DANZA MAGNIFICO

By Wilhelmina S. Orozco

The image of a grandmother in a Spanish play is that of a strong maternal and matriarchal character who makes all the major decisions in the home. The man or men usually bow down to them. Even serve them without question. In the Philippines, our grandmothers are no different. We love them even more than our own mothers sometimes because they dote on us, their grandchildren, lovingly while our mothers are busy with housework and eking out a living.

So when I watched Eduardo Guerrero dance the flamenco with the title, De Dolores,  last night, November 27, 2012 at the RCBC Plaza), I could see why he was so inspired to move, to flick his hands, to sway his hips, to clickety-clack his two-inch high boots, and to strut, fly and sweep the floor, as if it were natural for him to be like a butterfly, a praying mantis, and even a bull. He was highly inspired by that image of Dolores, (the title of his dance is De Dolores) his grandmother.

El recuerdo del ayer nos hace vivir hoy para triunfar en el manana…(The memories of yesterday make us live today to succeed tomorrow,) – Eduardo Guerrero, his  statements in the program.

What makes Guerrero’s piece remarkable is that he was accompanied by the singer Emilio Florido, and guitarist Javier Ibanez. Did he move according to the meaning of the lyrics of the songs, or the rhythm and melody coming from the guitar? The night was truly a great combination of many arts – music – song and guitar- dance, and theatre, a novel form that exploits the many talents and shall we say geniuses of the artists.

In the beginning, Guerrero was bare from the waist up and seated on a wooden chair without arms. Around him were two other chairs. Then he laid down on one his head reaching the floor, and his legs stretched out on the opposite side. It was as if, he was part of the furniture and he could not care less. It was like a moment of recall, of remembering the past; then slowly he moved, carrying the chairs one by one to their proper positions. On the right side of the stage stood a clothes rack. He approached it very slowly and then removed his pants, then put on one by one the pieces from the rack.

“…son recuerdos y en estos mas que el argumento es elsentimiento el que nos traslada hasta ellos. (a show without storyline because they are memories and in them, rather than the store, lies the feeling that moves us to them.) –E. Guerrero.

Guerrero has that sense of suspense in him as he made the audience draw their attention with bated breath as to what he would do next. After a few minutes, he was dressed up an ordinary man – in dark blue shirt with long sleeves, tight pants and a sash. Then, as the guitarist and the singer had sat on the two chairs, he began to move, his dance rising to a crescendo and after that it was like watching a bullfight with him as the bull, as the torero all rolled into one. The passion and intensity with which he moved to shape the characters on stage through flamenco were truly magnificent – he was a proud toreador, a romantic lover, a  shy young man, a tease, a virile man out to conquer a bull? A woman? The world? All rolled into one man were the various passions anyone can feel through this setting, as if the whole of Cadiz, of Espana was coming down to that stage to give us, not a glimpse but a panorama of how a man, a dancer can feel.

“Y mas inevitable es aun, recorder a la personal que me crio, que me introdujo n el arte, que me regalo mis primeras botas para bailar, que me acompano alla donde actue y que confio en mi.La suma de todos estos recuerdos es el recuerdo de mi abuela, es el recuerdo…De Dolores.  (And even more inevitable is to remember the person who raised me, who introduced me to this art, who gave me my first boots to dance, who came with me wherever I performed, the person who trusted in me…All these memories are the remembrance of my grandmother, the memory of…Dolores.) – E. Guerrero

Javier’s music and Emilio’s songs were truly penetrating of the heart, not just the ears. The amplifier gave just the right volume with a bit of echo sounding hrough the auditorium as Javier caressed and plucked  the guitar strings, while Emilio sang lilting tunes sometimes clapping as Guerrero clicked his heels, and at times, seemingly pining for something or someone lost?  Ay, if only we could understand Spanish pero nuestro 12 unidades en colegio no esta bastante para comprender los cantos total.

By the way, after our singing (many in the crowd sang) Lupang Hinirang, the music of Spain’s national anthem followed. I did not hear the lyrics at all from my seatmates whom I had heard talking in Spanish antes de programa. Maybe next time, the organizers could play the anthem with lyrics and make the expats sing with it.

Yet, twice already, after the playing of the Spanish anthem, last November 20, when Teresa Nieto’s company danced flamenco (where virility was championed over 4 women onstage), and last night, suddenly, the images of Rizal, the Luna brothers, and other heroes who went to Europe flashed in my mind. Why, they listened to that tune throughout their lifetime while in Europe and in the country. They must have hankered for our own anthem to be played as well.

Come to think of it, our anthem is a marching song borne during the times when our heroes and heroines were amid a period to assert the national sovereignty. On the other hand, the Spanish anthem is much slower sounding like an obeisance to some royalty, which could be the case as their society is aristocratic. 

Also, the program, started a bit late and the Instituto Cervantes director apologized for it before the start. While queueing though, he told us that they performers were still rehearsing. I responded, “Sir, no one is perfect. We are all human, please tell them. We have been standing here for quite a while.”

But the performance was truly perfect from beginning to end. The audience could sense the effort, the perseverance that had gone into making it truly memorable not only visually but emotionally as well.

We could probably empathize deeply with the performers onstage because of that common historical strain, of our having gone through the authorities of their forebears. Jane Orendain, a Filipina New Yorker, who was seated next to me, said that she has traces of Spanish blood in her – Catalan and many others. I, myself, an Orozco, is rooted to the Mexicans (remember Orozco the painter?) as Mexico was one of the colonies like the Philippines of Spain in the centuries past.

Danza is the title of the performance of Guerrero, Emilio and Javier, a truly impressive program which moved us strongly. The stage was minimally set – only the chairs on the left, the clothes rack on the right. Lighting consisted of spotlights coming from the ceiling and the sides. So there was a lot of shadows and darkness around, making us experience the sounds – the song and the clicking heels more intensely.  The synergy among the three of them was very strong and reverberated throughout sending the audience to give them a standing ovation in the end.

Jane asked me if this is the first time I had seen flamenco. I said I had seen it in the movies, and had watched a performance of students of flamenco but I did not experience that passion in their dance. This time I did – I felt the passion of the people of Cadiz, Seville and Andalucia. Perhaps even of the gypsies

Pride of their roots and their artistry were etched in every movement, every moment of song and guitar strumming.

We had to clap for so long because they deserved it. A lady brought in three garlands for each of them, and someone said, “Kiss!” but she had exited.  Cries of appreciation came one after the other and simultaneously too from different sections of the audience. In return, Emilio and Javier bowed while Guerrero, ah, Guerrero, he blew kisses to his right, to his left and to us, center.

We returned his kisses with “Bravo!”

“Magnifico!”

 

POLITICS IS NOT SO GENTLE

POLITICS IS NOT SO GENTLE

By Wilhelmina S. Orozco

Politics cannot wait for the weak, the helpless, the vulnerable who cannot fathom nor understand what is going on. Coupled with military might or war, it dismisses all kinds of ethical rules, religious beliefs, and cultural standards.

There are silent and loud wars. Those in politics are well-versed in this. Those who choose the first are biding their time, waiting for that opportune moment when they can express what they really think and feel should happen. Those who engage in the latter are not so gentle. They know how to manipulate situations to their interest, and most of the time, they cannot be so gentle.

One early morning last week, I heard over the radio that one country had bombed the territory of another and that military officials had been killed. The latter retaliated and so there is now an ongoing war in the Middle East. One man lost his sister-in-law and two other relatives after a bomb hit their house.

How could anyone live in a place, in a house where just a while ago, you have been speaking to the living and now they are dead? For the most irrational reasons?

I wrote in October 1991:

War makes widows of women It also leaves  many of them and children abandoned. (Didn’t one of the leaders of a democratic movement in an Asian country lose her husband while she was under house arrest? She refused to leave her country despite the dying moments of her husband at that time because she could not have been allowed to return again as she was under house arrest. On hindsight, wasn’t the image of her political father stronger in her than her husband’s? Actually, there are many ways of returning to a country through underground means. Alas, if one chooses that option, then he or she must be ready for the worst, and one of them is not being able to enjoy the accoutrements of modern living that a fugitive would always have a hard time acquiring.)

War thrives because some men cannot articulate their views well. They use those phallic symbols of power – guns, long arms to bring their message across.

War ( in the long term is aimed at decimation of the enemy). It kills lives. Women are against war because we know how difficult it is to bear life in our wombs for 9 months and then to rear them through adulthood.

(Until now) many war movies glorify machismo, thus making men feel and act superior towards men, (towards weak men).

Most violent movies are anti-women, anti-life.

There is a certain kind of pathological tendency among the machos engaged in violence which is played up in those movies. Violent movies present them as desensitized individuals whose preoccupation is to maim, to strangle, and to kill….

(I watched a Filipino TV drama program inside a bus sometime this year, unreeling how a mother and her daughter were conniving to kill another youthful woman. It was the end of the serial and the drama had made me cringe – why they now equate equality with men with that capacity to kill as well, with bold intentions and no sense of pity at all. Is it any wonder that we now have women involved in killing another woman? That incident in a downtown university where a group of female youths stabbed a girl from another university who had been visiting there and that other incident where a friend of a girl, a model, had allowed her boyfriend to reek havoc on her life, in the end killing her? Allegedly the victim had been gossiping about her as having children out of wedlock which could ruin her career in the media, especially the movies.

A foreign movie I partially viewed again inside a bus showed two women, one had a gun fighting the men. My traditional notion of women was touched aggressively. )

War has killed many articulate people who spoke well and could convince people to their side. They were killed because some men, unable to face them and argue with them verbally, wanted to win all the time, no matter how high-handedly.

….

I wrote that piece at that time a war was going on in the Middle East and the United States had joined the fray.

I remember while typing my column at the office of the Manila Times newspaper I watched a TV news report where Iraq was being invaded by US President George Bush warplanes. A UN official, on the throes of death, told the people around him, “Tell them not to abandon Iraq.” Not only were innocent lives destroyed then but that cultural artifacts which could never be restored and dating back before the time of Christ were bombed out. Thus today the people of Iraq could only have a memory of their past. And what happens when we don’t have any memory of our history? Our identity is lost forever.  We become robots. We become desensitized and selfish. Our idea of living is to accumulate whatever can be accumulated. 

Today, under the Obama second term administration, what could be its world policy towards the use of military might? Abangan.

But you see Folks, no matter how human a person can be, Obama would still be seen as weak-willed if he should show any sign of soft-heartedness when war issues and policies are discussed.

Thus, some diplomats have learned to use double talk when dealing with war hotheads. They use diplomatic language all the time, forgetting that every minute, every second counts for those caught in the crossfires. 

Sometime in the early years of this millennium, I met a rabbi who showed a friend and me a scroll which had come from the Dead Sea. As I was petite and dark while my friend was very tall and of Caucasian background, the rabbi looked at us rather lasciviously, perhaps imagining things and acts in a bedroom. Then he committed a very grievous act which I need not mention here anymore. Without having any pang of guilt and smiling mischievously all the time, he continued showing and explaining to us the importance of the scroll. Perhaps to him, all women are the same – toys to be manipulated in all aspects.

Since then, I have lost all feelings of being respectful toward him. And worse, he made me feel inhospitable towards his countryfolks here. But then the image of Mr. Meyouhas, that gentle soul who worked as an educator-consultant for the UN thrives in me. Mr. Meyouhas was my counterpart at the National Manpower and Youth Council where I had worked as an audio-visual specialist in the 70’s. By the way, the chairman of the UP Philosophy Department, Mr. Bonifacio, recommended me to be appointed by his friend heading the office, Mr. Rony Diaz. I was already a master’s student in communication at the Ateneo de Manila University then.  (Mr. Bonifacio thank you very much.) My husband then had just been incarcerated for ‘subversive” activities and I needed a job to tide over the needs of our family.

Mr. Meyouhas shared with me a lot of things on how to deal with the youth especially how to attract them to get education. Unfortunately, he suffered a stroke due to the heat as it was summertime then. Coming from the outside, he entered the office which was very cold due to the high airconditioning. He lost consciousness and then regained it while lying down on the sofa. I held his hand and he smiled at me. Then some people had thought of bringing him right away to the hospital, where on the way, he succumbed to death. I watched the ambulance roll away down that FTI road thinking that I should have gone with him, at least to give him moral strength to hold on.

When his wife got his body for transport with her on the airplane, a UN official, an Israeli also, told her: “You have two baggages, one your luggage and the other the casket.” Mr. Meyouhas had lost his respectable position in the world and had become a mere object to be brought home.

Folks, war is not only gentle, but it corrupts AND DEHUMANIZES even the so-called religious and highly-placed political officials.

NOW THIS IS MY PLEA TO ALL OFFICIALS ESPECIALLY THE HEAD OF THE UNITED NATIONS: Sirs and Mesdames, kindly stop the war in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine for a moment. And then, evacuate with all your might all women and children from those areas because they are the most vulnerable victims. If we cannot stop the warhawks, at least we could still save innocent lives.

We can only have one lifetime. Christians think we either go to heaven or hell. The Buddhists think we could be reborn, depending on our actions in this lifetime. We could be reborn a snake, an insect, or any other animal, if we did not earn merits in this lifetime. Those who die innocently in wars are reborn again to continue their lives. Now how do we earn merits? Folks ask Buddhist Shi Fu. The list is very long.  

Anyway, I won’t argue as to which religion is worthwhile having. That is an individual decision. But I would argue to death, that no one should tamper with one’s life, and with other people’s lives. Let everyone enjoy the bounty of the earth, breathing and breathing life into all of Mother Nature’s and God’s creations.