From war dance to theater of war moro moro performances in the philippines 7

We should view the moro-moro performances realized in the present not as exact creations of the moro-moro of the past, but rather, as effectuations or versions that re-makes sense in th

Chapter 7:

Choreographic Opposition and the Portrayal of the Moro

The moro-moro absorbs and reflects social changes We cannot expect it to

stay the same, for the society in which it thrives also undergoes significant change

We should view the moro-moro performances realized in the present not as exact creations of the moro-moro of the past, but rather, as effectuations or versions that

re-makes sense in the current situation and context We have already seen in the last few chapters how there have been significant changes in the modes of delivery and consumption, and in the form and content of the genre as it is reformatted for new

performance spaces and audiences Today's many versions of the moro-moro result

from a process of conscious selection of elements regarded as vital by performers

What elements have been kept as they were before, and what elements have been subject to considerable change? These differ from group to group Dictation is considered vital in Nueva Ecija but not in San Dionisio The use of real bladed weapons is considered vital in Baler, but not anywhere else Elaborate costumes with multiple costume changes is considered vital in San Dionisio, while in Nueva Ecija and Baler, a single set of costumes is preferred and worn with pride in the same way high school cheerleaders or varsity players proudly display their team uniform There

is no single "model" that serves as a template for what the moro-moro is or should be

But despite the diversity of performance styles and the multitude of versions of the

moro-moro found in small villages all over the country, there are some discernible

patterns, a unifying thread and underlying logic to the kinds of changes that take place, indicative of the spirit of the times

In this final chapter, I focus on one aspect of moro-moro performances that

has always been considered central to the genre: the theme of Christian-Muslim conflict, or more specifically, the theme of Christian superiority I draw attention to emerging patterns in the portrayal of the "Moro" and argue that there have been significant departures from the standard formula of depicting Christian victories over Muslim villains There are likewise, considerable changes in attitude, both among

"practitioners" who stage the plays and the audience that watches them, and these changes in attitude reflect the post 9-11 zeitgeist It is the responsibility of the scholar

studying the moro-moro to be perceptive to changes For just as performances today

are not mere re-creations of performances of the past, so too should frameworks of

analysis and assumptions about the moro-moro not merely repeat those of the past

The chapter is organized in three parts: The first problematizes the notion of

the moro-moro as a form of Catholic propaganda against Muslims The second section highlights the various ways in which moro-moro performances depart from

standard portrayals of Moros as villains And the final section proposes new analytical

frameworks that are better suited to account for the moro-moro of today

There is unfortunately, a tendency among some scholars in the present to

essentialize the moro-moro, by describing it and boxing it categorically in a way that

fails to reflect the dynamism displayed by village performers To illustrate this point, I

will compare a description of the moro-moro written in 1967 to one by a young

scholar in 2009; these two statements made forty years apart are disturbingly similar

despite the fact that the moro-moro has undergone so many transformations in the

intervening years

Let us first take a look at an "official" description of the moro-moro made in

1967, in connection with the celebrated protest by Senator Tamano which we have

mentioned several times already in this study As part of the Philippine celebration of International Tourism year, the Board of Travel and Tourist Industry (BTTI)

sponsored a moro-moro presentation for a select crowd at the exclusive Philamlife

Auditorium in Manila The press release issued by BTTI to promote said event

described the moro-moro as “a morality play portraying conflict between the

Christians and the Muslims, with the former always on the winning side” and where

“a fight takes place and ends in the utter defeat of the Muslims.” It was this press release that first caught the eye of Senator Mamintal Tamano, and provoked him to

protest against and call for the banning of the moro-moro.1 Tamano pointed out that the Muslims in the Philippines are portrayed as the national villains and this is counter

to the aim of promoting national unity

Since this controversy erupted, a number of influential academics, namely Virgilio Almario, Doreen Fernandez, and Nicanor Tiongson, to name the most prominent, and the drama enthusiast Felicidad Mendoza, actively campaigned for the

reform of the moro-moro For decades, they kept up a sustained effort of remedying the moro-moro's offensive theme They saw in the moro-moro an important part of

Filipino cultural heritage, and they hoped to harness it as a resource for the creation of

a national theater It had to be suitably reformed, however, so it could bear messages that promote national unity, and to do that the offensive theme of Christian superiority

had to be addressed They made their desire to improve the moro-moro known

through their writings, speeches at conferences, and through many other activities they organized, such as workshops and festivals, that brought them in contact with

moro-moro performers One such event that has been mentioned several times already

in this study, is the Komedya Fiesta held at the University of the Philippines in 2008

1 Excerpts from the letter of Mamintal Tamano, chairman of the Commission on National Integration to President

Marcos published in the Manila Times, Mar 11 1969

The event was a huge undertaking, a month long festival that brought together moro troupes from villages from all over the Philippines A big part of the workshop

moro-discussions was geared towards identifying issues and forging new directions for the

moro-moro so that it could be made more relevant and become worthy of being a

pillar of national theater

In an article entitled "Postcript to University of the Philippines Komedya Fiesta 2008: Prelude to a Discourse on National Theater"2, a young assistant professor from UP named Sir Anril Tiatco, who was actively involved in organizing and

running the event, argued that the moro-moro "cannot serve as a national theater because of its Roman Catholic religious orientation" "The moro-moro is about the

politics of the Catholic Church," he writes, and “non-Catholics are misrepresented in

this theatre form" The moro-moro "pertains to the victorious Catholics and the

lamentations of non-Catholics and Muslims”; it “echoes strong Catholic propaganda… [and] denigrates Muslims.”

Tiatco's language and thinking resonate with the prevalent definition of the

moro-moro used by the BTTI some forty years earlier He also echoes the complaint

made by Tamano that the genre denigrates Muslim By re-affirming the BTTI’s definition, and Tamano's stance, Tiatco implies that nothing has changed in the

conduct of moro-moro performances over the last four decades This renders invisible

all the efforts made by theater activists, and the many changes adopted by village performers over so many years These statements made by Tiatco are significant for our study because I believe that he is voicing out a widely held, albeit outdated and

static, view about the moro-moro today, and it is important to confront the issues he

brings to light His article, after all, as the sub-title suggests, is a "Prelude to a

2 Sir Anril Tiatco "Postscript to University of the Philippines Komedya Fiesta 2008: Prelude to a Discourse on

National Theater" Asian Theatre Journal., vol 26, no 2 (Fall 2009 University of Hawai'I Press pp 281-302

Discourse on National Theater", and thus could be read as an invitation for further

discussion Let us begin by interrogating Tiatco's main concern over the moro-moro's

supposed "Catholic orientation"

Revisiting the Moro-Moro's Relationship with the Catholic Church

Is the moro-moro today an extension of "Catholic propaganda"? At the Komedya Conference in 2008, two anecdotes on the disenchantment of moro-moro

performers with the Catholic Church stand out in my mind as clear examples of how

the Church and the moro-moro performers represent two traditions that are quite at

odds with each other

The first anecdote comes from San Dionisio, where, as local legend has it, its patron saint San Dionisio appeared in a dream to one of the villagers to point out

exactly where he wanted the stage to be built for the moro-moro performance In the

past, a makeshift stage would be built on that spot, to comply with the saint's wishes

A recent move has been undertaken by the village organization Komedya San Dionisio (KSD) to build a stage on that "special spot" Unfortunately for the

komedyantes of San Dionisio, the piece of land in question is under the jurisdiction of

the Catholic Church and their recent requests to build a permanent stage there have been continuously declined Other venues nearby are available, but elders still feel that San Dionisio's specific "instructions" should be honored The refusal of the Church is causing a great deal of frustration among KSD's leaders, and as of the writing of this thesis the negotiations are still on-going.3

Similarly, in Peñaranda, Nueva Ecija, the existence of the Arakyo, their local

version of the moro-moro, was threatened in the 1970's when a priest wanted to

3 This story was elayed to me by Hermie Hernandez in a private conversation

prohibit the performance of the plays The locals persisted in staging the plays, anyway, but had to find alternative venues farther away from the church, in peripheral spaces The priest in question was eventually assigned elsewhere, but the Arakyo today continues to be performed in peripheral spaces and no longer in the main plaza like it used to At the open forum, after my paper presentation, a local from Peñaranda

spoke up and declared: "lumihis ang simbahan sa kagustuhan ng tao" (the Church

veered away from the desires of the people)

The situation today is a far cry from the Spanish period, when parish priests

played a central role in the moro-moro's production And yet, even then, it could be

argued that the intentions of the Spanish priests did not necessarily coincide with native wishes either To make better sense of the relationship between the Church and

the moro-moro let us briefly revisit the 19th century environment in which this

performance thrived, and scrutinize the social location of the moro-moro Whose

theater was it?

In describing 19th century Tagalog rural life, Ileto calls the church-convento complex headed by the parish priest as the "first realm" that served as a reference

point, a codifying and organizing center of social life The local gentry, or principalia,

"dominated by the mayor, his allies, tenants, police, and kinfolk" comprised the

"second realm" which was plugged into the church-convento circuit, particularly in

relation to ritual life The principalia however, was able to maintain its own

autonomous sociopolitical sphere, even as it identified with the church In the latter half of the 19th century, transformations in Spain, and in particular the bitter conflicts between the liberals and the religious orders, influenced the outlook of the

principales Their familiarity with Enlightenment ideas gave them an awareness of

their rights, and the limits of the power of the priest This, in turn, led to heightened tensions between the first and second realms

Beyond the two competing realms at the center, Ileto draws attention to a third realm at the town's outer limits, an alternative community with its own set of spiritual leaders and religious sects in the holy mountain in the distance Mt Banahaw was recognized as a source of supernatural powers Many peasants, especially those living

at the outskirts, were wont to make yearly pilgrimages to access the mountain's potency These same peasants likewise, made strenuous efforts to travel to the town center for Catholic rites Just like the second realm, the relationship of the third realm

to the church center was that of "partial allegiances, guarded accommodations, shifting identities, and changing definitions of authority and salvation".4

The moro-moro at fiesta time was a site of convergence that connected all

three realms In the Spanish period, performances were lodged firmly in the first and second realms at the town center, and peasants would travel from afar to watch The

parish priest and the principales lorded over the fiestas and the moro-moro

performances, and made important decisions such as which stories would be staged and who would star in them (either troupes were hired, or local villagers performed the roles)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the principalia class or the elite abandoned the moro-moro, which then slowly retreated from the poblacion center to the peripheries, to smaller barrios and to even smaller sitios, lodging itself firmly in

the realm of peasants We could interpret this as a means by which peasants appropriated for themselves an art form that was once in the control of the elite.5 As

4 Reynaldo C Ileto 1998 "Rural Life in a Time of Revolution" in Filipinos and their Revolution 1998 Ateneo de

Manila University Press pp 79-98

5 This process of peasant appropriation of the moro-moro which was abandoned by the elite is discussed in detail

by Resil Mojares in his book Theater in Society

more Filipinos passed through the American education system, the belief that patron

saints needed to be appeased through moro-moro performances was dismissed as

superstition, and the new generation of educated elite no longer supported the staging

of the plays The older beliefs persisted among peasants, however, and they took it

upon themselves to fulfill the community's panata, since the elite no longer

considered it an obligation

In his study of the Pasyon, Ileto explains how the Tagalog notions of potency

were similar to the Javanese idea of power, which derives from the animistic conception of a constant energy permeating the universe, which can be accumulated through the performance of certain acts These notions of potency amalgamated with Christian elements, resulting in the domestication of Catholicism and the evolution of the Tagalogs' own brand of popular Christianity.6 We could view the moro-moro

performances in this light, as not only a colonial tool wielded by the Spanish, but also

as a vehicle for the preservation of the very same “animist” beliefs that the priests were trying to stamp out

Brandon posits that in pre-historic Southeast Asia, there existed in the region established traditions of folk performances that were closely tied to communal rites of animistic worship and to cyclical festivals, which served the dual purpose of religious worship and entertainment When foreign forms of theater (most commonly from India and China; and in the Philippine case, from Spain) were later introduced in the region, these newer forms did not simply displace the older ones; rather, they were localized, or altered and reworked, and grafted onto existing patterns of theater activity.7

6 Reynaldo C Ileto 1979 Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 Quezon

City: Ateneo de Manila University Press pp 11, 24

7 Brandon, p 12

Borne out of similar cultural settings, Brandon proposes that on the most basic level, the diverse theater forms of Southeast Asia generally reflect the casual rhythm

of tropical life The cycle of rice cultivation created leisure time, which was an essential precondition for the creation of theater The development of artistic skills and the production of plays took place after planting season, and the festive consumption of folk theater coincided with the harvest Throughout Southeast Asia, special performances were staged to honor the rice spirit This is rooted in widespread animist beliefs that spirits reside in everything and that individuals can tap into

"magic power", and acquire it through his own acts, such as through performance When a person acts on another's behalf or in behalf of his community, his act becomes a magic ritual Much of traditional theater in Southeast Asia can be understood within this context as an offering, whether in supplication or in gratitude,

or to placate spirits Those who participated in a performance believe it to be efficacious.8

Examples abound of how theater is used to bridge Southeast Asians with the spirit world For example, to appease spirits and protect motorists, a police station in Java sponsored a wayang kulit performance at a road intersection that was prone to

accidents A special wayang kulit performance, called Murwakala is performed as part of the ruwatan ceremony to protect "ill-omened" or vulnerable children.9 In

similar fashion, we have discussed in earlier chapters how in the moro-moro

performances in Nueva Ecija, actors carry babies in their arms for a dance called

pantot, as a means of protecting the children from illness in the coming year Old

women, and some men (such as a soldier who has returned from the battlefield), also join in the dance, either in supplication or thanksgiving for good health and fortune

8 Ibid., p 3, p 10

9 Jan Mrazek 2005 Phenomenology of a Puppet Theater: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit

Leiden:KITLV Press pp xviii., 350

We will recall that the Arakyo in Nueva Ecija takes place in May and is part

of a larger fiesta celebrating devotion to the Holy Cross While the devotion to the Holy Cross may lead one to assume that the Arakyo is very "Catholic", the point of view from the Church indicates otherwise Let us take a look again at a the comment

of the Most Reverend Mariano A Madriaga, Bishop of Lingayen, whom we quoted earlier in Chapter 2 as having branded the practices in connection with the Santa Cruz

De Mayo as celebrations "smacking of vanity and paganism" and being "pretexts or occasions for more eating than praying, more material enjoyment than spiritual upliftment, and for ostentation of the particular queens". 10

This reminds us to have a more nuanced reading of the term "Catholic" One

of the unique sociological features of contemporary Catholicism is the significant diversity within the Church, for it is anything but monolithic There are many kinds of Catholics—the traditional, liberal, charismatic, nominal and, of particular interest to

us, the folk Catholics who are very eclectic in their religious thinking and practice They subscribe to a “superstitious” Catholicism that combines elements of animism, polytheism, occult spiritism, and so forth By and large, official Catholic teaching does not sanction this kind of syncretistic religiosity although the Church has often tolerated it for pragmatic reasons

We can imagine fiesta time as a site, or space, for "the temporary resurgence

of that which is suppressed but which cannot finally be expelled by the Church." The

moro-moro could perhaps be thought of in the same way as the fiestas de Moros y Cristianos in Spain, which for Max Harris, can be viewed as "a resistance to the

ecclesiastical hegemony and as a way of making room within the Church's sphere of approved activities for those aspects of human nature which the Church ordinarily

10 This sentiment was relayed in a sermon delivered on Sunday, May 17, 1953, see Francisco G Tonogbanua A

Survey of Philippine Literature 1959 p 82

rejects." We must view in a fiesta, an opportunity for the accommodation of contrasting notions of faith and salvation simultaneously co-existing in a single festival time and space sanctioned by the Church.11

This leads us back to Ileto's ideas, which we quoted earlier, on the relationship

among the first realm of the Church, the second realm of the principalia or elites, and

the third realm of the peasants in the outskirts, and their "partial allegiances, guarded accommodations, shifting identities, and changing definitions of authority and salvation" Thus could we frame the tentative relationship between a folk Christian

devotion like the moro-moro and the official doctrine of the Church Going back to the sweeping statements made by Tiatco on the Catholic orientation of the moro- moro, is it really "about the politics of the Catholic Church" and an extension of

"Catholic propaganda" as he claims?, or is it a form of resistance to ecclesiastical hegemony and a vehicle for the perpetuation of alternative belief systems that the Church is forced to tolerate and accommodate?

We should also perhaps question just how much control the church had over

the production of the moro-moro We have already shown in previous chapters that the manner in which the moro-moro was presented created a lot of opportunities for

improvisations and extemporaneously composed elements that could not have possibly been censored by the church It is often mentioned in literature on the history

of the moro-moro that the moro-moro plays were subjected to Spanish censorship It

is worth pointing out, however, that the complaints of the Spanish about the unruly

nature of the moro-moro preceded the creation of colonial censorship bodies Some

recorded anecdotes substantiate this claim In one instance in Tondo, the archbishop complained that the Pope was presented onstage as having been beheaded by Moors,

11 See Max Harris "Muhammed and the Virgin: Folk Dramatizations of Battles between Moors and Christians in

Modern Spain" The Drama Review 38, 1 (Spring 1994), pp 45-61

and in another instance, the “disrobing of a character of the clerical robes he had on and throwing them on the stage floor” was the cause of complaint.12 These two events, according to Buenaventura13, led to the creation of the censorship bodies in

1855 and 1857 Read this way, the moro-moro seems more “out of control” rather

than “under (Spanish) control”

In the next section, we shall interrogate this notion of the moro-moro as

"Catholic propaganda" by taking a close look at how the Moro roles are conceived,

portrayed, and valued by moro-moro performers today

Changing Portrayals of the Moro

It has been four decades since Tamano's protest, and since that time many

changes have taken place in terms of the moro-moro's form and content We can see

in today's performances how the conventional theme of Christian superiority is slowly being abandoned Through strategies such as deletion (offensive scenes such as baptism are abandoned), inversion ("Moros" become heroes and victors), revision (alternative endings are shown, such as reconciliation, or a tie), and appropriation (characters are equated to indigenous gods and local heroes), performances are

infused with radical new messages such as peaceful co-existence and nationalism Deletion of Baptism

In the Arakyo of Nueva Ecija, as we have seen, the performance in the village

of Sinasajan ends with no clear winners or losers, and the baptism scene is conspicuously absent None of my interviewers could remember precisely when in the last two decades the practice was abandoned, but one man recounted to me that it was

"more fun" when there was a baptism because members of the community played the

12 Ibid., page 27

13 Cristina Laconico Buenaventura The Theater in Manila: 1846-1946 (Manila: De La Salle University Press)

1994 p 44-45