Steampunk at ‘Mabining Mandirigma’

I have many different groups of friends. One is the harem. Another is a group of women who occasionally lunch together. I don’t know if anybody sings in this group.  All I know is we don’t sing together. We go to all sorts of restaurants around town and in Tagaytay and have a lot of fun together.

To me the star of the group is Tillie, who invited me to join the group a few years ago. Anyway, a few months ago, Tillie invited all of us to go see Mabining Mandirigma at the CCP sometime the first week of December. Tillie is half Italian and is now vice president of the Philippine Italian Association.

To me the nightmare was finally that we had tickets for a Friday. I live in mortal horror of Friday’s traffic. But fortunately we managed to survive that, went to the performance and enjoyed it immensely.

 Mabining Mandirigma  is a modern musical conceptualized by Tanghalang Pilipino to celebrate the 150th birthday of Apolinario Mabini, whom our history books also call the Sublime Paralytic. He could not walk and was always in a wheelchair. It was written by Nick Tiongson, a luminary in the Philippines’ artistic world, a native of Malolos, Bulacan, and a relative of mine.  We don’t know exactly how we are related but we both know we are and we trace it to my maternal grandmother, Concepcion Arguelles vda. de Cruz (how she always signed her name), who was the first cousin of Lola Aurea Hernando, to whom Nick is also related. In Nick’s musical The Women of Malolos, Aurea was the woman who married a Spanish doctor, Eugenio Hernando.  That was the play that opened my eyes to Lola Aurea, who I remember simply as a tiny lively old woman whose kitchen window looked out on a narrow river. My grandmother and I used to spend nights sleeping on hospital beds in her home in Malolos. I only knew she was my grandmother’s favorite cousin. I did not know she was one of the famous women of Malolos to whom Rizal wrote.

 I always brim with admiration for Nick’s work. He has a talent for showing the human side of history, something I have always envied. I have always known that history was a lot more than dates and things like the Laurel-Langley Act or the Treaty of Paris.  History is alive. It tells the story of the lives of people then. I have always thought that was something history teachers should learn. Well, that is what Nick has done once more with Mabining Mandirigma.

 “This play was written for one simple reason. I believe Mabini is the hero par excellence for the Philippines today.  The problems he encountered in 1898-1899 when he was a leading member of the Aguinaldo government are exactly the same as the problems our country faces today: feudal patronage which privileges the underlings wj are pawns of those in power, private armies consisting of army soldiers whose loyalty is to the leader now as commander in chief but as a personal strongman, the use of violence against officials who are perceived as threats to the ruling power, men in government who will use the legislature to pass laws that will consolidate their class and assure them of easy access to government coffers.” This, Nick writes, and it is all true.

 The lady, Liesl Batucan, who plays Mabini teaches us patriotism so well. The group I went with agreed that every Filipino should watch this play. Even President Duterte, someone said. Maybe he can write a decree saying that every Filipino should watch it, especially the young, so they will learn how to be as patriotic, honest, and clean as Apolinario Mabini was.

There are many lessons to be learned from this musical. Chris Millado, the director, writes that they had two treatments — one dramatic but during the reading something was begging for a song. So they decided to make it a musical. Millado writes that he realized a need to communicate with young people whose eyes seem to glaze over when he talked to them about the anti-dictatorship movement that led to the People Power Revolution. Something had to break the barrier. So they decided to use steampunk.  “The discovery of the power of steam near the turn of the century revolutionized industry, commerce and dreams of empire. Ultimately it changed the way people looked at themselves and the way they imagined the future.  Steampunk repurposes the expressions of the Victorian era and engages them with the current.  In this spirit, the production repurposes the politics and aesthetics of turn of the century Philippines and engages it with current notions and issues.”

I didn’t know what steampunk was but let me say it makes watching Mabining Mandirigma a lot more fun. I think everyone should go see this fabulous production.  It is really fabulous.

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