LABOR WATCH

Teatro Mayo Uno And Emancipatory Culture

When the toiling masses perform, they breathe life into the stage. The stage becomes the social milieu where economic and political realities to which the spectators identify themselves are brought to life. And it is the whole cultural experience where the subtleties and implications of the issues are interpreted in colorful plays, songs and choreography that becomes emancipatory itself.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat.com  

Anakpawis nominees Rafael Mariano (second from left), Carmen Deunida (center), and Crispin Beltran (speaking on microphone) with Teatro Mayo Uno

The stage was improvised and set atop a huge cargo trailer that occupied the road fronting the Post Office. One won’t be able to notice the improvisation as your eyes are caught by seven big murals representing the basic masses. On the extreme left and right ends of the tableau are small platforms for narrators and singers. At their back are huge billboards with the name of the party-list written on them. When switched on, the sound system is electrifying spontaneously attracting more people.

This is the stage designed to commemorate Labor Day. Adding color is the blending of hundreds of , white and green banners, streamers, placards and, if one is observant enough, some big kites. The stage is where the performers and speakers do their act but the whole program includes the multitude who marched from several points of Manila to mark this historic event.

Teatro Mayo Uno 2004 (May 1^st Theater 2004) was followed by a miting de avance of sorts for the party-list AnakPawis (toiling masses) and the multitude who gathered at Liwasang Bonifacio included about 30,000 workers, farmers, urban poor, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, transport drivers, vendors, government employees, seafarers, migrant workers, women and children. The huge throng braved the intense summer heat to participate in this political and cultural event that lasted from noon till dusk on May 1 and was replicated in 15 other regions.

Hundreds of performers, young and old, came on stage to enact several song-and-dance numbers. Dressed in peasant, worker and urban poor clothes, they waved small banners and posters as they danced and did other choreographic steps to the beat of militant music, songs and drums. The first number was portrayed by an ensemble of peasants, workers and urban poor to dramatize their collective calls for wage increase, genuine agrarian reform and decent shelter. This was amplified in other numbers such as the farmers’ dramatization of the systemic landlessness and landlord oppression capped by the peasants’ own emancipatory action. Workers, led by Sinagbayan, interpreted the capitalist exploitation of labor with the players’ costumes symbolized by various kinds of machinery. This particular episode was climaxed by the workers’ own struggle highlighted by their years-long demand for wage increase.

“Isang Araw”

The most applauded and most listened to intently by the crowd was the urban poor play titled, “Isang Araw sa Buhay ni Carmen” (A Day in the Life of Carmen). The number centered on the urban poor’s daily life: going to work on board a jeepney, hustling with traffic policemen and MMDA demolition crews and the sheer daily grind of doing odd jobs to be able to put food on the table. The issues of the urban poor were contextualized in government’s pro-globalization and privatization policies that deprive the urban slum dwellers of their right to housing even as they are forced farther into the margins of society.

It was Carmen “Nanay Mameng” Deunida who set the tone of the play itself when she spoke onstage. Dressed in white shirt and light gray pants, Nanay or Ka Mameng, a House nominee of AnakPawis, she minced no words in denouncing President Macapagal-Arroyo and her underlings Norberto Gonzales (national security adviser) and Bayani Fernando, chief of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and nemesis of the urban poor, and the Lopezes for making the life of the poor more miserable. Gonzales had accused AnakPawis and other progressive political parties as “communist fronts.” The urban poor leader called Fernando a “criminal” enemy of the vendors for forcing them out of the streets at the expense of their main source of daily income. With clenched fist and holding the spectators somewhat in her grips, Deunida spoke with intensity, her message was clear and the anger that came from her voice was sincere. Among the thousands who listened to her all throughout could be heard cheers of approval and quiet rage over the brutality of the regime’s anti-poor policies.

It was precisely Nanay Mameng’s fiery speech – and that of other mass leaders – that gave depth to Teatro Mayo Uno. The speeches – along with the narratives - were interwoven into the plays, music and dances so that one could grasp better the nuances, symbolisms and interpretations enacted on stage by listening intently to the speakers. In a sense, the speeches capsulized and synthesized the slogans, dramatizations and other cultural forms used; but the speakers were fine performers themselves.

You listen to Ka Paeng Mariano’s denunciation of the sham land reform program and how it robbed further the peasants of their right to own land. Mariano, peasant leader and AnakPawis’ second House nominee, said that the landlord-dominated Congress must listen to the voice of the farmers and allow the land reform issue to once again take the center stage in legislative debates.

Ka Crispin Beltran, former Bayan Muna representative and now AnakPawis’ first nominee for Congress, called on the Filipino proletariat to unite with other democratic forces to drive out their No. 1 enemy – U.S. imperialism. A labor leader for more than two decades, Beltran it was who made pro-capitalist legislators squirm in their seats as he moved for the P125 across-the-board increase while marshaling co-workers and other militants to rally against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Parliament of the streets

It was youthful Apolonio Alvarez who wrote the major stroke to the other speakers’ deliveries. First House nominee of youth sector party Anak ng Bayan (nation’s children), the slim and bespectacled Alvarez stressed that, yes, the toiling masses’ issues can be debated in Congress and, yes, the voice of the masses can be made stronger this time in its chamber. But it was, he said in lucid and unequivocal terms, still their political struggles enacted and dramatized outside Congress, in the streets, factories and farms that still give the biggest hope for their emancipation.

When it was his turn to speak, House Minority Leader Carlos Padilla recounted that the time Bayan Muna entered its halls in 2001, Congress – traditional power turf of the country’s ruling elite – took on a different image. Padilla, who belongs to LDP, supported Bayan Muna’s legislations and resolutions and, together with other progressive congressmen, brought the people’s issues to the center of the debates.

Padilla’s commendation for the progressive party in Congress also rang true at Liwasang Bonifacio’s main event that day. The Labor Day political cum cultural rally should be commended for providing an enlightening, scientific and mass culture particularly at a time when people decide on the fate that lies ahead.

All across the nation on May 1, the major traditional political parties and their candidates put up their own ostentatious stages and props to feed the electorate with yet another political extravaganza. Gyrating and swinging onstage are professional entertainers, hot babes and showbiz “stars” who are paid to attract and capture listeners and make sure they stay all night and all ears to politicians as they play their own antics and cough out cheap promises. The entertainers steal the show and the politicians are the cheap performers who promise the moon and the stars to make the masa’s lives different. It is tabloid television stuff or tawdry movie come to life. This has been the same theatrical potpourri all through the decades since the American colonizers introduced the pro-elite election.

But when the toiling masses perform, they breathe life into the stage. The stage becomes the social milieu where economic and political realities to which the spectators identify themselves are brought to life. And it is the whole cultural experience that the subtleties and implications of the issues as interpreted in colorful plays, songs and choreography that becomes emancipatory itself. The cultural event gives power to both the artists and spectators; they become one. Unlike the traditional electoral stage where the people are beguiled to trust the politicians and leave their fate to them, the people’s theater makes no political promises. All that it essentially says is to trust the masses and in their militant, collective power to change the world. Bulatlat.com

Photos by Arkibong Bayan

Back to top

We want to know what you think of this article.