Teatro Pilipinas

THEATER OF POVERTY may well describe the community theater in the Philippines. But in these parts, it is enriched by ATORs  — “artist-teacher-organizer-researchers” – cultural workers all rolled into one.

Marili Fernandez-Ilagan is one such, compelled to become one under the circumstances of the theater of poverty in Mindanao where she honed her artistry, theater organizing and management skills in the island’s vibrant people’s cultural movement in the 1980s.
She was active in Kulturang Atin Foundation, Mindanao Community Theater Network, and the Davao Popular Aesthetics and Traditions. She is among the pioneers of the Kaliwat Theater Collective, performing in all its major productions until she migrated to Manila in 1986.

Aside from doing the whole gamut of theater work both in the rural and urban settings in her home front and overseas, she has conducted multicultural workshops participated in by Japanese communards and students; artists, migrant Filipinos and drama students in Australia and England; gypsies in Ireland, development workers in Cambodia; artists of the International Theater Institute-Unesco and the Women Playwrights International (WPI); and of course, cultural activists in the Philippines. She also had a stint as resident artist with the Drama Department of Flinders University, Australia in 1995.

Fernandez-Ilagan’s plays on women’s issues and the indigenous peoples have been performed extensively. A series of monologues about women which she directed in 2007-2008 had been presented in the Philippines and Indonesia. Last May, she did the music and stage design for “Sa Ngalan ng mga Naghihirap” mounted by the community group Teatro Oasis in Payatas, Quezon City.

Some of her feminist essays on theater and the indigenous women were published in various journals, including those of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

In television, Fernandez-Ilagan was in the children-oriented shows “Tara Let’s” & “Jr Watch” as cameraperson and researcher, the public service “Nora Mismo” as researcher, and the histrorical pageant “Duyan ng Magiting” as dancer and researcher for RPN-9; “Children Living in Asia” and “Balik Kalipay” as researcher for NHK; and “Malaala Mo Kaya” as production consultant for ABS-CBN.

She is currently dramaturge and project director of “Empowering Indigenous Women to Write their Own Plays” in the Saving the Babaylan Program of WPI-Philippines in Mindanao. This December, she did “Uyayi sa Digmaan,” a co-production of CCP and Tag-ani Performing Arts Society, Inc. as a choreographer-director.

Fernandez-Ilagan is the founding chair and artistic director of Tag-ani Performing Arts Society, Inc; and also a board member of Bagong Lumad Foundation, Kodao Productions, and WPI-Philippines. She is taking up her master’s studies in theater arts at the UP Diliman.