations. Last Sunday, 15th of August, was not a disappointment at all. I saw a parade of ethnic dances of the De La Salle Dasmarinas Filipiniana dance troupe. They exhibited their knowledge and great skills of ethnic dancing from the north to the southern Philippines, complete with highly colorful costumes and ethnic instruments -- drums, kulintang, and bandurria among others. I was told that the dancers are actually just students of De La Salle University who probably are given scholarships to study the dances and perform them during special occasions like that one last Sunday.I could glean that the directors did a good research on the steps to make them as authentic as possible.

I truly enjoyed the dances because they looked very, very different from the crotch-grabbing dances on tv performed over and over without the dancers knowing(?) that this gesture is Michael Jackson's brand of dancing. Or is it Madonna's?

The dancers gaily performed their dances -- a team imitating animals; singkil which is a very regal dance of the Muslims depicting the courtship of a princess by a datu; maglalatik which everybody knows is tapping coconut shells tied to the bodies of male dancers; bangkuhan -- whereby a couple dance with the man lifting a girl from one bench to the other in different levels while the fiesta folks clap on the sides; Pandanggo sa Ilaw with the women putting the glasses on their heads and then lying on the floor with their heads up trying to balance them so that they would not fall; a group of Igorot boys in G-strings, imitating a headhunting trip; and many more.

All these show that in the academe, there is still hope that our cultural heritage would still be protected, preserved, studied and presented with greater pride.

After that, I went to Phil-Am Theatre and found the Coro Cantabile performing their religious songs with great spirituality. The sopranos had angelic voices and the tenors blended well with them. In the last song, the conductor, Ms. Abesamis sat down on the piano bench and let the choir sing alone -- and they did in harmony and in proper timing, without the conductor!

In the beginning of their performance, a video showed that the Coro also trains people to be choir conductors so that choral singing would grow in every ministry, a very uplifting view of music. It is music not for music alone but for worship, a reaching out to other souls and God. I wonder if the choirs of UP have the same objectives. By the way, Ms. Abesamis was a former Madrigal singer for four years. In contrast, she said that the aim of the Coro is not to win in competitions but to spread the word of God through music.

These presentations made me rethink about our movies. How many great actors have we produced? I remember that our bests are already in their senior years -- Christopher de Leon, Vilma Santos, Lolita Rodriguez, Eddie Garcia, Dolphy and others.

How long can we sustain the breeding of new actors who are truly great in acting? I think that we cannot do that at present. The advertising world is too attractive to the actors because of the large pay given them at the end of a very short shooting period compared to what they would be getting in a movie that lasts for months and months to produce.

And many of our actors have jumped over to that world. Michael V. who is a natural comic does one advert after another so much so that in his TV show he had to dress up like an ermitanyo to hide his face that is seen in many ads shown on TV. Dolphy, our iconic comic was misused in his movie -- Nobody but Juan -- praising Willie Revillame and his TV show, as an ageing fan in a home for the aged, thus bringing his level lower than the latter. KC Concepcion who has the genes of his sensitive actor-father, Gabby Concepcion and his singing mother, Sharon Cuneta, an actress paired with FPJ in the past, is also bitten by the advertising bug to appear in products selling shampoo. Judy Ann Santos, an actress capable of appearing in drama ande comedy has been pulled to promote many products from shades to fitness juisces and simcards.

What can we say about all these? The advertising shorts cannot be a vehicle to honing one's skills in acting, because acting is a discipline. To deepen one's skills is to immerse oneself in a role, in a certain period, in a certain interaction with different characters, etcetera and with the whole gamut of emotions running high or low in every scene. Now this is not possible in an advertising medium.

And so, I hope that the movie producers should take it upon themselves to protect, honor and respect the acting craft -- providing all the necessary support so that their actors do not become mere commodities in the hands of advertisers not fall into accepting model roles in advertising simply because their movie pay is not enough to make them even live for a year.

Even the presentation of products within the movies I find to be in bad taste. I think that a movie should stand on its own -- given all the necessary props necessary to bring out the message of the script. To put a scene whereby John Lloyds gives a pill (and every member of the audience knows that he is the pusher of Biogesic in the advertising movie, jingle and TV advert), is rather inappropriate. I think that is using the actor for an object instead of raising his dignity and his role as a significant part of the movie.

Hence this is the problem of our movie industry I believe: the lack of proper recognition of the movie as an artistic product. There is too much fear of losing investments during production and so a surrender to commercial interests is made to help insure the profitability of the product.

The proliferation now of independent movies is the answer of the present crop of filmmakers against the studio-type and highly commercial movies that make up what is called the movie industry. We have a wide array of different kinds of themes being tackled by the filmmakers and this is good. It shows that everyone has something unique to say filmically. It also gives a good competition to the other media - radio-tv- and print -- as a tool for self-expression.

And so under the administration of P. Noy I hope that we would see a full flowering of the movies as art, especially that his sister, Kris, is into media. I think that this is where he can make her develop the industry and help raise the discipline of acting to a level that could earn us a good position in the movieworld. Especially with the proper connections of Kris, she could very well be the ambassador for all the good movies that would be produced under this administration -- by the way not propaganda films, ha?

I am thinking of a huge investment of the government for movie productions, without strings attached, except a return of investment. Movie producers -- not the likes of Mother Lily but filmmakers with something unique to say should be given all the incentives, provided grants to produce their ideas on film and let the products be our document of how in this particular historical period, we have been able to survive, overcome all trials and then live peacefully, humanely and happily.