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Workshops And Workshops
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- Category: Culture And Arts
(By Tita L. Ayala)
There are so many art workshops in the regions today. The art workshops are okay - especially as they are usually rigged up in summer to occupy the vacation hours of restless young children and young adults. A channeling of energy towards creativity, imagination and energy funneled to the production of images on paper, cloth with color, shapes, forms. Most art workshops hold exhibits of the student works on an on-campus or commercial basis.
What happens to the writing workshops? Do they put out collections afterwards so others may read them, so the workshoppers will see what they have done, remember how these were done, and carry over what they have learned into their own workaday businesses? Or do all the lessons learned on sequencing, tensioning of lines, editing, and proper use of words and language get lost to the winds, or relegated to just one more party or social experience.
Seditious And Subversive: Theater of War
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- Category: Culture And Arts
(By Doreen G. Fernandez)
Do wars breed theater? Does theater rise out of wars? Is theater a result of war, or is it a weapon, even a battlefield? Is one of the vestiges of war a theater of war? The Philippine experience provides insights.
War against Spain and the United States
The events of the late nineteenth century in the Philippines are fairly well known. The revolutionary secret society called the Katipunan was founded, then discovered in August 1896. By the end of the year revolution had spread throughout the country.
Between August 29, 1896, when Filipino revolutionaries first attacked Spanish soldiers, and the declaration of Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898 by General Emilio Aguinaldo, Filipinos waged war for the first time in their history. It was a hit-and-run, faction-troubled war, but eventually led to the first revolution in Asia against a colonial power, and the proclamation of the Philippine Republic at Malolos, Bulacan.
That ending was neither glorious nor permanent, however, for while the Filipinos carried on their war against Spain, Admiral George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, Spanish authorities secretly negotiated the bloodless surrender of Manila, and in December the Treaty of Paris was signed, ceding the Philippines to the United States for a few thousand dollars.
Telenovela
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- Category: Culture And Arts
Anime Transform Landscape of Philippine TV (By Janet hope Camilo Tauro)
In the year 1996, "Marimar" entered Philippine television, and things were never the same again. When the sizzling Mexican telenovela "Marimar" aired in the government-owned station RPN Channel 9, it zoomed to the top of the ratings chart in June 1996, the country's media giant ABS-CBN, with its P3 billion yearly income, almost fell down on its knees in defeat. The "Marimar" episode clearly stimulated certain radical changes in the country's TV programming. For one, in the year 2001, Philippine TV programming remains pervasively characterized by translation.
All acts of translation are essentially acts of communication. Thus, when foreign TV programs, which are translated into Filipino through dubbing and/or recreating or localizing, are considered as acts of communication, the implications of their ubiquity in present-day Philippine television are instructive and enormous for scholars and critics of mass communications in the country. This is especially so as we develop translation both as a profession and an object of criticism.
Tenacity Of Identity Or Where are the People?
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- Category: Culture And Arts
(By Dr. Jesus Peralta)
The exponential intensity of information exchanges of various kinds throughout the entire length of the Philippine archipelago has posited a problem in the theoretical areas of anthropology-What constitutes ethnicity? It used to be that ethnic identity is defined by self-ascription and, more tenuously, ascription by others. This approach was appropriate when the territorial integrity of ethnic groups has been maintained and when there were relatively fewer cultural intrusions into the relatively closed structure of ethnic groups. Recent times saw organization and structural changes in Philippine societies that indicated a gradual gravitation toward cultural convergence.
The institutions that contributed to this convergence are many: the political system that radiates from the national, provincial, municipal and the barangay that through the years have supplanted the indigenous systems of leadership; the economic system that introduced a market system that included the international market as catchments area; the educational system that leveled the modes of values and education throughout all the sectors of Philippine society; the religious systems of Christianity and Islam that subordinated and debilitated indigenous belief systems; the emergence of a powerful multi-media system that invaded all forms of communication and information systems; and a gradually developing transportation system that is bringing remote areas closer to central places of dispersion.
Suffering Colonialism
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- Category: Culture And Arts
Modernity as Sacrifice and Salvation in Philippines Colonial Painting(By Patrick Flores)
Reflecting on Philippine colonial art lodges the Philippines in the memory of the Hispanic empire and its history of conquests. Such history would endow what was claimed as "islands" with identity as colony, at the time of the emergence of New Spain in the Americas, and around four centuries later, as post-colony, at the end of the nineteenth century. This process entails theoretical elaboration as it implicates the intervention of "art" in entitling objects and subjects, regarded as aesthetic agencies, to a contested sense of progress. The latter is made possible through discrepant discourses of Enlightenment, civilization, cooptation, and revolution.
The paper readdresses the problematic of coloniality and modernity by exploring a kind of engagement that enables the history of Philippine colonial painting to inscribe conditions of conversion, artness, and social movement in the very political economy and performance of the practice. I regard painting as idiom of both colonial visuality and folk/popular aesthetic culture. In fleshing out this idea, I turn to two works: Esteban Villanueva's Basi Revolt (1821), consisting of fourteen panels which depict the failed rebellion in Northern Philippines against the Spanish government's regulation of a sugarcane wine called basi; and Juan Luna's Spoliarium (1884), the Gold Medalist at the 1884 Madrid Exposition which allegorizes the oppressive Philippine colonial condition through a dramatic scene at the spoliarium, the part of the Roman coliseum where dead or mortally wounded gladiators are despoiled in the presence of wailing relations.