By Cecile Guidote-Alvarez
We congratulate the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Awardees: Krisana Kraisintu, Thailand; Deep Joshi, India; Yu Xiaogang, China; Antonio Oposa Jr., Philippines; Ma Jun, China; and Ka Hsaw Wa, Burma. The recognition of their exceptional work in honor of our former President Ramon Magsaysay has been dubbed the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Asia.
Watching the RM Ceremonies last August 31, I had a lump in my throat applauding heartily the 2009 awardees whose outstanding services to their countries were vividly presented. Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno and Board of Trustee Chairman Jaime Augusto Ayala gave their medals. My mind wandered down the memory lane 39 years ago when I stood on stage at a different space—Phil-Am Life auditorium. The time frame and situation were totally different. We were living under Martial law. A day before the ceremony, a top defence official warned me about my then fiancé: “Tell Alvarez to surrender or he‘ll be shot on sight!”
Tension, anxiety, even fear was now mixed with jubilation. Even Doroy Valencia in an appeal to Malacanan to give me a travel permit to serve as a UNESCO consultant of the International Theater Institute‘s US Center to evaluate ethnic programs fell on deaf ears. The reason, ‘Cecile dared to join Ninoy Aquino‘s protest against Imelda Marcos‘ plan of putting up a Cultural Center instead of making operative the law on Commission on Culture signed by President Diosdado Macapagal.‘
At the Senate hearing in 1972, this was my explanation: $67 million of war damage educational fund should not be used for a building by the bay. It should be spent for development and training to evolve and apply nationwide the integration of a relevant arts education curriculum from kindergarten to high school. If construction is the purpose, the fund should be equitably distributed $1 million each to 67 provinces to animate their own architectural design of their respective centers of culture and unleash the creative power of their local community in all artistic disciplines to build skills and confidence, as well as appreciate our history, habitat and heritage to unearth the wealth of cultural diversity, in our country. This approach will help forge our national identity to achieve peace and sustainable development.
After being cited “for leadership of the renaissance in the performing arts giving a new cultural content to popular life,” Belen Abreu, then Magsaysay Foundation director, called me to deliver my response. As expected, under the regime of the conjugal dictatorship where press freedom was absent if not curtailed, my response was neither broadcast nor was it printed.
I was determined with God‘s grace to fulfill my assignment with La Mama Theatre as a base of operation to link our country into the global arena. In spite of the travel ban, I staged a dramatic escape at the airport. For doing so, I was alternately accused as a “CIA agent” and branded a “subversive.” I was reunited with Sonny to whom I was married Matrimonia Consciencia style before he escaped to direct a democratic opposition overseas. In assisting the struggle to restore freedom on the cultural front and providing cultural care-giving services to Filipinos overseas, I was inscribed in the list of “Steak Commandos” in exile. The current vilification campaign undertaken against me is therefore not a new experience but a recycled strategy of character assassination. It is understandable that the Marcos children would protest the executive prerogative of President Gloria Arroyo in proclaiming national artists. Twenty-eight years ago, offered as a sweetener for my husband to stop his opposition to the regime and cut our alignment with Ninoy and Tita Cory was for him to return home and run a ministry with me honored as a national artist and running the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). We did not bite the bait.
In her column, Imee Marcos has berated me as an overrated artist, and in an interview castigated me as desecrating the legacy of her parents. This is a classy deception as they cast into oblivion the amendment of the Marcos Proclamation with Executive Order 236 rationalizing an Honors Code and E.O. 435 stating that CCP with NCCA serves in an advisory and not mandatory capacity. The best response to help clarify the disinformation drive mounted vigorously in the media where there is hardly equity of reply is a speech delivered almost four decades ago at the Magsaysay Awards ceremony in March 1973. My commitment stands as articulated: to democratize the right to culture.
“My father died before I was born. He joined the guerrilla movement and dismissed the fears, tears and anxieties of my mother with the urgent explanation of fighting to give us the gift of freedom. I often wondered about him. My father left me a shining legacy of giving, loving and fighting for one‘s convictions. He was medal-less, but he is my hero. Even as a child, as his daughter, I was resolved to define and seek my own service to our people.
At the age of 16, working at the Orthopedic Hospital, I was deeply impressed how a frail, shy girl on crutches, whose hands were sweaty, whose eyes were downcast, who could speak inaudibly only through trembling lips, found herself. She blossomed into a beautiful character on stage, acknowledging the cheers of the other patients who were a most enthusiastic audience. The wonder-therapy for her incredible personality development and social adjustment was drama.
A further realization of theater as a formidable means of influencing thought came into focus while I was working with teenagers as a constructive reaction against the rise of juvenile delinquency. It was noticeable that participants‘ sensitivity, flexibility, imagination, creative facilities and expression were being cultivated as we continuously developed weekly original TV dramas. These dramas functioned not merely as a platform for entertainment, but also as an arena for social action where youth‘s present problems and future goals were discussed to provide consciousness expansion.
Surely, if the scope was broadened, if we had a national theater movement truthfully articulating our people‘s thoughts, feelings, values and aspirations, if we could develop and encourage theater artists to draw from the wealth of indigenous folklore, legends and ethno epics—to understand them, to teach from them and to improve upon them in order to provide a knowledge and understanding of the region‘s temper, tradition, figures of speech, and historical trends yet striving to reflect the time in which we live—then we should also be a nation.
This is where I found meaning to serve, to care and to be involved. My goal became to initiate and develop a network of theater arts programs for enriching curriculum and educational techniques for community development of creative human resources. Such programs could enhance the rehabilitation of workers, farmers and prisoners and provide specialized workshops for out-of-school youth, adult illiterates, the mentally retarded and the physically handicapped. They could also contribute to the integration of our ethnic cultural communities.
My associates and I aspired to provide the necessary high caliber program to encourage, train, promote, disseminate and coordinate professional excellence, artistic skills, research, meaningful expression and experiments within the context of the indigenous Philippine cultural heritage and the richly varied Asian theater traditions. Our movement aimed to build bridges of goodwill to the rest of the world, particularly in the absence of diplomatic arrangements or where political negotiations remained unsuccessful.
In the face of such great objectives and so little finances, a superior type of manpower rose to the challenge as artists were inspired to work for a newer, more vibrant Philippine theater.
It‘s most heart-warming for us that the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has manifested faith in and now gives testimony to the enormous power of theater arts for the public good in our country.
The joy of this Award is shared by all who unselfishly gave their time, talent and energies, and lent encouraging support to the concerted struggle to establish a theater, not for the coterie and the elite, but for the masses— drawing meaning and power from the lives of Filipinos, speaking in the language of our people. The honor belongs to all in Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) who joined in the determination to displace the false attitudes attached to theater arts as personal exhibitionism and social frivolity by projecting theater arts as public service, effectively applying it as a creative force in evolving and strengthening nationhood and advancing our national development, complementarily utilizing it as a dynamic vehicle for promoting regional friendship and cooperation, as well as international understanding and peace.
Avenues have been opened and directions set with efforts for a Central Institute of Theater Arts in Southeast Asia and a responsible position in the Third World Project of the International Theater Institute. But the search for and creation of a vital theater that meets the needs of our people is a continuing lifetime process. To this vision we are pledged. It is an art that relies upon the work of many collaborators, united and disciplined but free in order to thrive.
We can only express our deep appreciation to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for its interest, concern and attention through a strengthening of our commitment. Please know that the Award has given us more courage and greater impatience to tap and guide the vast potentials of our people so that, eventually, the curtains will rise everywhere in the country on theater at its best—”a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of conduct, an armory against despair, dullness and repression, a temple of the ascent of man.”
In August 1972, Cecile Guidote at 28 became the youngest Filipina to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Outstanding Asian Award for Public Service in the Arts. It was five years after she founded the Philippine Educational Theatre Association and organized the 1st Third World Theatre Festival and Conference for the Unesco International Theatre Institute. She was also bestowed with the Earthsavers DREAMS Ensemble the Unesco Artists for Peace Award and the UN Human Rights Day Award for Theatrical Innovation by the International Fund for Free Expression.
Source: http://www.manilatimes.net
