Foreword by Khavn de la Cruz on ACT's 'Adarna'

"Variety shows last well past noontime these days. They don’t show old movies in the afternoon anymore, only in the ungodly wee hours. And nobody seems keen on watching them."


The metrical romance Ibong Adarna (Adarna Bird) is on the brink of a sort of extinction. What once was ubiquitous and familiar, what once was folklore, what once was strip-mined as grist to make movies that have since become afternoon TV fixtures, has become obsolete.

Of course, the movies never went beyond the first act, even revising its ending so this truncated altered version has become the de facto quintessential Adarna story. But the original Adarna poem runs through 1,722 stanzas (8 syllables per line, 4 lines per stanza). It has this epic sweep the movies barely touched. Very few have experienced the third act --- arguably its richest section. Very few, too, know that the entire poem is ultimately a love story --- its themes being the lengths one would go for love and the ease in which all can be lost to forgetting. Or even that its primordial form is as poetry. Or how rife with spiritual and nationalistic metaphors it is --- Don Juan as Christlike Filipino Everyman, Dona Maria as motherland, the Adarna Bird itself as godhead. The original Adarna has become this sort of popular myth with missing parts. But at least it has been somehow kept alive in the collective consciousness.

Variety shows last well past noontime these days. They don’t show old movies in the afternoon anymore, only in the ungodly wee hours. And nobody seems keen on watching them. There hasn’t been an Adarna movie for ages. Even that little fragment of the epic that has been assimilated into the zeitgeist of earlier generations is fast disappearing, if it hasn’t disappeared entirely by now, even as ceaseless interconnectivity and globalization leaves each new generation falling ill to a progressive and incremental amnesia of its own cultural touchstones.

As a writer, composer, filmmaker, and Filipino, my lament cuts many ways. There is the obscuring and obsolescence of a form of poetry --- the korido, the original form the Adarna story took. There is also the film classic --- particularly the version by the iconic director Manuel Conde but to a lesser extent even the more popular comedic version with Dolphy. And lastly, there is this vital piece of folklore.

I come to the Adarna poem as an artist. Using the original poem as the source right down to the use of archaic Tagalog to flirt with the Wagnerian ideal of total art, madly melding and clashing modes and media. A playful extravagance is what I’m after. But I also come to the Adarna poem as a preservationist. And this is a kind of personal rescue operation. A restoration, a re-invigorating and even a kind of deepening and decoding of a vital cultural artifcact that we could well be in danger of losing forever any minute now.