Nestor O. Jardin: A life in the Arts

Life’s little detours sometimes take us to totally unexpected places. Thirty-five years after abandoning classes in field ecology and animal physiology to join two friends at a summer dance workshop, Nestor Jardin is receiving the singular honor as 2008 John D. Rockefeller 3rd awardee for outstanding professional achievement in the arts.

His parents had wanted him to be a doctor – the first in the family from Lucena, Quezon  –  and scholarships at the Philippine Science High School and at the University of the Philippines for a BS in Zoology put him well on his way to that goal. But in the summer of 1973, best friends Loy Arcenas – now an acclaimed and multi-awarded director and stage designer in New York – and Rudyard Yap made him join them at the CCP Summer Dance Workshop. Then a member of the UP Filipiniana Dance Company, Jardin took his first class in classical ballet at the workshop – at the ripe age of 21 – and by the end of summer, he had bagged a full scholarship to the CCP Dance School. And while his two friends went on to other lives in the U.S., Jardin began his professional life at the Cultural Center of the Philippines – and a career that is unequalled in that institution’s 39-year history. From dance scholar to CCP president, medicine’s loss was the art world’s great gain.

The John D. Rockefeller 3rd award was established in 1986 to honor individuals who “have made particularly significant contributions to the international understanding, practice, or study of the visual or performing arts of Asia.” The award is managed by the New York-based Asian Cultural Council (ACC), which in turn was set up in 1963 by the JDR 3rd Fund to provide fellowships and grants to artists and scholars involved in Asian arts and culture. The first awardee was Harvard University’s fine arts professor John Rosenfield; the second and only other Filipino awardee was the late National Artist for Music Jose Maceda.

Jardin received his award last Friday at a $500-a-plate fundraising dinner gala sponsored by ACC-Philippines and the Asia Society, which also featured a fashion show, “The Art of Natori.” Conferring the award on Jardin were ACC chair and deputy chair of The Atlantic Philanthropies Elizabeth McCormack; ACC trustees Josie Natori and Kenneth Fung; ACC director Ralph Samuelson; and Rockefeller granddaughter Wendy O’Neill Wang.

Says Samuelson of this year’s awardee, “Nes represents a different kind of awardee; he shows how arts is alive. He is the first arts administrator to get this award. I call Nes a ‘Champion of the Arts,’ an advocate of the arts. Artists can’t be alone, they need a support system and Nes is the champion, helping people understand why arts and culture is important in our lives.”

Jardin’s transition from artist to arts manager and cultural executive was almost seamless. He spent a dozen years with Ballet Philippines (BP), starting from that fateful scholarship offered to him by BP founder Alice Reyes and rising to company soloist, instructor and administrator.

“I started classical ballet very late, that’s why I had no major roles in the classical ballets,” he says of his days as a dancer. But he did take on lead roles in modern and contemporary dance pieces that form the core of BP’s repertoire. Among his most memorable roles were Daphnis, Chloe and Pan (he was Pan), the pioneering rock musical ballet Tales of the Manuvu, and the lead in Pagsamba. “That was our tour opening piece,” he says of the iconic Pagsamba. “So everywhere we went, all over the world, when the curtain went up, there I was!”

Asked if he misses being on stage, he says without hesitation, “Generally, no.” He now gets satisfaction from watching a good performance. “Every time the curtain goes up, and the show goes well, and the performers take curtain call… I feel good.” He assesses that he is “satisfied” with “nine out of ten shows” of the CCP, “and of the nine, I’d say I’m ecstatic about five of them. And when people come up to me after the show with congratulations or they say they liked the show, that’s reaffirmation that we did a good job.”

He was associate artistic director for the performing arts of the CCP from 1987 to 1995, and artistic director for three years after that. He resigned from the CCP in 1999 in the midst of the charter and leadership crisis at the center, and was asked back to help revitalize Ballet Philippines as president and artistic director. But he had hardly begun reorganizing the country’s premiere dance company when the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Center sought him out in 2001. Says a BP trustee, “It was a big loss for us, since we felt we had found the perfect artist-manager to lead the company. But we had to admit it was a matter of serving the greater good.” BP is a resident company of the CCP.

Jardin joined the CCP board in 2001 as trustee, and was elected president. He is currently on his second four-year term. By virtue of his position at the CCP, as well by his credentials and experience in the arts and culture community nationally and worldwide, he is part of an incredibly long list of commissions, boards, foundations, organizations, associations, projects, and delegations. A standing joke among his staff and friends is how many times a week he is invited to cut ribbons and open exhibits, deliver speeches and welcome/closing remarks, and a day with less than half a dozen meetings is considered a lazy day.

His declared hobbies are sewing missing buttons on his shirts and cleaning out the cabinets in his apartment. He once gifted a friend with a whole stack of t-shirts that were smaller than small, relics of his days as a reed-thin dancer. Physically much more substantial now, he used to have a week-end badminton group, but that has since been disbanded in favor of meetings and conferences. He now rarely makes the long drive back to Lucena in Quezon province where he grew up, leaving it up to his sisters Ollie and Marie and their families to make the trip to Manila to be with their bunso.        

Aside from keeping the CCP and its programs going despite serious financial challenges, Jardin is overseeing the massive complex development of the CCP. Having established with finality (via a Supreme Court decision in 1998) its rightful ownership of 62.4 hectares of prime bayfront property, the CCP masterplan was completed by the environmental planning group PROS, and the financial and business plans for the complex are currently being worked on by the Chadaro group, a consortium of five Filipino companies, and is expected to be completed by mid-year.

“Our considerations center on two things: maximum financial returns for the CCP, and ensuring the realization of the vision of the masterplan in terms of the artistic nature of the complex.” It seems to be a case of commerce versus art, financial versus aesthetic considerations. But Jardin does not view the situation as a conflict, or that one has to be sacrificed for the other, but rather as a win-win situation where the commercial elements of the center will provide the CCP with enough of a solid financial base on which it can carry out, develop and expand its artistic vision and mission.

Sitting as it does on what is probably one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the city, many individuals and groups are understandably interested in participating in its development. “After the business and financial plans are submitted and deliberated on and accepted by the board, we will begin preparing the Terms of Reference for the actual development of the complex. We will make this available to all interested parties, local and foreign, by the end of the year,” he says.

Beyond the CCP, Jardin is focusing on three major advocacies. One is the recognition and promotion of the Philippine creative industry – including artists, designers, cultural workers, media practitioners, scholars and others whose work involve creative processes – as a legitimate and productive component of national development. In 2005 he organized the first Creative Industry Forum that brought together 270 creative industry practitioners from all over the country, and spearheaded the Creative Industry Task Force composed of heads of various government agencies and NGOs.

Another is cultural education, for which he was in charge of formulating the Philippine Cultural Education Plan that is to be implemented by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Department of Education.

Taking the lead in linking culture and the environment, his “Culture for Life” concept sets artistic programs focusing on the promotion of indigenous cultural practices for the protection of the environment, and environmental advocacy projects that utilize various art forms and media.