Poetry & Live Art Performances at Cesare Syjuco’s ‘Ancestry of Stone’

“I don't think artists can avoid being political. Artists are the proverbial canaries in the coalmine. When we stop singing, it's a sure sign of repressive times ahead.”

- Theresa Bayer

It has already been a tradition for a multi-disciplinary artist to invite poets, performance artists, and musicians to perform at the opening of his or her show. The convergence of different artistic mediums at the opening of Cesare Syjuco’s exhibit, for instance, produces interactive dialogues between the artists and the audience. And for the audience, it has always been a treat to witness such unique gathering of artists from different disciplines to reveal their aesthetic discourses through poetry, music, and live art performances.

Among those who performed at Cesare’s “Ancestry of Stone” last July 24, 2010 at Galleria Duemila in Pasay City were Gimeno H. Abad, Alfred “Krip” Yuson, Rayvi Sunico, Vim Nadera, and Maxine Syjuco for poetry; Cesare Syjuco, Mitch Garcia, Ian Madrigal, and this writer for live art performance; Lirio Salvador, J.P. Hernandez, and the members of Elemento for music.

Gimeno Abad always performs his poems from memory, thus speaking his poetry from his soul. The lightness of his persona and the sound of his placid voice emanate a buoyant atmosphere, cradling his audience with the rhythm of his verses. Alfred Yuson, on the other hand, seems blasé yet bubbly the way he engages his listeners with his spoken words. He always delivers his poems with wit and humor, titillating the mind and heart of the audience as though he was seducing a woman. Rayvi Sunico, a bilingual poet, speaks his poetry with such passion, drawing his audience closer to the texture of his linguistic expression.

Clad in tuxedo impersonating an opera singer, if not Pavarotti, Vim Nadera rouses the audience into laughter when he sang the name of Cesare Syjuco to the tune of “Besame Mucho”. Wearing a white mask and hand gloves, this writer also performed a poignant piece titled “Suicidal Tears”, an existential cry of anguish and despair, as expressed through bodily movements and bloody tears that came out from the mask’s eyeholes.

Lirio Salvador, the founder of ethno-industrial band called Elemento, redefines avant-garde music with eclectic sound that comes from assembled electronic and metal scraps. His orchestral music, with J.P Hernandez playing the percussion, creates an ambient backdrop for other artists to perform their pieces, like the sensual and mesmeric Maxine Syjuco with her short poem about the rain. Then, later, it was segued by Mitch Garcia, showing off her written statements on sheets of paper before the audience. One of her conspicuous avowals says: “Atheism is a non-profit organization.”

Cesare Syjuco’s performance is indubitably satiric and whimsical, luring his audience to listen attentively to the playful sound of his plastic gun with his emotive soliloquy: “She loves me, she loves me not…”(The man himself seemed to be overwhelmed and gratified over the success of his show). Noticeably, among the audiences were from showbiz, like Ronnie Lazaro and Joel Torre, and visual artists, like Tony Twigg with his wife, Gus Albor, Eghai Roxas, Red Mansueto, Roberto M. A. Robles, Raffy Ignacio, Boy Achacruz, and UP Professor and art critic Reuben Ramas Cañete, to name a few.

Hosted by gorgeous Trix Syjuco, co-host of Illuminati opposite Alfred Yuson at GNN Destiny Network (Channel 21), the superbly curated “Ancestry of Stone” and the entire performances were aesthetically orgasmic, culminating with exotic food, beer, and wine.

After the guests left one by one before midnight, this writer with Jean Marie Syjuco (painter and performance artist), Silvana Diaz (gallery owner), Lanie Aquino (cousin of PNoy), Gus Vivar (publisher), Mary Ann Sillada (Director of Neatnix Philippines), and Ilac Diaz (Pinoy social entrepreneur, activist, and model) relished once again the oeuvre of Cesare with a warm conversation on arts and culture, social issues, politics, and, of course, religion.

It was, after all, a night of aesthetic revelation that reopens our eyes to many facets of political and social realities, and a beginning to renew our hope and trust to our new political leader. And as one of Cesare Syjuco’s artworks says, “God Speaks to Cesare,” we (visual artists, writers, poets, and indie filmmakers and musicians) are hoping the same thing that God will already break His long silence and, this time, HE WILL SPEAK TO NOYNOY to bring peace, harmony, and prosperity in our country!

Lanie Aquino, Gus Vivar, Ann Sillada, Danny Sillada (me), Jean Marie Syjuco and Silvana Diaz

© Danny Castillones Sillada

Revelation of Secrets & the Aesthetics of ‘Syjuco Tres Marias’

"The things we keep secret are always bigger and more frightening in the darkness than they are in the light of day."

– Elspeth Allcott
Published in Manila Bulletin, Pages F1-2, Lifestyle Section, September 8, 2008

In the corpus of aesthetic language, the disclosure of secret is the poetic revelation of truth through visual, literary and performing arts. As a poetic revelation, aesthetics uses visual imageries to reveal what is hidden based on the artist’s personal encounter of reality within a particular society.

This revelatory process is autobiographical by nature because art or any work of art, for that matter, is always personal – either representative of the artist’s reality or the reality of his or her environment. However, before the reality can be processed and translated into art, it has to percolate from the artist’s psyche and experience.

Inherently, the creator is personally involved in the process of art making so that, when a particular work of art is finally revealed, it becomes the “incarnate” of Truth from the artist’s perspective to be understood and deciphered by a historical society where art is created and addressed to.

MAXINE SYJUCO: “A SECRET LIFE”
In her first collection of poems titled “A Secret Life”, Maxine R. Syjuco is like a spider that lures her reader to tiptoe into the web of her secret world. She passionately weaves the vignette of her thoughts and feelings in-between verses, flutters and spins her delicate “voice” with grace and elegance, until the reader is gradually trapped within the complex web of her poetic creations. Dense and abstruse in form and substance, Maxine’s collection of poems possesses the characteristics of John Berryman’s lyricism, Sylvia Plath’s bold and elliptical lines, Anne Sexton’s sardonic voice, and Robert Lowell’s complex and autobiographical style of writing.

The 1950s and 1960s are described as the beginning of popular culture, the gradual collapse of cultural values and beliefs, the pluralism of social and political ideologies, and the advent of a technological and consumerist society. It was also the time where existentialism was gaining its momentum from such prominent literary figures like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.

The same era that “confessional poetry” emerged from the influential American poets such as Robert Lowell, identified as the father of confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (both students of Lowell), and John Berryman that would later change the history of American poetry.

In the local literary scene of post po-mo “confessional poetry”, Maxine’s voice emerges as the dialectical representation of her generation. Her poetry addresses some salient issues, which are eminent in the post po-mo society, i.e., the dislocation of hierarchy of values and the susceptibility of human psyche amid the “created realities” offered by popular culture.

The poems “Dear Mr. Prick”, “How to Murder a Naked Woman,” and “Red Light District: Lost Rules of Usage” are looming pictures that mimicked the sensationalized staging of realities in mass media.

Other poems like “How to Murder a Mocking Bird,” “Caution: Falling Debris,” “That Men Are Creatures,” and “Mrs. Stitcher” are derisive protests on traditional values and beliefs, whose beneficiary-victims are, most often, the children and the submissive wives of a conservative Filipino society.

Her poems, per se, are not self-revelatory confession of personal anguish and torment, which are inherent of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath’s poetry, but more on Berryman’s subtle and lyrical characterization of different personas, addressing the Freudian’s “Id,” “Ego,” and “Superego”.

Using the “I” in most of her poems, Maxine has always emerged as the heroine of her oedipal narrative, a subtle dissent from the symbol of authority and traditional system of thoughts. Similarly, the poems “To Sartre,” “I Am in Love with Galileo,” “Chewing Chopin,” “Dear Seurat,” “Jackson Pollock and I,” and “Who Shot Bukowski?” are transferential reverberations of her academic studies, a satiric gripe against the prominent figures in Humanities.

Another salient element in her poetry is the use of familial imagery, exploring Jungian’s theory on personal and collective unconscious. In “Mrs. Stitcher”, for instance, there is the displacement of the imagery of “context”, blurring the lines between symbol and the actual derivation of reality.

In another poem “Caution: Falling Debris”, it opens: “My father was a drunken carpenter/ who liked to build fires. / He built three great fires in his lifetime, / all in all, at least, that’s what I remember.” Then, in the fourth paragraph, the father was trapped, figuratively, by his own fire “until he became a silhouette” including his daughter and wife “where recycling was not cheap”.

Gothic, witty, irreverent and, at times, laden with dark humor, Maxine has woven a new kind of poetry reflective of her generation. Her eccentric use of words and imageries creates a poignantly strange linguistic expression, which is unique to her voice: Freudian, surreal and existential.

“A Secret Life” is slated for launch in September at Mag:net Bonifacio High Street. A second launch will be held in October in Indonesia with her father Cesare A.X. Syjuco and Alfred A. Yuson, among the Filipino representative poets at Ubud Writer’s Festival in Bali.

MICHELLINE SYJUCO: “THE PRIMAL FORMS”
Another aesthetic revelation that was unveiled by one of the “Syjuco Tres Marias” last August 8, 2008 at Mag:net Café, Bonifacio High Street, is Michelline Syjuco’s collection of sculpted jewelry on metal titled “Armadillon”.

It features the artist’s handmade jewelry designs, which are made of unique and intricately sculpted and soldered metals, embedded with spikes, bullets, clenched pearls, gemstones and fragments of rocks from outer space.

Guest of honor National Artist Napoleon Abueva and other notable guests the poet and columnist Alfred A. Yuson, art critic-artist Cid Reyes, and restaurant mogul Raymond Reyes, among others, graced the opening of the event. Landscape and interior designer Al Sibal curated the show.

The opening of Michelline’s exhibit was a historic evening – “The ocho-ocho weekend that was” – as described by Alfred Yuson in his column “Kripotkin”, because of so many events that were unveiled that Friday (08-08-08) in the local art scene, needless to mention the opening of Beijing Olympics in China.

Packed with sardine-like crowd inside the Mag:net Café, the event was highlighted with the fashion show of “Armadillon” collection. Fashion models include Trix and Maxine Syjuco, Arianne Tonda, Cami & Chinky Hiquiana, Iza Elises, Natasha Rodriquez and this writer, the only thorn among the roses.

It was followed with live performances of poetry, music and performance art by the usual members of the Electric Underground Collective: Cesare A.X. Syjuco & Jean Marie Syjuco, The Syjuco Sisters, Eghai Roxas, Yanna Acosta & Project Ganymede, Alfred Yuson, Bailan & Ukay-Ukay bands, Bob Balingit & The Wuds, Alan Rivera, Danny Sillada & Mangayaw band, Mannet Villariba, Lirio Salvador & Elemento, Mitch Garcia, Art Casanova, Ian Madrigal, The Slave Drum, Parking in Mogadishu, to name a few.

The “Armadillon” collection is the debut exhibit of Michelline Syjuco, the eldest sisters of the “Syjuco Tres Marias”, daughters of avant-garde artists Cesare A.X. Syjuco and Jean Marie Syjuco. The exhibit is extended up to the month of September at Mag:net Café, Bonifacio High Street.

TRIX SYJUCO: “THE BLACK BRIDE”As an offshoot of visual art, performance art subverts the form and structure of conventional art making by using material devices and bodily movements in presenting the imagery of reality during the performance.

Contrary to performing arts like dance, theater and musical, live art performance is a dynamic and unrehearsed presentation of symbolic images through live actions in front of the audience.

In her recent performance at the opening of her sister’s (Michelline Syjuco) jewelry collection at Mag:net Café, Trix Syjuco stunned the audience with her riveting feat in “Black Bride”. Clad with black wedding dress while her collaborator, acting as a priest-bridegroom (this writer), is wearing a white cassock and satin scarf with eye-shades covering his face.

The contrasting images are hauntingly surreal; the priest, instead of sanctifying the sacrament of matrimony, was going to marry the bride. In the same vein, the bride’s black wedding dress, a traditional symbolic color for a widowed wife in mourning, amplifies the gothic and bizarre imagery of the performance.

The tension heightens when the bridegroom (the priest) and the bride reenact a bodily sensual encounter in a dance-like movement. Then, the latter, as if awakened from demonic spell, chastises the bride by wrapping her body and face with plastic sheet. The bride, to complete the ritual, sprinkles her head with black and white powder and pours out the holy water on her body.

Passionate, primal and, at times, perturbing, Trix Syjuco’s performances break the wall of her mild-mannered archetypal “self” without subverting the form and content of her live art presentation. Her performances like “I Fell in Love with a Killer”, “Plastik” and “Black Bride”, to name a few, inherently follow a trail of existential angst, disillusionment, and embittered human relationships.

Her subtle use of imageries and devices is intelligently delivered in a dialectic manner, purging and liberating the harrowing quest of her inner persona as a woman and as an artist and, at the same time, creating a succulent seedbed to grow and nurture her aesthetics.

 © Danny Castillones Sillada

The Poetic Revelation in Language and Culture: The Vision of Sonny Villafania

“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Manila Bulletin (Lifestyle section, pp. F1-F2, May 12, 2008)

Poetry, according to a German philosopher Martin Heidegger, is the foundation of truth. As a foundation of truth, it employs aesthetic symbols to reveal realities that concern the historical, cultural and socio-political conditions of man in his society.

The use of metaphor or allegory, for instance, is a symbolic device to magnify the objective reality and establish a rational basis in understanding the truth.

As a foundation of truth, poetry reveals what is hidden in such a way that the general readers or public will know it, and the most effective tool to reveal such symbolic reality is the use of language and linguistic expression common to a particular culture and society.

One of the greatest poets who had achieved such magnificent feat is a British-Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetry transformed, not only the lives of Bengali people, but also the Bengali literature and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tagore’s poetry like the famous collection of Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which was translated into several languages, has been sang and spoken by the common Bengali people such as farmers, fishermen, the monks, the townsfolk and the intellectuals.

THE POETIC REVELATION OF SONNY VILLAFANIA
In the local Philippine literature, there is one visionary, who is about to achieve such poetic revelation to the common people in his region, a multi-awarded Pangasinan-born poet Santiago “Sonny” Villafania.

His remarkable achievement, in the standard of anlong tradition (Pangasinan Poetry), defies the conventional use of Filipino literary languages, which are English and Filipino, by creating a suite of highly structured sonnets and villanelles in his native lingua franca.

In his book 364-page “MALAGILION: Sonnets tan Villanelles”, one of his poems “Rekindled”, which is included among the collections of poems written in Pangasinan, Villafania takes the reader into a sensual journey of bucolic life that reflects his origin and culture.

“There is a rice-pounding song tonight playing…” he wrote in a simple introductory line, yet the imagery is filled with sensual meaning that is only decipherable among the ordinary people in his region.

The “rice-pounding song” evokes the rhythmic sound of pounded rice on lusong or wooden hollow echoing amid the rising moon and the silences of the night. One could imagine the smell, the sound and the taste of unripe rice being fried on a cauldron and then pounded to make them crunchy.

As the poem continued in the second paragraph, Villafania introduces and defines the rice-pounding not only as an ordinary activity, but also as a ritualistic gathering of young men and women to celebrate the offering to the goddess of earth and harvest.

The poet reveals the symbolic meaning of rice-pounding as offering and ritualistic celebration. In the same way, as he uses a subtle allegory to signify the fruition and harvest of poetry in his own native language. “They will hear me scream my poems of hunting…”, thus, says Villafania with magnificent force and passion in his native language.

THE ELEGANCE OF LANGUAGE AND ITS ACCESSIBILITY TO THE PEOPLE
There is something mysterious and magical in the language or any language for that matter, that only a poet could fashion, magnify and unveil its hidden message through a unique linguistic expression of symbols and meanings.

A poet is like a messenger and, at the same time, a shaman, who conjures up the spirits to magically transform the language with unassuming meaning and become the common source of understanding among those who write and speak about it.

A good poet lifts up the soul of his or her reader to the symbolic and metaphysical meaning of reality so that his message can be understood and applied by the common people in their daily lives.

In the first paragraph of Sonnet 158, for instance, Villafania mesmerizes his readers with the use of sound and the fluidity of language that even a non-Pangasinan could feel the sensual rhythm and elegance of written words:

Panon takan aroen Pinabli?
Ipetek ko man ira’y sonata
Anlongen ko man ira’y sonito
Ag iraya onkana anganko
Ed puson agto amta’y ondengel
Ed saray Dangoan na panangaro
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“How can I love you, dear?/ Even if I sing these sonatas/ Even if I write these sonnets/ These are nothing it seems/ To a heart who knows not how to listen/ To the Songs of Love.”

Villafania addresses that concern with urgency in such a way that his particular readers do not only feel and understand his sentiments, but also live and speak about it. He is like a chameleon immersing and identifying himself with the anguish of his people by gathering them toward a common understanding of reality.

In a sense, Villafania is not only a visionary poet; he is a linguistic philosopher who codifies the origin of language and culture. He dissects and juxtaposes the literary tradition against the modern influences by dialectically infusing them with his poetic revelation of truth.

THE BOOK IN THE CONTEXT OF PHILIPPINE LITERATURE

To understand and appreciate the literary content of Villafania’s 364-page “MALAGILION: Sonnets tan Villanelles” as an important contribution to Philippine literature, it is noteworthy to discuss the derivation of title, the literary content, style and structure.

The book’s title “MALAGILION” is derived from “malapati” (dove), “agila” (eagle), and “lion” (lion), an allusion to the alter ego of a Filipino-American poet Jose Garcia Villa, who called himself as Doveglion (Dove Eagle Lion). A title of the poem from which the famous 20th century American poet E.E. Cummings wrote as a tribute to his Filipino friend, Jose Garcia Villa (Adventures IV 5; CP 904).

In essence, “Sonnet” is derived from “sonetto”, an Italian word for little song from which, in the 13th century, became a poem signifying fourteen lines following strict rhymes and specific procedures. It is fundamentally a dialectical structure with contrasting ideas, emotions, beliefs, images, etc., allowing the poet to resolve the tensions at the end of the poem.

The “villanelle”, on the other hand, is a poetic form originating from French literature and was employed in the English-language poetry in the 1800s. It is composed of two rhyming lines. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. Composed of 19 lines, 5 tercets and 1 concluding quatrain, the villanelle is a complicated poetic form compared to sonnet.

One could imagine the regimen and artistry that Villafania underwent in conceiving and delivering his aesthetic creation, integrating these poetic forms in his own native language. The result of his painstaking labor is, impeccably, a magnificent work of art comparable to one of the Shakespearian opus in the 16th century.

Funded and published by the Philippine government’s Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino and Emilio Aguinaldo College, the book, among the very few written in native languages, is an ambitious attempt to bring literature to the masses, albeit a minute victory over the 170 Filipino languages spoken by the 80 million Filipino people inhabiting the 7,107 Philippine islands.

THE POET’S ADVOCAY

As a visionary Filipino poet, Villafania advocates the use of native language. He also encourages other writers to weave their craft in their native tongues so that literature will become accessible to the ordinary people, the same poetic vision, which the famous poet Tagore envisioned for his people. Villafania online publication of Dalityapi, for example, is a venue for all international and regional writers, who write in their respective languages.

To sum, in his regular column “The Breaking Signs” at Panorama Sunday magazine, a multi-awarded Filipino poet, writer and columnist Cirilo Bautista hailed Villafania’s book as “a source of rejoicing for readers of regional literatures... Villafania has created 300 sonnets and 50 villanelles in his own language that attempt to reflect the primacy of native culture and return the poet to the central stage of social life.”
© Danny Castillones Sillada
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Above photos: (1) Book Cover, (2) The Author, (3) Poster of the book.