Mga Tiyanak

Here I am again, after two and a half months, I'm back and in another class with Francis! This time, it's a class which doubles as a workshop for his own Palanca Award-winning play, 'When the Purple Settles,' which deals with issues of race, ethnicity, colonialism, dictatorship, feminism, and parent-child conflicts in the midst of the "Conjugal Dictatorship" of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos during the late sixties and the early seventies. It's certainly not light opera. If you are coming to see the show, make sure that you brush up on your history of the Philippines, or you will be lost beyond reason as for what's going on during the show.

Okay, now, what do I write? I feel quite low on ideas, and being a perfectionist, it is very agonizing to start doing anything due to fear as far as how the finished project will look. Actually, if I were in Francis's shoes, I know I would be terribly worried about how to best express what I wish for the audience to see onstage. So far, we've had enough time to work out what will fit or not into the performance, and we have adjusted accordingly.

Still, even as the class is required to be off-book for a week now, and technical rehearsals begin next week, I wonder how all the scenes, which we have rehearsed in little blocks, will flow together. On top of that, the play is supposed to be a hip-hopera...a constant chorus of beats and rhythms, colloquial slang, emotion, and protest rolled up into a tough little streetwise package made for the people by the people. The Purple Posse has certainly been practicing hip-hop dance steps for at least a full solid week, but it is still a mystery to me how we are going to wrap and rap everything together into the performance that Francis and everyone else hope to create. Time will tell, I guess.

Oh, and I have an assignment for the workshop, in-class part of the course, which involves researching Marcosian rule and torture tactics. Crude, but certainly interesting. My only hope is that my penchant for starting and turning things in late will not happen now. I can only hope, all the while working on the project when I have the time this weekend. I'm just glad that I have two days of no practice in order to work on that...