RP Theater in Sydney To stage My Son, Jose / First Filipino diplomat

Filipino theater-lovers in Sydney, who will be staging My Son, Jose, have requested me to write a message. What follows is what I wrote, with some notes added.

Hearty congratulations to Armando Reyes and Alberto Dimarucur for organizing the Fine Arts Collaboration (FAC) which aims to preserve and disseminate Filipino culture through various forms of artistic expression.

FAC’s intention to stage My Son, Jose, written by my sister Leonor Orosa Goquingco was first mentioned to me by the eminent theater personality Mars Cavestany. To be directed by Reyes, the play will presumably delight theater-lovers, the renowned dramatist Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero having described it as “the best written in 1955”.

Further, National Artist for Literature Alejandro R. Roces later declared that Leonor, National Artist for Dance, encompassed and encapsulated more artistic disciplines than any other National Artist. Let me explain.

In her younger years, Leonor garnered rave reviews in Tokyo as dancer and in New York as actress portraying Oparre in “Wingless Victory” and the lead in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; and as dancer impersonating the Tikling.

As choreographer, she stylized and theatricalized the folk dances, revolutionizing the entire Filipino folk dance movement and “bringing it to its highest stage of development” in Nick Joaquin’s words. Having elevated the folk dance to a creative and artistic level, Leonor presented abroad her epic “Filipinescas: Philippine Life, Legend and Lore in Dance”, to her own storyline, forthwith winning profuse praise from some of the world’s most discriminating cognoscenti.

Leonor also directed dramas, played the piano, wrote poems, performing arts reviews and cultural essays, the latter seeing print in such erudite publications as London’s Grove’s Dictionary, New York’s Dance Magazine, Rome’s Encyclopedia del Spectaculo and Hongkong’s Arts of Asia. Historian Teodoro Agoncillo regards Leonor’s encyclopedic Dances of the Emerald Isles as “a towering contribution to Philippine cultural history”.

When painter H.R. Ocampo saw Leonor’s drawings and sketches, he wondered why Leonor had not devoted her time to the visual arts. Actually, she did in part by designing costumes and stage sets for many of her dance programs.

Although My Son, Jose (Rizal), shows only a facet of Leonor’s prodigious and incredibly diverse talents, its staging is a singular tribute to her grasp of Philippine history and to the depth and breadth of her dramatic perception.

With the unwavering determination of cultural stalwarts Reyes and Dimarucut, FAC will inevitably continue to infuse life, meaning and substance to native creativity — to the upliftment of the Filipino community in Sydney.

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Jose Macario Laurel IV, Philippine Ambassadors Foundation president, kindly sent me a copy of The Ambassadors’ Journal which, to my immense surprise, contains a photo of my grand uncle Felipe Agoncillo, and a brief writeup of him entitled The First Filipino Diplomat.

I quote: After Gen. Aguinaldo had proclaimed Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898, diplomatic agents were sent abroad to work for the recognition of such independence.

Felipe Agoncillo is acknowledged as the first Filipino diplomat and he was given the unenviable task of going to Washington, DC. He left for the US on Sept. 2, 1898 and starting 5 January 1899, he tried to get an audience with Sec. of State John Hay six times but was ignored. He left with the latter’s office a memorandum with six salient points. It goes without saying that this diplomatic representation was summarily dismissed because the US was bent on colonizing the Philippines as a prelude to its “manifest destiny” of becoming a world power. His foray into Paris on a similar mission was a failure. Here I might add that ironically, the subject of the Treaty of Paris was the Philippines yet the presence of its representative was not recognized.

One term of the Treaty was the payment of $20 million by the US to Spain. If the Filipinos then numbered ten million, the price for each was $2!

The write-up ends thus: Agoncillo married Marcela Mariño who made the first Philippine flag in Hongkong in 1898.

Incidentally, my father once told me that Gregorio, Felipe’s lawyer-brother, got 100 percent in every subject at what, I surmise, was the equivalent of today’s bar exams.