Know your Identity, Know your History, Know your Self.
No Identity, No History, No Self.

Fourteen years ago, a Japanese by the name of Seiji Shimoda came to the Philippines with an intent of inviting a Filipino to attend an art festival that he was organizing. As it turned out to be, it was the ASIAN Performance Art Festival. Fortunately, I met up with him and in turn he invited me to go to Japan to actively participate in that NIPAF event. I was so moved by that experience that I committed myself to organize a festival upon coming home to the Philippines. That was 1999, PIPAF was born. And it goes without saying, PIPAF owes it to NIPAF.

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The Philippine islands are called Festival islands for a reason. Nearly anything in the Philippines is reason enough to hold a festival. Although we termed it “festival”, we mean “Filipino Folk Art Fiesta”. And such momentous and monumentally difficult festival to mount happens in the unlikeliest of places.

There is a festival for boats, which is different from the festival for boatmen; 
and a festival for ducks, which is different from the festival for duck eggs.  There is a festival for bees, a festival for bananas and a festival for blood compacts.  
A pantheon of saints celebrate their birthdays in festivals every year, and even obscure figures of Biblical lore, such as the blind Roman centurion who pierced Jesus with a spear on the cross, have festivals held in their memory.

Once a year in the Cagayan Valley Region, particularly in Santiago City where I live, we celebrate our ethnic diversity and we were able to show why the Filipino festival will never go out of fashion. 

The presence of over seventeen ethno-linguistic groups (in our area alone) has inspired a “Festival of Unity” called Pattaradday Festival. It packs the most colorful celebrations in the Philippines represented by the many ethnic groups that have made the city their home. This is so much more than just a convenient way to see the best festivals of the Philippines in one day. To experience it is to gain an education on the very idea of the Filipino festival itself. 

“Pattaradday” is the Ibanag word for “unity”.  The Ibanags are among the original settlers of the Cagayan Valley and are said to be the most adaptable of all indigenous Filipino tribes.  

Deep in the soul of every Filipino burns the need to rise above anonymity and shine before his peers.  For ordinary folks, the annual celebration may be the only stage they will ever be seen in.  And so, the festival has built-in features for letting everyone’s inner star shine. On the last day of the five-day-festival, the grand parade is held. People come from distant provinces to heed the call of Pattaradday Festival.  

When the parade ends, the showdown of street performances begin; this has become the focal point of modern-day Philippine festival because of their popularity with the youth. Purists bewail that what they see is the westernization of basic tradition, but pragmatists view it as a way of keeping the town festival 
relevant to the youth.  Festivals, after all, have been performed since pre-Hispanic times.  Their hold on people is so strong that even the Spanish missionaries used festivals to win acceptance for the Catholic faith.

At the street showdown, the performance of the Sinulog Festival from Cebu 
shows the enduring power of the festival as a tool for indoctrination.  When the Spaniards landed in Cebu nearly five hundred years ago, they presented an image of the Sto. Niño.  Since then, the Sto. Niño has become the patron saint of Cebu, 
honored during the Sinulog Festival every January.  

The myth of the Sto. Niño spreads across the Visayan region and spawned other festivals in its honor, such as the Dinagyang Festival of Iloilo.  Dinagyang comes from the Ilonggo word “dagyang”, meaning merry-making.  It is celebrated every 4th of January to commemorate the day the image of the Sto. Niño first arrived in Iloilo and was received by the dark-skinned natives. The Tabaco Festival of Tabaco City, Albay also harks back to an incident from Spanish times. The tale of the angry father who ran towards the newly arrived Spanish explorers thinking they were coming to take away his daughter. His shouts of “Tabak ko! Tabak ko!” meaning “My bolo! My bolo!” prompt his daughter to come out waving her father’s machete at the Spaniards.  The Spaniards thought they were being welcomed and wrote down the name of the place as “Tabaco”.

While some festivals commemorate historic events, others are inspired by agriculture.  

The Balatong Festival of San Mateo, Isabela honors the mung bean which has become an added source of income for the town in between rice harvests. The Pandan Festival of Mapandan, Pangasinan is based on the pandan plant that the town was named after. Pandan leaves are used to add flavor to cooking and make woven mats. The Bangus Festival of Dagupan, Pangasinan puts its famous milkfish on center stage.  In 2003, the Bangus Festival set the Guinness World Record for the longest barbecue, after a thousand grills were lit over a two-kilometer stretch to cook Bangus. The Ibon-Ebun Festival of Candaba, Pampanga highlights the town’s duck-raising industry as well as the diversity of bird life in the Candaba Swamp, which the town is building up for eco-tourism.

Festivals, by definition, are joyful occasions, but some of these celebrations actually came into being as a result of the collective trauma experienced by a community. The Masskara Festival of Bacolod City was formed in the 1980’s when the collapse of the sugar industry brought hard times to the city.  A festival with masks that had happy smiles painted on them was created to bring back optimism, and to this day, long after the city has recovered, Masskara Festival continues to be celebrated every October. Similarly, the Panagbenga Festival of Baguio City originated from a tragic experience. In 1990, a strong earthquake struck Baguio City and killed more than a thousand people. The Panagbenga Festival was organized to help the city heal from the tragedy.    

The international acclaim that these festivals have achieved has inspired other cities and towns to get more creative with their festival celebrations. The city of San Fernando, La Union, branded their founding anniversary Pindangan, after the name of the ancient village that grew to become the San Fernando of today. The city of San Carlos, Negros Occidental gave the name “Pintaflores” to the annual celebration of its patron saint, San Carlos de Borromeo.  Pintaflores is the combination of a tattoo festival and flower festival that were held separately in San Carlos in the past.  

As more small towns search for a tradition to anchor their identities on, 
Festivals have become a favored venue for image-building.  

The Baggao Festival of Cagayan province have steadily been making a name in the national street dancing circuit. The town of Cabarroguis, Quirino has named its festival Panagdadapun, which means “assembly” in the language of the Bugkalot tribe. Angadanan, Isabela have made the Gakit, or bamboo raft, the trademark of their festival. The home of the Pattaradday Festival itself, Santiago City, 
has cultivated its own performance called La Gran Batalla. Sword fighting forms a big part of the movements, as inspired by the Moro-Moro ---  mock battles performed on stage in the Spanish colonial era. 

As a community that grew out of a motley mix of ethno-linguistic groups, Santiago City could easily have drowned in a swirl of regionalism. With Pattaradday Festival, however, Santiagueños have turned their speckled origins into the one thing they have in common.  

In its ability to instill a concrete identity and provide a strong sense of belonging;
the Filipino festival definitely has no equal.

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And here comes PIPAF, not very much the same as the everyday festivals being 
celebrated in the Philippines, but still, a third world festival.

With PIPAF, it is easy to see that festivals continue to have that emotional hold 
it still has today. From its inception, the Philippine International Performance Art Festival (PIPAF) have presented many kinds of action making informed by the explosive methodologies of performativity; working across mediums, contexts and spaces. For a decade now, PIPAF have witnessed International as well as Filipino performance artists challenging the orthodoxies of “traditional arts practice”. PIPAF have “cracked open” new creative models, new languages for the representation of ideas and identities and new strategies for intervening into the public in an urgent, influential and we guess, exciting ways. PIPAF continues to map new artistic grounds and will continue to create an appropriate cultural platform to “include” a diversity of artists that might otherwise be “excluded” from all kinds of art policy, support system and / or all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical discourses. This PIPAF is operating both within and on the margin of things but this does not suggest that it is in anyway marginal, rather, it is testing the limits and boundaries across and between disciplines and ideas, investigating the “accepted and possible” in Performance art for PIPAF espouses and mobilizes many cultures.

What are the challenges we face in organizing PIPAF?

Confronted by our share of cultural problems, PIPAF is now mounting a movement, a cultural movement. Not a big, humungously national in scope one but a realistic, doable, regional one and in bite sizes. Performance artists and cultural leaders and cultural workers come together and strategize how can they be identified in and unified with their communities. One of our many challenges is to determine in what direction we are taking Performance Art to and what must be done in order to get to where we want it to be. Our consensus is: We want it to go “beyond entertainment”. 

Performance Art asks questions. Maybe this is a clear indication enough 
that Performance Art could go beyond entertainment. Performance Art in the first place, could alter if not elevate the public’s or its audiences’ sensibility and sensitivity, even just one notch higher.

Our intent is where the process begins. It is our “noblesse oblige” to help find conducive performance art spaces and creative environs in order to gain the artists’ commitment to do Performance Art. Here, we envision what “could be” as opposed to what “should be”. People support a world they help create, so through assessments, surveys and critical validations, we can align emotional intelligence around our vision. We can address the credibility gaps that must be bridged and rectify attitudes that undermine “that-much-needed-creative-change”. I have always believed that Performance Art has intrinsic-sublime-values. If it does not look like anything in itself, what must matter then is its power of vitality. What matters most is: Our audience is “touched” by our very action making.

The reading of meaning of our actions are connected to our audiences and spectators. Our action making somehow finds “support” in the energies 
of those who watched it. A person depleted of imagination, insensitive to feelings and devoid of any creative ideas will never see any significance in any action that we make. Intellectual analysis of actions, however, is not that needed because 
Performance Art does not only acts upon our intelligence but acts upon our total being.

What are the possibilities and limitation of organizing performance art events or art festivals in Asia?

When “dancers” break the boundaries of choreographic conventions, “theater people” push the limits of theatricality, “poets” appropriate the idioms of mass culture, “cultural workers” occupy the frontline of political activism and computer geeks explore the performativity of virtual space, their converging point is Performance Art. In this century of paradigm shifts, artists and cultural workers have a major role in the changing of mindsets or in the molding of new mindsets. A convergences like this could be an opportunity for this role taking. 

What do you think the performance art scene in the Philippines
needs in the next decade?

Aside from funding?
We need to surmount the greatest challenge we face in organizing Performance Art festivals in the Philippines, and that is how to encapsulate concepts and present it in audiences that have watched live-traditional-presentations like that of Carillo (Shadow Play), Moro-moro and the Cenakulo that have mesmerized entire communities for hours, for days for the past three hundred years? This is a very steep challenge.

Also, that challenge of how we can practice art as our own artistic expression 
or how we can perform cultural work that gives us individual freedom in order that that very art practice and cultural work could catalyze social change?
We have to respond to the needs of our time. We have to make firm steps to enter into the realm of arts and culture that is not just “scratching on the surface” 
but enter into the realm of arts and culture that liberate and unify us as a people.
The big picture here is always the ASIAN context. The big question should be: How could we put in the right track Performance Art’s current standing from where it is now to what it could become in the future? Definitely, we need to define terms.

When we say culture, what is it?

We have to know our Identity first and foremost. 
We have to know our History, We have to know ourselves.
No Identity, No History, No Self. Vice versa.

We have to craft our identities so that Moral and Social Transformations can be realized. This is a call for HOPE. This is a challenge to ACT.

Performance Art is not a-one-big-thing; it is a million little things.

Performance Art is an endless permutation of actions, a subtle equivalent of the spoken and written word; it is one of the most potent, intuitive and yet highly evolved strategy that can be used to comprehend the unknown.

Performance Art is not about who does it that counts but what it does to the public sphere. An expressed desire and a declared action with a singular intent of heightening the consciousness of its audience. 

Performance Art is an affirmation of our inner strength to win that war against poverty, pollution and corruption. On the side of the greater good, it improves moral standards that could provide a strong foundation for a sustainable community. 

Performance Art may be read as an activity where every artistic understanding must be subverted and conventional Aesthetics must be exploded. And yet, Performance Art is a celebration of creativity.

To make robust the practice of Performance Art by the rule of freedom needs to be guided by a deep and unadulterated pursuit of truth in all its various dimensions – seeking to uphold what is fundamentally right and fair. For those who display an absence of social compass, we will put things down in black and white with no spectacle. Let us not believe in “might make right”, instead, let us labor to help restore the people’s faith in a compassionate society.

In my one remaining good brain cell, my conscious advocacy is the development of a “support system” for the propagation, promotion, research and development of Performance Art - Its “liveness” and its parameters if there are any. I would like to emphasize, though, that the term “liveness” here 
should not be understood as a descriptive adjective of an art form but as a “cultural strategy”. 

I know that as a Filipino performance artist, I must with conviction make my fellow Filipino performance artists better understand our present social condition. Then together, we can respond to the fast-shifting-multi-cultural-identities in the community we live in.

As I essay in my performance artworks my everyday life experiences, myself as an entity living in a pluriversal surrounding, I take it upon myself to highlight and articulate the conflicts and contradictions that I see as well as try to formulate an intervention to closely engage with “my audience” in order that they could somehow be empowered. I belive that Performance Art can be a catalyst for social change. With God’s grace, I commit myself to help fulfill the Filipino’s quest for true justice. When all is said and done, much more is said than done.

Description of your organization
APO Artspace (Ambalatungan Purok One Artspace) is the haven of artists, cultural caregivers and PIPAF; the push and pull of artists doing performance art and artist organizing performance art festivals does not divide the house, on the contrary, it fortifies it for both are infinitely varying in scope, enormously wide-ranging in latitude and could accommodate enigmatic activities that nourish the rich Cultures and Traditions of the region that bolster that link to ASEAN Cultural Diversity
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Keywords: Crafting Identities, Social / Moral Transformation
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Yuan Mor’O Ocampo is a Performance Artist and a Cultural Caregiver based in Santiago City, Philippines. Mor’O, established PIPAF (Philippine International Performance Art Festival) in 1999 and directed the 1st PIPAF in Manila subtitled “Gampanan’99” (December, 1999), then the 2nd PIPAF “Saluhan’02” (February, 2002), the 3rd PIPAF “Lakaran’03” (May, 2003), the 4th PIPAF “Ugnayan’05” (September, 2005), 5th PIPAF “Ambagan’09” (September, 2009) the 6th PIPAF “Daluyan’11” (September, 2011) and 7th “Balikatan’12” (August, 2012). At present, Mor’O is the City Civil Registrar in the Local Government Unit of Santiago City. He received the Dodjie Dy Awards for Culture and the Arts as “Most Outstanding Visual Artist in Isabela, Philippines 2010”.