From war dance to theater of war moro moro performances in the philippines 3

57 CHAPTER Rethinking Repetitiousness To the uninitiated, there are a number of features of the moro-moro that may seem irrational. One such feature is the overwhelming repetitiousness of moro-moro performances. Repetitious is the delivery of dialogue, uttered audibly first by a prompter-director who reads from the script line by line, then by the actors who follow his lead, so that everything is heard twice. Repetitious too, is the manner in which the dialogue is intoned: in a nasal, high-pitched, rhythmic, constant monotone. Repetitious are the ideas conveyed, as a single idea may be paraphrased a dozen times into a dozen stanzas, even if a single quatrain would have sufficed. Repetitious are the scenes, involving stock characters in stock situations that always seem to lead to battle scenes that are inserted liberally into the performance. And repetitious are the fantastic plots that are told and re-told from year to year. These repetitions are what make moro-moro plays invariably long, lasting from as "short" as five hours, to as long as nine nights of performance, or even more. Scholars have often commented upon the repetitiousness of the moro-moro, seeing this as a negative feature or weakness of the genre. Yet these repetitions not exist by accident, nor are they just random and mindless insertions. They fulfill practical functions. Both in form and content, repetition was an important literary device wielded by the moro-moro playwright, which enabled him to cater to the needs and tastes of his audience. This chapter examines how the repetitiousness of the moro-moro is pleasurable and useful for authors, actors and audiences alike. I will 58 highlight here the traditional mode of consumption of performing arts, one that is founded on native habits of gathering as well as local aesthetic sensibilities. My aim here is to describe and understand the moro-moro audience's distinct ways of sensing, hearing and feeling the performance. The playwright's decisions on how to craft a performance make sense when seen from the standpoint of his audience's particular mode of consumption. It may not be immediately apparent to a modern observer (and one much influenced by Western notions of art) how an overwhelmingly repetitious performance could be enjoyed as such. In many ways, modes of consumption of the past have all but become incomprehensible to the present. Today, the question still begs to be asked: have we fully understood the appeal of the moro-moro for the audience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? To make sense of the moro-moro 's form and content, we cannot simply rely on the extant scripts and outsider accounts and confine our analysis to these documents. Rather, we must be sensitive to the socio-literary context in which the moro-moro thrived. More importantly, we must remember that it is a performing art and we must have a firm grasp of the dynamics of performance, of how the different parts of the moro-moro come together, of what is entailed in the presentation and consumption, as well as the composition of the plays. Fortunately for us, there are still some villages today where moro-moro performances can be observed. True, many changes have taken place in how it is presented and consumed, but still, we can get a better sense, a better inkling of performances of the past by observing what remains in the present. This practical knowledge of performance dynamics can fruitfully be used in the reading of extant scripts and outsider accounts and help us make sense of the moro-moro then and now. 59 Repetition as Distribution: Consumption in Bits and Pieces As far as we can tell from available documents, the way the moro-moro was consumed in the past was very different from the theatergoing experience in any modern venue or concert hall where one is ushered to a numbered seat and is expected to observe proper etiquette. In a modern theater, one has to keep quiet and refrain from standing up, not even to visit the restroom, unless it is at the designated time. In contrast, the situation of audiences at traditional moro-moro performances, may be described as very informal, regardless of whether the venue is an urban theater house in nineteenth-century Manila or on a makeshift outdoor stage on the village green during the town fiesta. The moro-moro was consumed in a very relaxed manner, with people freely moving about, and with a lot of background noise. In the past, the prominent members of the community had specially constructed sheds or palcos that were either located near the stage or elevated in some strategic vantage point. In their palcos they entertained guests, ate, and even slept as the play progressed.1 The rest of the villagers brought their own benches from their homes, while spectators who had come from far away also brought their own food provisions and fruit.2 The gathered crowd continuously ate, drank, and chatted, or even left for a few hours, and returned later in the day, or even the next day, for performances could last for several days or nights. From certain vantage points, the dialogue may be partially or even completely inaudible, but the audience would not mind, for if one felt like listening to the words, one could simply come closer to the stage, or even sit on the stage itself. The consumption of a moro-moro performance can be likened to eating lechon served at fiesta time. The lechon is a whole roasted pig that is the celebrated highlight at the fiesta buffet table. It is displayed prominently and everyone eagerly awaits the Resil Mojares. 1985. Theater in Society, Society in Theater. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. p. 91. Isabelo de los Reyes. 1906. Ang Comediang Tagalog. 60 moment when the pig is chopped up and all can line up to take a few bits and pieces, walk away, return for a bit more, and leave again. The roasted pig will stay on the buffet table the whole day ready for waves of visitors that come at will, and at various moments it will either be mobbed, or abandoned, only to be mobbed again when a new group arrives. And even when it is already half eaten, with the crispy skin gone, the bones showing, and only a few fleshy sections left, visitors who come to the feast at a later hour will still find it impressive that there's a lechon, and will approach the mangled remains with gusto because they have in their heads the image of the whole roasted pig in its glorious, shiny entirety. Just as everyone wants to have a piece of lechon so, too, villagers want their piece of moro-moro action at fiesta time. In the nineteenth century, the folk who lived in the outskirts of town and in the mountains would go to great lengths to come to the town center during the fiesta, to participate in Catholic rites, visit family and friends, partake of the feasting, and watch the moro-moro. Director-playwrights who crafted moro-moro plays employed repetition, both in form and content, in order to "distribute" the story in a somewhat equitable manner so that at any given time, a viewer may enjoy the "bits and pieces" of performance that will give him a taste for the whole. After all, a playwright would have used plot structures that the audience was familiar with, so that even if a play was viewed in a discontinuous manner -- like the partially-eaten lechon -- it could still be imagined as a whole, and the bits and pieces would still be delicious. By considering "distribution" of the story as germane to the playwright's purpose, the repetitiousness of a moro-moro play can be understood in a new light. Repetition has, unfortunately, been viewed negatively as something of a weakness. Quite understandably, since to the modern observer the repetition of a single idea in a 61 dozen stanzas of verse, and the repetition of the same sub-plots over and over throughout the play, may seem superfluous, and tedious to watch. For the native playwright and his intended audience, however, repetition played an important distributive function. To illustrate this notion of repetition-as-distribution let us examine a lament from the play entitled Abdal y Miserena written by Balagtas. Labindalawang Sugat ng Puso (Twelve Wounds of the Heart), enumerates a dozen "wounds" that love has inflicted upon a suffering lover: Hirap, Kalungkutan, Dalita't Hinagpis Pighati at Dusa, Dalamhati't Sakit Panibugho't Sindak, Bagabag, Ligalig, Umiiwang lahat sa aba kong dibdib. (Weariness, Melancholy, Suffering, and Dejection, Grief and Sorrow, Depression and Affliction, Jealousy and Fear, Worry and Axiety, All these stab my miserable heart.) In the next twelve stanzas, each of the twelve wounds enumerated above, which are practically synonymous to each other, are elaborated upon one by one. This strategy of "repetition of a single idea into many verses" abounds in moro-moro plays. Bienvenido Lumbera, who has analyzed this play, interprets the lament as a manifestation of "intoxication with language". That Balagtas interrupted the narrative line of his play to make room for a speech like this is read by Lumbera as an indication of the growing sophistication of his audience who had outgrown the "primitive interest in narrative as a series of incidents, each one of which whets curiosity for the final outcome of the plot". Lumbera sees this as a positive development in that it "confronted the poet with the fact of language" and led him to 62 the "exploration of the expressive possibilities of language", but he lamented that "this was not necessarily conducive to the production of better drama".3 If we factored in the audience conditions and the mode of consumption of the moro-moro in our analysis of Balagtas, we may arrive at an alternative reading, and we could see the practical necessity for his repeated quatrains. Our reading does not necessarily negate Lumbera's explanation but adds another dimension to it. Imagine the moro-moro stage, a makeshift, open-air stage made of bamboo and nipa, surrounded by an audience on both sides as well as front and center. In the following photo is shown (Illustration 3) a typical nineteenth-century outdoor stage made of nipa and bamboo erected on a open field. Illustration 3. A Moro-Moro performance in Taguig. 1899. From the National Library Filipiniana Collection. Bienvenido Lumbera. 1986. Tagalog Poetry 1570-1898: Tradition and Influences in Its Development. Ateneo de Manila University Press. pp. 110-111. 63 In this situation, to make themselves audible to the entire audience, actors would deliver their lines at all the four corners of the stage, to equitably distribute access to the unfolding story. In between spoken dialogue, dance movements to musical accompaniment would be performed to allow an actor to artfully move from one end of the stage to the other. We can imagine the playwright to have been aware of the choreographic treatment his writings would receive, so that he allows the same idea to be repeated in a dozen stanzas each of which would be heard by a different segment of the audience as the actor makes his rounds of the stage. The playwright, after all, was usually also the director-prompter called diktador or apuntador, who was in the thick of things and thus would have had an intimate knowledge of the space of performance and an intuitive understanding of the needs of his audience within that space. I was alerted to this relationship between audience location and repetition in composition when I observed a moro-moro performance called Arakyo in the village of Sinasajan in Neuva Ecija in 2005. That particular performance will be the subject of analysis in a later chapter in this study, but for our current discussion, suffice it to say that I was quite frustrated at how I could not record the dialogue well because whatever vantage point I chose, and from whatever location I set up my tripod and video camera, actors always alternated between being very audible one moment, then slipping out of hearing range the next. Much later, when I was at home trying to watch my inadequate footage and trying to match the script to the action on stage, after watching many replays in a futile attempt to make out words from vaguely recorded sounds, I began to "see" the point of that which I could not hear. I began to consider the possibility that inaudible moments are organic parts of the moro-moro viewing experience. I noticed the orchestration of the dialogue, how the actors moved 64 in a precise and intricate manner around the stage, and how strategically their blocking was executed; as if on purpose, they meant to turn their backs on certain sections of the crowd as they addressed another section on the opposite side. I began to recognize and appreciate what I describe as the "choreographic logic" of the moromoro script, that is, the dynamics of performance embedded in the specific arrangement of dialogue. Through the choreographic interplay between repeated verses and rotating blocking, access to dialogue is more or less equitably distributed to an audience that is conditioned to take turns in hearing parts of the play. Foreign observers accustomed to Western habits of consumption of the performing arts may have attempted to follow all the speeches delivered in a moromoro performance in their entirety, and quite predictably, they may have found the experience laborious (since the moro-moro could last for several days). Juan Alvarez Guerra's account in 1887 of his experiences in a town in the Bicol province illustrates this point quite well. Guerra arrived from Manila two months before the town fiesta to observe the community process of producing a comedia. He rented a house next door to the town’s gobernadorcillo, so he could closely watch the village leader spearhead the preparations for the 10-day long performance. An entire chapter of his book is dedicated to sharing anecdotes on the townspeople and their comedia, and his account culminates in this description of the final day of the long fiesta: The next night, which was the last, I attended the spectacle, just as I have done the previous nine nights, and being tired…[from] too much pasa doble, too much martial music, too much moro-moro, and too much monotonous and nasal declamation, without much variations, I listened to the final loa.4 It is not surprising that Guerra found himself tired after watching the whole show. Just as no one is supposed to consume an entire lechon -- for to so would simply be crazy -- a traditional audience was not expected to watch everything, but Don Juan Alvarez Guerra. Viajes por Filipinas De Manila a Albay. Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet, 1887. p. 175. 65 only to enjoy it in bits and pieces. Their style of watching alternated between moments of intense concentration at the actors' performance, and moments of complete disengagement from the proceedings on stage, moments that are devoted to other pursuits such as conversing or eating. We must not dismiss this behavior as irreverence, or lack of "theater etiquette" but rather, consider it as a different mode of consumption of performing arts, a mode which could also be seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Writing about the way a Sumatran audience listens to a hikayat recital, James Siegel notes: "During the recitation, which can take a whole night and sometimes two or even three nights, people wander in and out, chat quietly, and then at certain times, not necessarily when the action is most exciting, listen intently."5 Likewise, in his study of audiences at traditional professional storytelling and literary recitals in Kelantan, Patani, Trengganu, Pahang and Kedah, Amin Sweeney explains how "the listeners would be seated or reclining on mats, and one might expect to hear a whole range of background noises, from babies screaming to old men pounding their betel chew. Consequently, the audience was not likely to catch every word, nor would it expect to so."6 The informal and relaxed atmosphere, and the consumption of the play in bits and pieces, was not limited to outdoor moro-moro performances in the village setting, but was also experienced in permanent theater houses in Manila's port district, where moro-moro performances were available commercially. One might think that a "theater house" would offer a more formal viewing experience, but whether held indoors or outdoors moro-moro performances were characterized by informality, casualness, and the din of background noises. James Siegel. 1979. Shadow and Sound: The Historical Thought of a Sumatran People. p. 205 Amin Sweeney. 1980. Authors and Audiences in Traditional Malay Literature. Center for Southeast Asian Studies. University of California. 66 A few words are in order here about the nature of the theater houses in which the moro-moro was shown. During the nineteenth century, many theater houses sprouted in the port area, catering to different audiences. Quite a contrast existed between comedia español or Spanish plays, and comedia tagala or the moro-moro. The former, which was patronized by the elite and upper social classes were staged in the better theaters, which were constructed of strong materials and more opulently decorated. One such building, the Teatro de Binondo, was described as "magnificent". It had a vestibule crowned by a high gallery, and two wings with two rooms below, which housed two cafes. Comedia tagala, of which the moro-moro is a sub-species, in contrast tended to be staged in theaters made of flimsier materials such as nipa and bamboo where, as Retana put it, "natives raised a platform wherever they could."7 One such native theater house was set up in the owner's backyard, while another called Teatro Guiñol, was a roofless structure, six by fourteen meters in size, which was frequently dismantled, transported, and re-assembled at the sites of fiestas.8 An American observer, John Foreman, who saw comedia tagala theaters in the suburbs of Manila and described their condition as being the type of theaters "none of which a dramatic company of any note would consent to perform", complained that in one theater called Teatro Filipino, the performance could be partly seen from the street. The Teatro de Tondo, meanwhile, was situated in a dirty thoroughfare in a low quarter. Yet another theater house called Teatro Zorilla "was built without any regard to its acoustic properties such that only a third of the audience could hear the dialogue."9 Foreman, of course, was unaware of the traditional mode of consumption of the moro-moro, of consumption in bits and See Retana, Noticias, p, 71. Christina Laconico Buenaventura. 1994. The Theaters of Manila 1846-1946. DLSU Press. p. 24 John Foreman. The Philippine Islands. 1906. 1980 reprint by the Filipiniana Book Guild. p. 349. 78 evening because the author-director needed that time to finish the play.26 We have heard this type of story before, of playwrights still working on the script close to performance time, if not during actual performance. Balagtas and De La Cruz have left behind anecdotes about this habit, but stories also abound of humble playwrights whose poetic feats have not been recorded in print. To compose in this manner a playwright, drawing from stock knowledge and relying on conventional formulae must versify spontaneously. The skillfulness of moro-moro playwrights as oral composers (and less as "writers") is hardly surprising when we consider the long history and the embeddedness of oral versifying in Philippine society. In his account of 16th century Visayan culture and society, the Spanish missionary Francisco Alcina reports that to gain community respect a man must have been able to participate in the spontaneous versifying that accompanied social gatherings. The really skillful were practically professionals and were eagerly sought after for weddings and other festive displays of prestige. Alcina writes that many natives were reputed to be more articulate in verse than in ordinary conversation, and all were able to perform for hours at a time and even whole days or nights "without dropping a syllable or fumbling a word."27 Walter Ong explains that skilled oral art forms preceded and predetermined the style of written works. Oral narrative is more directly connected with the totality of the social world than literary narrative needs to be, making orality itself continuous with social existence. Writing may have transmuted oral performance into new 26 Robert Soller. "Three Centuries of Moro-Moro" in Sunday Times Magazine. May 22, 1960. P 19 Taken from Francisco Ignacio Alcina. 1668. Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas. Part 1, Book 3:30. Victor Baltazar transcription. University of Chicago Philippine Studies Program 1962. In William Henry Scott. 1994. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. p. 98 27 79 genres, but oral mindsets and ways of expression have persisted, and while these habits of orality may have diminished, they never entirely disappeared.28 One obvious manifestation of the persistence of oral modes of expression, or habits of orality, in the composition of moro-moro scripts can be seen in the lexicon of stock phrases that are used repeatedly. The word lilo (cruel) for instance, appears in various combinations and phrase settings, and is used recurrently in a single script to convey villainy. It can be used to describe either Christians or Moros, thus the common appellations lilong Heneral (cruel General) and lilong Moro (cruel Moro). It can also appear in combination with a plethora of unflattering adjectives: lilo at sukab (cruel and traitorous); lilo't palamara (cruel and ungrateful); lilo't tampalasan (cruel and deceitful); lilo at taksil (cruel and impudent); lilo't sinungaling (cruel and liar). In her analysis of the moro-moro script, Doreen Fernandez opines that the many terms for villainy "seem to be chosen and placed by folk poets largely for reasons of line length and rhyme, or for variety, and not for accuracy of meaning". The way these stock phrases are employed by the moro-moro playwright in his writing of scripts is similar to the way an oral composer relies on stock phrases in oral versifying. This does that mean however, that they are inserted mindlessly for "they have nuances of meaning, and reveal an unspoken roster of traits that are not acceptable to the komedya ethic". It is worth noting that these words are no longer used in everyday conversation; they are old words that appear in one of the earliest dictionaries compiled by the Spanish which is believed to contain orally transmitted folk material dating from the initial period of interactions between the native and Spanish cultures.29 28 Walter J. Ong. "Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization" in New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 1, Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages. (Autumn, 1984), pp. 1-12. 29 Doreen Fernandez. 1991. "Princesa Miramar at Pricipe Leandro: Text and Context in a Philippine Komedya" in Philippine Studies 39(1991). pp. 426-427. 80 When the Spanish first arrived in the archipelago, they found a people who had their own writing system and rich oral tradition. Spanish chroniclers are unanimous, however, in their observation that writing was used not for producing literature but for records and short letters. The missionaries replaced the native writing system with the Roman alphabet and burned a lot of indigenous writings, and the surviving texts were eventually lost as they were written on highly perishable materials. The natives lost their proficiency in their own writing system, but oral tradition continued to be preserved in singing. Spanish missionaries attempted to compose new songs in the local languages so that the natives would "forget the ancient songs reeking of their past paganism," but their lack of skill (being primarily clergymen rather than poets) produced awkward verses that failed to meet the aesthetic standards of their intended audience. In San Agustin's Compendio it is reported that the natives were shown various poems written according to the rules of Spanish riming but these did not please the natives, who said that they were not poems.30 The anecdote just mentioned can lead to exciting new ways of viewing and understanding the moro-moro audience as aural connoisseurs with an ear for poetic recitation. As pointed out earlier, many native ilustrados, taking after their Spanish mentors, looked down on the moro-moro as backward and its audiences as "pobres y ignorantes" or the "poor and ignorant". With the introduction of reading and writing, highly skillful oral composers and performers were thus transmogrified, from being experts to being ignorantes. They were “illiterate”, however, only in the sense that they could not directly read printed material, though they could still access it indirectly. Indeed, the bulk of the moro-moro audience was made up of the masses 30 Lumbera, pp. 52-53. 81 who had no schooling and may not have learned to read nor write, but from another angle of vision, we could make the case that this audience was composed of aural connoisseurs who were raised in oral poetry and were thus peculiarly "literate" -- an audience that was well versed in literary fare despite their print illiteracy. The nature of "reading" was such that access to written works was not limited to those who were lettered but extended to everyone else who could listen. For both the educated ilustrado and the illiterate indio alike, literature was an aural experience. Written works were chanted and sung, or intoned audibly rather than read in silence, which also meant that literature was consumed communally, rather than individually, and libritos (booklet) often passed hands. As such, printed material were accessible not only to the literate few who could read, but also to the wider majority, a "listening public" that not only consumed stories but also recalled, reconstructed, and relayed them from memory. For this orally-inclined audience, the kinds of written works that tended to be appealing were those that lent themselves to oral transmission. The written artistic forms that did became popular from the mid 1700's onwards were the texts called pasyon, awit, and corrido, and the dramatic forms sinakulo and moro-moro. These made use of poetic conventions from the folk tradition, including stanza forms and riming patterns, and were thus geared towards the mental set of their audience. The use of folk stanza forms allowed for popular reading materials to be sung to traditional melodies, a fact which aided in their popularization. In the section that follows we shall discuss these written literary genres that enjoyed wide circulation alongside the moro-moro to provide a socioliterary context that will aid us in our understanding of the appeal of the moro-moro to its audience. 82 Theocratic Literature from the Spanish Colonial Period Penned by a native of Batangas, Gaspar Aquino de Belen, the Mahal na Pasion (Holy Passion of Christ) was the first published narrative poem in Tagalog and dated from 1704. Unlike the awkward earlier attempts by missionary poets to write in the Tagalog language, the pasyon was vivid and evocative. The Tagalog Pasion is akin to a huge family of Spanish writing on the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, but it is not merely a translation of its Spanish counterparts. When Bienvenido Lumbera compared the Vita Cristi from Spain and the Tagalog Pasion, he noted that although both used the same measure (quintanilla: a stanza of octosyllabic lines), the Tagalog version made use of a different rhyme scheme: the monorime of Tagalog folk poetry which allowed it to be set to folk melodies. The pasyon's dramatized version is called sinakulo. Parts of the long narrative poem were turned into dialogue, and recited by actors in between re-enactments. The pasyon and sinakulo were performed during Holy Week and animated village life with calendric predictability. The pabasa or the reading sessions of the pasyon, which took several days or nights to complete, involved the coming together of villagers, to gather around for the communal consumption of poetry. The staging of the sinakulo, likewise, required the coming together of the community, to participate in the procession, to build the stage, to produce the costumes, and to coordinate actors and musicians. We mention the pasyon and sinakulo here, not only to provide a sense of the socio-literary climate in the early 1700's, but also to make the argument that these two religious genres cultivated among its audience modes of oral presentation and aural communal consumption, and established the habits of gathering that would exert a strong influence on the shape and form of the moro-moro plays which emerged not long after the pasyon was first published. 83 While the pasyon text and the dramatized sinakulo were centered on the story of Christ, and were performed during Holy Week, three new poetic genres that emerged in the mid 1700's were of a more secular nature. The metrical romances awit and corrido, and the dramatized moro-moro dealt with tales of chivalry set in faraway medieval kingdoms. While the story of Christ could not be altered too much, tales of chivalry could, such that these three genres offered poet-composers who were skilled versifiers, ample opportunity to unleash their full creative impulse to compose epic narratives.31 All three literary genres dip from the same wellspring of chivalric tales of love and honor set in faraway medieval kingdoms. The plots and characters were adapted from Spanish ballads which dealt with knightly pursuits of the Crusades. As such, the conflict between Christians and Moors was a central feature of these stories. It is believed that they made their way from Spain to the Philippines via Mexico. Prior to 1766, the lucrative Manila-Acapulco trade route brought many Mexican natives in contact with locals. Soldiers and sailors, or guachinagos, who intermarried and settled in the Philippines are the most likely transmitters of the plots of the Spanish ballads, which in turn supplied skillful local poets with exciting new themes, characters, and settings.32 The theory of this Mexican connection is supported by both literary and iconographic evidence. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Franciscan missionaries 31 It must be mentioned here that the pasyon readings also offered an opportunity for composition and spontaneous versification, though in a more limited way when compared with the secular awit, corrido, and moro-moro which poets composed in their entirety. During pasyon readings, recitation often strayed mischievously from written texts which is why Spanish priests regularly condemned pabasa gatherings as sites of sin and superstition. Another manifestation of how the pasyon was siezed by local poets as a venue for expression of their poetic impulse is the manner in which the "literary" version of the pasyon penned by Gaspar Aquino de Belen in 1704 over time, through constant copying, memorizing, and passing of hands, had evolved into the Pasyong Pilapil which contains many new sections. The deviations of the Pilapil version from the earlier Pasyon offers a window into popular consciousness. The Pilapil version was in fact the most popular version of the pasyon among the rural folk, even though (or perhaps because) it was the least polished. 32 Rafael Bernas. 1965. Mexico en Filipinas: Estudio de una transculturacion. Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. pp. 109-25. 84 brought to Mexico a type of drama called Moros y Cristianos, to represent the superiority of their race and religion. Moros y Cristianos has its roots in the chivalric epics and dramatizations of medieval Christian communities of the Iberian peninsula. The period's literature and drama was closely linked to the Reconquista and the cult of Santiago de Matamoros. It is believed that Santiago (St. James), one of the original apostles of Christ who proselytized in the Iberian Peninsula, would descend from the skies astride a white horse to provide divine assistance to Christians fighting Moors. He is said to have appeared to Charlemagne in a dream and instructed him to build an army and enter Spain. Santiago's aid was instrumental in Charlemagne's bid to unite Christendom. Anthony Shelton, in his study of chivalric literature and Moros y Cristianos explains: The close association of the two warriors the one divine, the other temporal, may have encouraged a close, even confused, identification between them, which stimulated many of the Mexican versions of the Dance of the Moors and Christians to be based on acts of Charlemagne rather than Santiago…The Charlemagne association encouraged the development of another common dance drama with a similar theme…the Doce Pares de Francia. Furthermore, the conflation of the two parallel traditions may be responsible for the mixed and sometimes confusing iconography found in many contemporary dramatic performances, such as that between the dress of the Moors and Romans found in Mexico and the Philippines. Shelton suggests that it was oral traditions rather than written epics and their associated literature that exerted a stronger influence on the popularization of the structure and content of these conflict-based dramas. Spanish ballads and chivalric tales were transmitted by pilgrims who traveled along the Jacobean trail, and the various stories, as they were repeated, melded through time.33 It is perhaps for this reason that the stories transmitted to Mexicans and later to Filipinos were garbled plots that deviated greatly from the Spanish ballads as sung at their point of origin. 33 Anthony Shelton. "The Performative Lives of Narratives: European Chivalric Literature and the Dance of Moors and Chirsitians" in Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof. 2004. Reflections on Asian-European Epics. Singapore: Asia-Europe Foundation. pp. 266, 278. 85 The content of the awit, corrido and moro-moro, like the pasyon, may have originated from foreign sources but in the process of being transplanted were reconstituted within a literary grammar that grew out of the Filipino social world. And while the moro-moro has a performance text, and the awit and corrido are metrical romances, the most popular stories like Don Juan Tiñoso, Doce Pares, and Bernardo Carpio are not only read as romance, and acted out as moro-moro, but are also told as folk-tales and in a sense take on the characteristics of oral lore. An examination of pasyon, sinakulo, awit, corrido and moro-moro verse structures can give us a "feel" for how these complementary genres sounded, and how they were enjoyed. They were all written in stanzas of four lines each, following traditional folk quatrains. They differed in meter, tone, melody, and length of time required performing them. The corrido makes use of the octosyllabic meter, and is sung allegro, to lively melodies and thus is quicker to complete. The awit makes use of the dodecasyllabic meter, is sung andante, or in a more serious, somber tone, and takes longer to finish.34 The pasyon also followed the octosyllabic meter and was sung to various melodies. Ileto describes how the pasyon sounded thus: "Although the Spanish melodic influence is dominant, one particular style called tagulaylay, in which a complete stanza is completed in one breath with fancy curls and trills, harks back to pre-Spanish modes of singing."35 As for the dramatized pasyon, the sinakulo, there were two modes of delivery: the hablada (recited) and the cantada (sung). The hablada requires that the lines be spoken in deliberate manner so that the rhythmic measure of each verse and the riming scheme of each stanza may be shown for the purpose of giving the impression of the dignity of the theme. The cantada requires that the lines be sung in much the 34 35 Damiana Eugenio. 1995. Mga Piling Awit at Korido. pp. xvi Reynaldo Ileto. 1979. Pasyon and Revolution:Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. p. 20. 86 same way the pasyon is chanted during the Lenten season. The hablada version can be completed in one presentation, while the full-length cantada takes longer, as much as three nights, to complete.36 In contrast to the other written genres mentioned above, the moro-moro verses were not set to folk melodies, but rather were intoned in a monotone allowing playwrights to make effective use of both the octosyllabic and dodecasyllabic meters. The audience would hear the director-prompter and actors in alternation, creating a rhythmic discontinuity that allowed for transitions of meter that are not possible in the sung pasion, awit, and corridor, which are set to fixed melodies. In the play entitled Principe Baldovino for example, the celebrated poet Jose de la Cruz makes use of the octosyllabic meter for a quarrel scene. The brevity of the lines coupled with the splitting of the lines of the quatrains between the two actors, their alternating dialogue, and the allegro beat, effectively captured the excitement of growing tension between the two warriors.37 De la Cruz then shifts to the dodecasyllabic meter for a love scene much later, which would have most likely been delivered andante style. In watching the moro-moro the native audience saw something both familiar and extraordinary. It was familiar in that it made use of conventional schemata, narrative motifs, stock imagery, and riming patterns found in the pasyon, awit, corrido, and sinakulo - the delivery of dialogue may have even sounded very similar. In many ways, however, it was extraordinary, a visual and sensory feast quite unlike other literary fare available at the time: it had magic effects, elaborate stages that resembled castles; it had awesome props such as paper mache giants, and mechanical birds, and beasts and dragons manipulated with bamboo poles, and pyrotechnics! The moro-moro made audiences giddy with courtship scenes between handsome princes 36 37 Francisco G. Tonogbanua. A Survey of Filipino Literature. Manila, Philippines, 1959. p. 80 Lumbera, p. 72. 87 and beautiful princesses. Most importantly, the moro-moro had the exciting war dances, and rousing battle scenes. In the moro-moro we find the convergence of two artistic impulses: the impulse to versify, and the impulse to dance. In the lengthy and repetitious moro-moro these two impulses find full expression. The Pleasure in Repetition The lechon that makes it to the fiesta buffet table will have had months of preparation behind it, starting with the selection of a most promising piglet, that will be fattened up with care. Come fiesta time, it will be skewered, and then roasted whole. Lechon get its unique flavor from being turned constantly over hot coals, in a pit located in plain sight, in some common space where it can be shown off and collectively anticipated by everyone who will later have a share of it. We can think of the process of publicly roasting a pig as a sensory feast in itself, before the actual feast. Just as the lechon was roasted in plain sight, so too were moro-moro rehearsals held in public to be watched before the actual show. So writes an American observer in 1906: “Rehearsals took place daily in the grass-grown streets, and might be witnessed by any who wished. Even the moonlit nights were dedicated to practice in the wide street in front of the presidencia.”38 This was also the case for the ErmitaPahina district in Cebu, where in 1920, the linambay (local name for moro-moro) entitled Trasmonte de la Fortuna, was held for nine evenings. A day or so before the opening night, the cast held their final rehearsal on stage and a huge throng of spectators flocked to the stage to watch, filling the Plaza to full capacity. Ambulatory vendors exploited the opportunity and set up an impromptu fair on the plaza 38 William Bowen Freer. 1906. The Philippine Experiences of an American Teacher; a narrative of work and travel in the Philippine Islands. New York: C. Scribner’s sons. p. 74. 88 grounds.39 I saw this myself in the village of San Dionisio in Parañaque City in 2006, when rehearsals were held outdoors, in the plaza fronting the church in plain sight of everyone, complete with lapel microphones and loudspeakers (they were after all conducting a technical rehearsal which included a sound check). This practice of rehearsing in plain sight, of showing ahead of time what will be shown during the actual performance, signals to us that the element of surprise, which is so valued in the West, may not be as important for a traditional audience that anticipates the familiar. It also indicates to us the pleasurability of repetition. And to take this point even further, on top of the lengthy and repetitious rehearsals and the lengthy and repetitious performance, the audience extends the joys of watching by even asking for encores once the performance is done. It was a common practice for an actor to be implored upon to repeat a particularly pleasing scene several times over. In one striking example, documented in 1917 in the locality of Tehero in Cebu, an actor endearingly nicknamed "Prinsipe Onsot" so regaled the audience in one of his scenes that they applauded him vigorously and called for encores. As the anecdote goes, Onsot obliged the crowd by repeating the scene. Again, the audience asked for another encore, and he repeated the scene a second time. Yet again the audience asked for a third encore. This time the actor declined to repeat the scene, and the playwright, who thought the audience had the right to an encore and who felt so insulted by the refusal to repeat the rousing scene, slapped him in the face. This caused the actor to draw his sword, and he would have probably struck the playwright if others hadn't intervened.40 39 40 Ramas, p.18 Ibid., p. 16 89 The amount of time spent on enjoying the moro-moro before, during, and after its performance has been noticed by foreign observers, and this has sometimes led them to make unflattering conclusions about the Filipino character. This was perhaps the case with Navarro Chapuli, whose comment about the "dormant intelligence" of the Filipino we cited earlier. Chapuli made the following observation about the nineteenth-century native audience: Nothing enlivens this sorry lot more than the staging of the moro-moro in open air. . .There they often stray, they have arms for tilling the fields, but. . .spend a great deal of time practicing for their parts for the moro-moro, in this they never fail. Like little children, indios need a great number of hours of play every day…The indio is happy because he has not grown up, and infancy – unlike serious occupations – requires much happiness and merrymaking.41 These observations read the amount of time spent on the moro-moro, and the love for happiness and merrymaking, as indicative of the infantile and indolent nature of the natives. There are, however, alternative interpretations for the amount of time spent on the moro-moro. The devotional angle is one, or the lengthy performance as a worthy offering to a patron saint. Elsewhere in the Hispanic world performances during fiestas patronales are carried out in fulfillment of a devotional vow called panata in the Philippines, promesa in Spain, and manda in Central America. Participation in the performance is a privilege as well as something akin to a tithing giving time, treasure, and talent whether in supplication or in thanksgiving for an answered prayer. We can imagine that a lengthier performance involves more sacrifice and more resources expended, and thus could be considered a better offering than a shorter one. Another explanation, this time beyond the religious devotional frame, may have to with the projection of a town's power and prestige. This is similar to an 41 Antonio Chápuli Navarro. Siluetas y Matices Galería Filipina Madrid: Impr. De la Viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1894. p. 168-169. 90 observation made by Matthew Cohen regarding the popular theater form called komedi stambul in nineteenth-century Indonesia. Says Cohen, "hosting komedi troupes was often represented as a part of what made a town or city ramai (lively), it was seen as a sign of prosperity and health (ramai harja in Javanese) of the civic body. This ramai quality was also highly valued in komedi performances for the signs of activity and life onstage osmosed into everyday life. A stage that is ramai guarantees a society that is ramai as well."42 The panata angle and the ramai quality of the plays suggest that a lengthy performance is considered meaningful. But even beyond considerations of meaning, there was something about the repetitiousness and lengthiness of the moro-moro that was deemed aesthetically pleasing by the audience. It must be clarified here that the manner in which dialogue was delivered was done less "dramatically" and more mechanically, even artificially, in a repetitious monotone. The acting in the moromoro, inclusive of the language and movement, is highly stylized. An American spectator of moro-moro in 1906 that “the acting consisted in strutting about the stage and declaiming what sounded like blank verse in a monotonous, unnatural and highpitched voice, with very stiff gestures and little or no facial expression. . ."43 Earlier, we mentioned how since the nineteenth century realism had become the yardstick against which all literary works were measured. As such, the stylized moro-moro was (and perhaps continues to be) seen as inferior. Realism, however, is but one among many yardsticks and what it enshrines as desirable need not be viewed as universally valued. Who is to say that more natural ways of acting and speaking, and verisimilitude are inherently better? In her study of classical Javanese dance, Clara Brakel-Papenhuyzen argues that in the Javanese context, the opposite may be 42 43 Cohen. p.17. William Bowen Freer. 1906. p. 80 91 the case. She makes the point that the more stylized an art form, the more highly regarded it becomes. In Javanese theater, many rules have to be mastered with diligence and care in order to achieve the expected harmonious and beautiful result. If an art form is not stylized it will be considered inferior and lacking in craftsmanship.44 From this angle, it is entirely plausible that the stylized delivery of dialogue, which has been described by outsiders as a "blank", "monotonous", "unnatural", and "high pitched", was valued by the traditional moro-moro audience as a hallmark of craftsmanship. Again we turn to Sweeney's study to enlighten us in this regard. For the traditional audience of classical Malay literature, likewise, a stylized recitation using a rhythmic monotone, which may be unbearably tedious for a modern audience, was both engaging and functional. Sweeney claims that the notion of a monotonous chant as being "boring" is "absurd" for the Malay audience, and is akin to saying that the letters and words on a printed page is boring. Says Sweeney, "the monotony of the chant, far from being a negative feature, is a sine qua non for effective communication" since a "richly melodic rendering of a tale would distract the listener from the words and relegate them to a position of secondary importance".45 Though Sweeney's analysis is based on a performance genre that involved recitation, and the moro-moro is after all a form of drama, we can still apply his analysis to our study. One could make the argument that moro-moro acting was less of a "dramatization", and more of a recitation combined with "stiff gestures and little or no facial expression", such that the viewer had to imagine for himself, or had to reconstruct in his mind, what was being relayed by dialogue. The repetitiousness of the delivery of dialogue -- that is, the monotone -- aids the viewer in his 44 45 Clara Brakel-Papenhuyzen. 1995. Classical Javanese Dance. Leiden: KITLV Press. p. 51. Sweeney. pp. 21-22. 92 reconstruction, and helps to draw him deeper into the story. From this, we can better appreciate what yet another observer, Forbes-Lindsay, said about the audience: The native spectators indeed, enter into the action of the play with, as it were, a grim earnest, as if all their mental faculties were judging the complex emotions and nice situations. Nothing indeed, on the native character is more remarkable that its unwavery decorum. Here the happy crowd has been standing for three hours agape with delight… Here, too, they would be willing to stand for several hours longer…46 The remark about "remarkable unwavery decorum" made by an American in 1906, resonates with an observation by the Spanish chronicler Alcina in 1668, nearly two and half centuries earlier. Alcina reports the existence of a sixteenth century oral art form called siday or kandu, which was a difficult and noble literary form and which may correspond with what we refer to as “folk epics”. They were long, sustained, repetitious, and heavy with metaphor and allusion. The subject matter was the heroic exploits of ancestors, the valor of warriors, the beauty of women, or even the exaltation of heroes still living. It might take six hours or the whole night to sing through, and might even be continued the next night, during which rapt audiences neither yawned nor nodded "though the frequent repetition of long lines with only the variation of a few words struck Spanish listeners as tiresome".47 What we see here is a pattern of continuity between the native habits of presentation and consumption at the point of contact - and presumably before contact with colonizers - and well into the colonial period. That the Spanish listeners found the repetitiousness of the native oral art forms tiresome, or tedious, is a very significant fact. It indicates to us a discernible angle of vision: the repetitiousness and lengthiness of the moro-moro betray native sensibilities, rather than those of the 46 C.H. Forbes-Lindsay. 1906. America’s Insular Possessions. Philadelphia: J.C. Winston co. p. 548 See William Henry Scott. 1994. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. p. 98 47 93 Spanish friars who first introduced drama in the country. This may lead us to make exciting new interpretations about the role of the moro-moro in Philippine history. If we were to go by popular accounts, the moro-moro was a kind of theater brought by the Spanish to the Philippines, and it was used as a "tool of the establishment" to instruct the natives on the superiority of the Spanish race and religion. This suggests to us that it was a creation of parish priests, a kind of theocratic literature imposed by colonizers "from above" and accepted by natives "from below". This view has attained near orthodoxy, and has led to a negative assessment of the moro-moro as colonial baggage, and of Christianized Filipinos as being "culturally damaged". If the conventions of the moro-moro are any indication, however, this genre developed "from below", and is a result less of colonial imposition than of the native population's own creative inertia. The lengthiness and repetitiousness of the moro-moro must be read in this light -- as a means for skillfulness (both in composing orally, and listening at length) formerly expressed in pre-Hispanic oral art forms, to find expression in a new dramatic genre that emerged under Spanish colonial conditions. That this genre flourished and was much loved by natives is largely due to the fact that it developed in the hands of local poetplaywrights who ably catered to the oral mindset of their audience of aural connoisseurs. Repetition, far from being boring and tedious, was to moro-moro enthusiasts -- authors, actors, and audiences alike – useful and pleasurable. [...]... nights to complete, involved the coming together of villagers, to gather around for the communal consumption of poetry The staging of the sinakulo, likewise, required the coming together of the community, to participate in the procession, to build the stage, to produce the costumes, and to coordinate actors and musicians We mention the pasyon and sinakulo here, not only to provide a sense of the socio-literary... elasticity A town that has a huge budget for the moro- moro may want the show to last for nine nights to coincide with the nine-day novena in honor of the town's patron saint To accommodate such a schedule, several kingdoms may be included in the story, in which case the palace scenes, battles, speeches, tournaments to win the hand of each princess, and so on, will be repeated in each of the kingdoms A... pyrotechnics! The moro- moro made audiences giddy with courtship scenes between handsome princes 36 37 Francisco G Tonogbanua A Survey of Filipino Literature Manila, Philippines, 1959 p 80 Lumbera, p 72 87 and beautiful princesses Most importantly, the moro- moro had the exciting war dances, and rousing battle scenes In the moro- moro we find the convergence of two artistic impulses: the impulse to versify, and the. .. brevity of the lines coupled with the splitting of the lines of the quatrains between the two actors, their alternating dialogue, and the allegro beat, effectively captured the excitement of growing tension between the two warriors .37 De la Cruz then shifts to the dodecasyllabic meter for a love scene much later, which would have most likely been delivered andante style In watching the moro- moro the native... manner so that the rhythmic measure of each verse and the riming scheme of each stanza may be shown for the purpose of giving the impression of the dignity of the theme The cantada requires that the lines be sung in much the 34 35 Damiana Eugenio 1995 Mga Piling Awit at Korido pp xvi Reynaldo Ileto 1979 Pasyon and Revolution:Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 p 20 86 same way the pasyon is... Netherlands: Universiteit Leiden p 39 -40 75 referring to Levi Strauss's discussion of "bricoleur" in The Savage Mind The bricoleur constructs his bricolage in a retrospective way He chooses elements from his already existing oeuvre, restructuring them into a “new” assemblage.19 In his study of Southeast Asian theater, James Brandon notes a pattern in the mode of production of plays in the region: "the. .. limited to paying patrons, as there was a practice of giving those who could not pay a chance to see part of the show for free Just before the last act, the management would shout, a la verde!, and those waiting outside for this go-signal would rush in. 10 The late entry of spectators is not a hindrance to their enjoyment of the performance, accustomed as they are to consuming the moro- moro in bits... nature of the natives There are, however, alternative interpretations for the amount of time spent on the moro- moro The devotional angle is one, or the lengthy performance as a worthy offering to a patron saint Elsewhere in the Hispanic world performances during fiestas patronales are carried out in fulfillment of a devotional vow called panata in the Philippines, promesa in Spain, and manda in Central... and off the vehicle as they please, and can occupy whatever space they find, in contrast to the modern theater where the audience is expected to take the whole journey from start to finish as if strapped to their designated seats Like a jeepney ride, a moro- moro performance would also have many "stops" along the way, and there was a great deal of flexibility in its "schedule" Consider the following... pattern was adhered to, the audience would be familiar with the general contours of the story and would not be confused even if there are inaudible passages, because in such cases they could "project meaning into the missing part, and any such meaning would be likely to conform to the composer's intention".21 We can gather that habits of orality persisted in the composition of moro- moro plays, and that . words are in order here about the nature of the theater houses in which the moro- moro was shown. During the nineteenth century, many theater houses sprouted in the port area, catering to different. time. In the nineteenth century, the folk who lived in the outskirts of town and in the mountains would go to great lengths to come to the town center during the fiesta, to participate in Catholic. speeches, tournaments to win the hand of each princess, and so on, will be repeated in each of the kingdoms. A playwright may add or decrease the number of kings, princes, and princesses in the story,