Tupada Xing: Social Contact
Sophia Natasha Wei

John C. Maxwell once suggested that life should be lived in reverse. He says that you have to die first and get it out of the way. You spend the first few years of your life in an old-age home, you become younger and you get kicked out. After starting to work hard and then going through your graduation, you go back to school. Then you become a child again and play with no responsibility whatsoever. Finally, you enter the womb and spend the last nine months in the womb floating and live as a gleam in someone’s eye.

The performances in Tupada Action & Media Art 2007, or TAMA 07, almost unanimously endeavor to portray the truth of a better quality of life through blatant irony and critique. This time in the ongoing TAMA series, this aspiration was perhaps more obvious to the audience, given the fiery backdrop of the intense political election going-ons. Like living a life reversed, each performer turned purified like a little innocent child after delivering his o her message in each fraught performance displayed.

Thursday 19th April 2007
Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila

From left: Dirk Fleischmann, Seiji Shimoda, Eileen Lesgapi-Ramirez and moderator Maki Calilung.

TAMA 07 begins with a forum with panelists Dirk Fleischmann and Seiji Shimoda, Eileen Lesgapi and moderator Maki Calilung. The forum acted sturdily as an intellectual foundation for the event.

Moderator Maki Calilung opened the forum by quoting from a TIME magazine article that captures the audience as the focus. She emphasises how art can be not consuming and passive in the blizzard age of technology. Sometimes, the performer assumes either the role of the catalyser or the focus especially in the interactive locus. Questions like: how is action affected by the immediacy of the reaction? Are the public and the audience the same? How to differentiate different degrees of the audience? Does action continue without the artist? Who determines the final product? Is there even a final product? Such questions help one to step on the right foot for the forum.

Dirk Fleischmann and his “Stop Show”.

Participants concentrating in the game.

Final round to decide the winner.

Dirk Fleischmann began with his game “Stop Show” that involved ten participants. His intent in his art making is to address the masses and make art accessible. Hence, his projects are process-based works that create situations, address people differently and envelop several methods to connect with the audience.

Dirk Fleischmann highlighted a candy-selling project carried out in his art academy selling candies like twix, snickers, disco lolly, etc.; the work is titled “My Kiosk” (1998-2000). Though it may seem a business to many, but to Dirk, it is one artwork that has successfully transformed his life in the art academy as a student and the lives of many other who popped by in late nights to purchase candy from him, as a momentary relief from hunger. His engagements in money and commodity exchange enable his easy access to the audience. Although it is unclear where the artwork is in this project, we can confidently say that a creative situation is nonetheless created and defined. His other works like “The Bistro” (2003) in Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt 2003 also added new life to the former canteen of the Frankensteiner Hof. By offering free market play in the created bistro, Fleischmann’s persistent economic field research irons out the individual’s character in a stifling capitalist world.

In my opinion, Eileen responded most pertinently to the forum’s theme relating to social contact. Naming “the performative space” as a contact zone for reception of critical possibilities, she threw out questions on what the registration of space means to the artist. Is it owned or occupied? Shared or contested? She also quoted Jeho Bitancor’s performance — with documentation, does it spoil the performance? Is it a giving up of authorship during a performance? By delineating the barriers between the audience and the performer, she believes that contact engagement is conditioned by what is absent and present in the performative space.

Seiji Shimoda gave a brief report on the history of NIPAF (Nippon International Performance Art Festival) as a reaction to revolution that culminates in street performances in Shinjyuku, Tokyo. Referencing Nagano International Communication Festival, Seiji concludes that the performer needs to alter the language of the cultural context.

A major takeaway from the forum is that social responsibility is needed in social contact. It reminded me of Charles Spurgeon who, when probed on “What’s wrong with the world?” answered “I am”, and signed off “Yours sincerely, Charles Spurgeon”. Very often it is a kink for every performer, that while addressing concerns in the outside world, we can conveniently forget to look inward to ourselves. On the extreme, it may be an over indulgence of oneself. The touchstone to a good performance is humility. With humility, it breeds a new perspective for the audience and performer and all questioning will then perhaps, cease.

The art exhibition by Tupada artists.

Yoshie Baba from Japan.

Ronald Apriyan from Indonesia. Apriyan observes the similarity in the social and political problems faced by the Filipinos and Indonesians in their respective countries. In many ways, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, with its impressive architecture, is an enclosed building of high walls, which makes one feel isolated from the hideous reality outside. In the exhibition, there were huge life-size digital prints of performance still shots in which he identified himself in one of them. People were viewing these as part of the art exhibits. When one stays within that space enclosed like an aquarium, one naturally feels like an object viewed together the exhibits.

To Apriyan, by selecting that space for his performance, he questions if the audience saw him as an art exhibit or a performer. And so, he started to clean up the dusty glass panels with a cloth and water to build that spot-free relationship between himself, the art-print, the space and his action of cleaning. No doubt his performance, “Please look at me!”, is one that begs the audience to see crystal-clear reality.

Bruno Mercet from France.

Jeff Carnay from the Philippines.

Juliana Yasin and Natasha Wei. In a collaborative way, Juliana Yasin and I sought to redefine the dichotomies in the relationship of women of differences. Each time we came together, we brought with us a message of bonding revival that cures and tears down boundaries. Titled “121”, this performance speaks of how as polar opposites, these two performers worked together with a cloth (representing social dressing) and eventually become united in the feminine fabric of unity, resulting in a performance heightened with the allures of female sexuality no longer restricted to a position of a pedestal but to the truth of humanity.

Saturday 21st April 2007
Vocas Bar, Baguio City

Streets of Baguio City.

Most of the invited artists, together with the Tupada artists, readily made their way to Baguio City (a six-hour bus ride) after the first night in Manila. We met the Baguio artists and gathered again for the last lap of TAMA 07 at Vocas Bar.

Baguio City is a resurrected place from the curse of the 1990 earthquake. Like the icing on a cake, the American scents of Baguio City, and cathedral bells ringing, wraps a community of down-to-earth residents living in an unspoiled cool environment (approx. 15 °C) with fresh greenery and breathtaking mountain views. This is a contrast to the intolerable Manila heat. Unlike Manila which is filled with malls of different sorts, Baguio city has only one big mall — SM City. Laden with little street markets and souvenir stalls, people get busy with work in the daytime, and in the evenings, people hurry from work back to domesticity.

The artists’ snug dormitory, a 5-min walk to Vocas Bar.

View of the city from Vocas Bar.

Group photo at Vocas Bar.

Candid shot at Vocas Bar.

Political rallies along the streets.

The marketplace.

Sam Penaso from the Philippines. Entitled “Dirty Politics”, Penaso described his performance as one that “expresses [his] dismay of the usual goings-on whenever election fever hits the nation, with politicians subjecting themselves and each other to endless devious ways to ensure their win. Mudslinging, vote buying, giving empty promises in campaigns, rampant cheating, spending millions in political advertisements, billboards, leaflets, banners, and even killing their political opponents and their supporters are not new.  In the Philippines, nobody loses the elections, because the losing politicians always say they were cheated. Sadly, when these politicians do win, they continue their tangled web of bureaucracy and corruption, even getting back their money from the coffers of public funds and through contracts they get into. Political amnesties are also common, and this happens each time there are elections.”  

Chen Yiling from Taiwan.

Makoto Maruyama from Japan. Maruyama executed his performance spontaneously by reacting to materials of paper, pencil and a table, his body and the space of the performance in Vocas bar. Stripping naked, he allowed his body to act on primal instincts. In the end, he pulled the table, dragging his materials with him and hurled it upon his head to create a sculptural image of a paradoxical combination of natural and man-made qualities.

Seiji Shimoda from Japan.

Koh Siu Lan from Hong Kong.

Angie Seah from Singapore.

Sherwin Carrillo from the Philippines. Carrillo’s performance is of an investigative nature. Playing rhythmic sounds with his djembe (a native Filippino musical instrument), the instrument itself became a communicative tool to commune with the audience composed of many nationalities. Music is fundamentally a universal language that expresses the emotional faculties of humankind, and he used it in that context to bridge the gap between the audience and himself.

Sunday 22nd April 2007
Session Road, Bus Station, the Marketplace and Vocas Bar, Baguio City

The last day was the climax of the event. The main road in Baguio City was closed due to Earth Day and the entire street bustled with chalk drawings, a procession of performance art, basking and jamming. Kids were the most thrilled on this Sunday and the night loomed to romance with young couples dating on the streets. Spirited energy in the morning air was tangibly felt by everyone.

Lynn Lu from Singapore.

Harumi Terao from Japan.

Roen Capule from the Philippines.

Buddy Ching from the Philippines.

Rommel Espinosa from the Philippines.

Rommel Espinosa’s performance, titled “Vote for me”, is at once a symbolic gesture of honesty and a live installation of thoughts. Saturated with symbolism, he began his performance by offering his audience chocolate candies as a dangerous bait to attract and a metaphor for hollow promises of the Philippines public officials during election time. Tying his caught audience with gauze represents the love-hate relationship between the politicians and their supporters: the entrapment of common people who have cast votes and how these politicians have taken calculated steps to earn votes. Ending the last thread of the performance with Espinosa lying in pool of red stained sugar and declared words on papers, “Maka-tao” (people-oriented), “Maka-Dios” (godly), “Maka-bayan” (civic-spirited), he redefines and seeks an empathy with the audience that only genuine public service merits proclaiming and losing one’s life for.

Donahue Calderon from the Philippines.

Brown rice that constructed a cross-like image and three lads’ mags — FHM, UNO and MAXIM — posited at its northern end laced with pieces of male thongs opened artist Donahue Calderon’s performance at Session Road. After stripping off his clothes, with only an athelete’s jockstrap left, he taped a Singapore two-dollar note on his mouth. A roll of dental floss was crudely stuffed in his anus. As he slinked to the northern end, the dental floss slowly unrolled from his anus. He then formed a bahag (native loin cloth) with the thongs tugged at his jockstrap and ripped the pages of the lads’ mags off. Eventually, he gathered the torn pages and bound them together with the fully unrolled dental floss. He returned to the cross-like image and sprinkled the magazines with brown rice.

This contextual performance is what Calderon defines as “poverty begets sex and pornography”. Seeing the contrast between the exorbitant price of a lads’ mag (190 pesos) and brown rice which cost 40 pesos a kilogram, he yearns to unveil one’s blindness towards the influence of insidious pornography in a financially poor and backward country.

Qing Shengming from China.

Wang Jian from China.

Natasha Wei from Singapore.

Jevijoe B. Vitug from the Philippines and Juliana Yasin from Singapore.

Kaye O’Yek from the Philippines. In O’Yek’s performance titled, “Exposing Covering”, a solitary figure took centre stage, then she snipped parts of her unadorned black dress and requested volunteers from the audience to expose more of her body by cutting more pieces out of it. For erasure and/or censure, she used those remnants to plaster pornographic images in a publication.

Here, O’Yek explores and inhibits, in her own words, “self-limitation and incrimination, self-indulgence and denial”. Ultimately in a sacrificial way of sharing her body to the unfamiliar audience, as she hides and protects with her body another woman’s trapped nudity in a pornographic publication; it is a painstaking attempt to unearth the human virtue of compassion.

The Baguio artists’ Bohemian lifestyle is unrestrained and also lackadaisical. In an inimitable way, music stupors them in a trance-like traditional dance with congas and bongos drumming.

For many of the artists, I believe that they would concur that TAMA 07 has successfully engaged the public in the displays of performances exuding a plethora of culture and identity in the common grounds of the Philippines. As social contact is made, the artists have gained much from the experience in the lands of beautiful Philippines, be it in the exchange of performance art professionalism or the fellowship that binds every artist in the name of art. Judging from the audience’s active participation and responses to the event, art appears to be revived and takes on a novel role in the Philippines. An awareness of live art has definitely been created to a higher level through this event.

And so where do we, as performers go from here after living a life reversed? Unwinding the reels and stripping off the burdens of previous performances like perfect flesh unstreaked with blood, we make a run towards a new beginning after each performance and we hope against hope to be able to live as a gleam in someone’s eyes at the end of it all.