THE GHOST IS A GHOST, NO FICTION
A Talk by Christian Tablazon
16 May 2017; 6pm
Tanghalang Manuel Conde (CCP Dream Theater)
The CCP Visual Arts and Museum Division and Green Papaya Art Projects presents a talk by Christian Tablazon on the Complicities between Artist & State, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, & Convolutions of Power & Desire in Creative Labor & Collaboration.
The inauguration of the Center in 1969 promised “a new dawn in Philippine cultural history” meant to usher an “unprecedented flowering of the arts”, with Imelda Marcos as its principal patron—“a new era” that would also mark the threshold of massive plunder and abuse by the Marcoses. Even at present, the halls of the Center remain venue to the indices of fervent delusion, the baroquely decadent extravagance that has characterised Imelda as an adjective, and the beginning of a series of unsustainable debating sprees that would swamp generations of Filipinos until 2025.
Taking after the line “lend me your softness”**—which puts forward the erotics of negotiation, expropriation, and surrender—my research will explore the various registers of softness in the processes of collaboration, adaptation, and correspondence in the hybrid context of the Philippine komedya, with particular focus on my great-grandfather’s Prinsipe Baldovino (ca. 1936), adapted by Rolando Tinio in 1971 for the inauguration of the CPP Little Theater.
Tinio’s adaptation has been cited in several sources as a marker of the vernacular shift in the 70s in the pursuit of a ‘national theater’ that culled from the so-called regions, and ran parallel to the then First Lady’s programs. Transposed from the traditional context of a village fiesta into a modern performance space in the national capital as a spectacular costume drama to institute the new experimental theater, recontextualized from its insular and make-do stagings on Calamianes to its cosmopolitanized dramaturgy at the bourgeois setting of the CCP, Tinio’s adaptation of Piedad’s performance text not only invites one to look into notions of softness in the transpositions and permutations among the ‘vernacular’, the ‘national’, and the ‘cosmopolitan’, but also facilitates inquiries into the convolutions of power and desire in the many aspects of collaboration in the arts and culture, with the CCP at its center. This study seeks to lay out a continuum between CCP’s inception and the present while examining notions of ‘innocence’ and the varied nuances and degrees of complicity and its subsequent paradoxes, between agent and State towards the realization of work, in the context of creative labor during the Marcos regime.
Christian Tablazon works mainly with text, photography, and video. He is a recipient of several national fellowships in creative writing and cultural criticism, and an international fellowship in transdisciplinary art from Plymouth University. His works have been published and exhibited in 11 countries, and his videos were also screened as part of the second edition of The Wrong–New Digital Art Biennale. Together with young writers and artists, he founded The Cabinet, an intermedia-arts collective and a small independent press. He lives and works in Manila and Laguna, Philippines.
* The title of this paper is based on a line from the poem The Comforter by Donald Davie.
** The line is a prompt from curator and researcher Renan Laru-an for the commissioned works from the author and eight other artists for Debatable Screenings: a Curated Series of Global Contemporary Video in 2016.
Flyer image: Christian Tablazon’s paternal great-grandfather Enrique Gimeno Piedad with his foster daughter, my mother, in their home in Coron, ca. 1965. Behind them is one of Piedad’s assemblage sculptures.
For more information, contact the Visual Arts and Museum Division at (632)832-1125 loc. 1504/1505 and (632)832-3702, mobile (0917)6033809, email [email protected], or visit www.culturalcenter.gov.ph.
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