Skip to main content

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.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Evelio Javier

Some of our heroes may have been more brilliant or achieved more greatly, but I find it hard to think of any who lived more purely and more single mindedly than Evelio... his commitment to democracy, to social justice and to a life among the poor in our land. Februay 11, 2009 in Panay Island, Philippines is Evelio B. Javier Day. It is the 22nd Anniversary of the assassination of Evelio Javier. It was a stunning and decisive event towards our eventual liberation from Martial Law later that February 1986. Many in our Ateneo community remember meeting Evelio’s body at the airport two days later, and the Mass and the long march from Baclaran to the Ateneo de Manila on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1986. We had a Mass at sunset in the field beside the Blue Eagle Gym and ended the Mass with the electrifying experience of hearing Fr. Jose A. Cruz, S.J. read for the first time in public the letter of the CBCP on the elections. Evelio B. Javier was born to Everardo Autajay Javier of Hamtic and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Many Feathers

Many feathers. In the silence of many feathers. - Robert Bly Today my window spoke to me in the language of leaves, told me of gravity and the tired hands of twilight day after day pulling at the trees’ thousand fingers, the trees with their lifetime of cycles, the wind, its invisible wings. I have seen things only words will outlive , it said. But even words kneel before the silence of feathers. Once a poet peered inside the hollow of a tree and discovered words, and now I steal from him, repeat his curved consonants, the illusion of presence. In the secret, dim light I run my hands over the carcass of some dead creature he might have seen still heaving its last sighs. A window knows nothing of the sorrows of speech, the weight of things breaking as wind carries them away from tongue. Darkness moves against darkness, night dresses its sleepy body in shadows, whispers its stories, and my window speaks what it sees. While I see only what is spoken: A poet peers inside a tree and sees ca...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Evening Star

Tonight, for the first time in many years, there appeared to me again a vision of the earth's splendor: in the evening sky the first star seemed to increase in brilliance as the earth darkened until at last it could grow no darker. And the light, which was the light of death, seemed to restore to earth its power to console. There were no other stars. Only the one whose name I knew as in my other life I did her injury: Venus, star of the early evening, to you I dedicate my vision, since on this blank surface you have cast enough light to make my thought visible again. Louise Glück Averno Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Post a Comment
Read more