An ode to (the power of) art: A review of ‘The Kundiman Party’

Running on its final week at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrerro theater of UP Diliman is "The Kundiman Party."

Announced as the swan song of its playwright, the prolific Floy Quintos, who has been heroically championing the cause of Philippine anglophone theater across the past two decades, this kundiman-infused production undoubtedly adds a memorable opus to this storied but increasingly beleaguered tradition.

Directed by Dexter Santos, "The Kundiman Party" harks back to Quintos’ previous work from almost a decade ago, "Atang", whose story it resembles in more ways than one.

This time, instead of the famous kundiman queen, the central figure in "The Kundiman Party" is the character of a sexagenarian maestra, Adela, who had been a Marcos-sponsored soprano during her heyday. She then joined the popular struggle against the dictatorship that saw her inspiring crowds and also subsequently losing her voice. Thereafter, she retired from professional singing and turned, husbandless and childless, into a private and somewhat reclusive voice teacher. Presently she is the central figure in a barkada of matronly and kundiman-loving women, all of whom regularly meet at her small but well-appointed house.

Most possibly Quintos’ gayest work — a Filipino opera queen’s dream project, replete with such hopelessly ornate and rococo things as melismas, tessituras, and allusions to la divina, and women characters who are camp, candid, and sexually irreverent by turns — the play’s dramatic world is, incongruously enough, our own present-day troubled national reality.

A former activist, Adela is now to be seen happily tutoring her students, including the queerly histrionic but undoubtedly talented Melissa, and the earnest and aspiring singer, Antoinette, whose social-media-savvy boyfriend Bobby is the estranged and rebellious son of a corrupt senator.

Members of the conscientious civil society, the maestra’s colorful friends — the widow and kind Helen, the carefree divorcee Mitch, and the paranoid Mayen — have decided to involve themselves in the protest movement against the rising tide of impunity in the country, as perpetrated and fecundated by the iniquitous administration that seems to never run out of stupendously awful things to do.

The genteel maestra, egged on by a video of herself — giving a speech about the transformative value of honest and heartfelt art — suddenly turning viral, as well as by the extrajudicial killing of her maid’s youngest brother, decides to leave the safety of her dotage behind and reemerge into the social sphere. This time she couches her call for resistance alongside her pithy and hugot lines in mostly musicological terms.

Antoinette sings kundiman standards in between her annotations, in videos that Bobby edits, uploads, and disseminates online. The merry band of plucky friends all help out in the effort, with the occasional participation of the most babaeng bakla character of them all, the aforementioned Melissa, performed to the faggoty hilt by Andrea Melissa Camba, who must herself be a classically trained soprano, as suggested by her wonderfully lyrical voice.

Quintos had earlier announced that this would be his last play, and clearly, going by the evidence, in writing it he allowed himself to have fun, and indulge his unabashedly gay passion for Baroque music and the kundiman, at the same time that he proffers the urgent and slightly tweaked message—picked up from Nick Joaquin—that the artist’s foremost job is to remember and to sing (and if need be, to resist).

If this is indeed to be the final play of this prodigious playwright, then how entirely appropriate that it should be an ode to the power of art. It’s admittedly a hard-sell and a bit far-fetched, of course: in the real world, unless it has perhaps been formally contemporized and radically transformed, as a musical form the kundiman will most likely never become the subject of viral videos (not even or especially when it’s being pushed by a continentally trained soprano has-been).

But fealty to the real has never been the artist’s particular calling. Rather, it is toward the true that she must gesture and aspire, and its limit isn’t what can be experienced, but rather what can be imagined.

"The Kundiman Party" banks on the sincerity of its authorial intention, the excellence of its performances and production design, the tightness of its direction, and of course, the beauty of its music—representative pieces from this Filipino genre, with snatches of arias from the operas Tosca and Norma, in particular “Casta Diva,” as recorded by la divina herself, the great Maria Callas. For the moment that the play allows, we are beguiled enough to suspend our disbelief, and to allow the theatrical vision to play out and play itself beautifully toward the sober and surprisingly unromantic end, which sees the erstwhile idealistic Bobby getting unmasked for the egotistic millennial that he is.

Teroy de Guzman, one of the most dependable and authoritative male actors on the local stage, makes one brief but remarkable appearance in this play, performing a role that’s eerily similar to the “trapo” character he plays (also saddled with a rebellious son) in Mike de Leon’s comeback film, Citizen Jake. Strangely enough, it’s this patently figurative, whimsically camp, and opera-inspired work that ends up feeling more “realistic” than de Leon’s politically direct and polemical new film, precisely because it doesn’t romanticize the millennial maverick, and instead depicts him to be just as vulnerable to the enticement of power and egotism as everybody else.

What does prove slightly disappointing, however, is the argument about art’s truest value, that the play’s text seems to confine to the merely affective and the representational.

Adela keeps harping on the power of all well-shaped art to touch the heart, and from there to transform lives. This argument is old-hat, precisely because it’s hardly ever explicated.

What would have been more interesting is if Quintos had actually used the dramatic situation he has conjured — a pedagogical one, with yet another teacher as a character, similar to his curator-narrator in Angry Christ — to complicate this platitudinous understanding. The affective power of art after all lies in its ability to render vivid and real again what life has automatized into habit. It’s an ability that is, as we know, indistinguishable from the intricacy and complexity of its form.

A more “formal” appreciation of the kundiman was in order, I believe. Doubtless, it would have enriched the “educative” moment that the play proffers to its audiences. The character of Adela unfortunately dismisses this level of appreciation early on, when she brushes aside the question of technique and simply advises her students to focus instead on the “dramatic” nature — and hence, the emotive and gestural requirements — of this form of musical expression.

The aesthetic is thereby reduced to the mimetic, when it possibly provides many other “defamiliarizing” forms of experience, the effects of which can precisely shatter complacency and render urgent and “real” again what has otherwise become easy and imperceptible.

Even the ironic and “estranging” quality of camp — a queer vision, that overturns traditional hierarchies and generates transgressive knowledge — could’ve been more directly thematized by the play, for it informs its characters most blissfully.

The aesthetic debates of the last century have taught us that it’s precisely camp’s inversion of social hierarchies that makes it an eminently political and ethical question for queer artists and thinkers. One of camp’s most radical powers is that it so blurs the line between humor and seriousness that its effects become ambiguous and undecidable: it is both failed seriousness and failed humor, and the message it secretes is often a dark and unfunny one.

And yes, since the maestra herself registers an impassioned demurral against the mass media depiction of abjection, the play could’ve problematized better the role and responsibility of the artist as far as the question of human suffering is concerned. Again, the aesthetic argument doesn’t have to be confined to the issue of representation, but can rather go to the heart of the (ethical) matter itself.

As the Marxist critic Theodor W. Adorno once put it, no matter how sympathizing, politicized, angry, or “committed” the artist may be, by the very fact that she is able to make art at all — actually, by the simple fact that she exists — despite and after all the horrific and unspeakable atrocities that humanity has inflicted and continues to inflict upon itself, then she is already affirming, no matter how grudgingly, that selfsame and henceforth irredeemable humanity.

Given the unimpeachable evidence that it is in the nature of human civilization to be evil, even its ensuing “civilized” gestures to condemn this evil may not, finally, absolve it of such a nature. In other words, because holocausts and genocides have already happened, humanity, in our day and age, is to be taken as simply and unquestionably suspect, and not even art—indeed, especially not art—should be understood as being capable of altering or mollifying this suspicion. Adorno also reminds us that it’s mimetic art that’s most suspicious in this regard, precisely because it lyricizes suffering and makes it aesthetically acceptable and “whole.”

In other words, it would have been nice if the play had pushed the envelope a little more, and broached this kind of philosophical “reflection”: for instance, it can be argued that highly ritualistic and formally conventional as it is, as with opera the kundiman’s very artifice (excessive and overly sentimental) may well be seen as its ironizing gesture, that at once flags and undermines its own mimetism. Or at the very least, the question of complicity and art’s own structural limitation in the matter of registering this or indeed any kind of social protest, should have been raised by the text more pointedly. Such ideas are implicit, after all, in the play’s passing reference to the Marcosian regime’s cooptation of so many writers and artists, back in the day—a well-known but little-discussed passage in the history of our national culture, in which the maestra’s own vaunted career has, after all, been fundamentally imbricated.

On the other hand, invoking the kundiman as a form of play-performance in a play is arguably Quintos’ preferred form of “meta-commentary,” for it constitutes a self-reflexive examination of theater, and how it is as similarly—that is to say, as marginally—situated in our multimedia world of consumerist “connectivities” as this superseded musical genre.

Props should finally go to Santos for his superb handling of the material, and of course to the entire cast, all of whom deliver outstanding performances.

Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino is, as always, luminous and beyond reproach, as are Frances Makil Ignacio, Missy Maramara, and Stella Canete Mendoza, who are all exceptional in their roles as the maestra’s bosom buddies (all burgis and matatandang kerengkeng, as Quintos’s script succinctly and perfectly puts it). Kalil Almonte is certainly maturing as a thespian, and is moving from strength to strength. Arya Herrera’s Antoinette is affectingly naïve and idealistic, her delicate singing voice aptly youthfully iffy and touchingly flawed.

And yes, pianist Farley Asuncion’s Ludwig, the only avowedly bakla character in The Kundiman Party, manages to calmly and unobtrusively own the play, whose overall sensibility is nothing if not unremittingly camp and operatically bakla.

The connection between opera and gayness is, of course, by now self-evident and so widely recognized that it would simply be foolish to deny the constitutive relation between the two even or especially where this play’s imaginative vision is concerned. While doubtless inspired by a variety of local historical personages, the maestra and sopranos in The Kundiman Party clearly function, on the semiotic level, as variants of the operatic “diva”—that cultic figure with whom the gay identity of the opera queen has identified in Western and Westernized modernities in the last century.

And so, finally, it may be germane to remind ourselves of what the famous critic, Wayne Koestenbaum, has intuited regarding this cultural affinity between male homosexual (gay) and operatic cultures in our time. Needless to say, this affinity has something to do with their mutual proximities to the idea of the ironic, the artificial (or inauthentic), and the camp:

“Anachronism was one aspect of opera that long ago opened it to gay appropriation; opera seemed campy and therefore available to gay audiences only when it had become an outdated art form, sung in foreign languages, with confused, implausible plots. Opera’s apparent distance from contemporary life made it a refuge for gays, who were creations of modern sexual systems, and yet whom society could not acknowledge or accommodate. Opera is not very real. But gayness has never been admitted into the precinct of reality. And so gays may seek out art that does not respect the genuine.” (From The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire).

"The Kundiman Party" will run for one more weekend, with shows from May 12 to 13. Visit the Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas Facebook page for ticket information.  — AT, GMA News