Wordless anthems at Fete dela WSK 2011

I never thought I would return to Fete dela WSK. In 2010, the festival was an expensive event to attend for someone who was at that time on a very tight budget. But what I heard about it was something that piqued the interest of a relative newcomer to the arts scene. My decision to show up was made firm by Kawayan de Guia, who back then told me that he had a work at this festival going on at The Collective. We were at Vargas Museum one quiet afternoon, where forty or so students were being compelled to hear him hold forth on his installation piece “Bomba.” The work later went on to receive a prize of some sort.

 

Kawayan's work for the Fete in 2010 showed up at the Lopez Museum this year, along with Tad Ermitano's own piece for that festival, which was a remarkable use of sheet steel and an electric motor vibrating at B-flat. Appropriately enough, this show validated the work of an early adopter and impresario whose background, I was surprised to learn, was also in philosophy. Teddy Co, a filmmaker and critic who chaired the Film Committee of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), told me that Earl “Tengal” Drilon got his start by volunteering to help Co with a film. 

 

Drilon first came to my attention as John Torres's stand-in in “Todo Todo Teros” (2006), but he was at one time tied to the circle of Khavn de la Cruz, as is Torres. My impression of him when I first came to Fete in 2010 was that like de la Cruz, Drilon had a tendency to push himself and what he did, but he often takes the trouble to apologize for it. “I wanted the festival [this year] to be less about me and more about the art,” he said in a chat after I first got wind that he would be pushing through with Fete dela WSK. And like de la Cruz, he was fond of the word "wasak." However, to paraphrase what Queen Elizabeth I said in “Shakespeare in Love,” he had a care with it lest he would wear it out. (Khavn appears in a video for Fete, and his segment may have been filmed in 2010.)

 

How that particular word entered the argot is something I am personally unaware about. In the context of the Fete dela WSK, the festival's production manager, Chesca Casauay (Tengal credits her for this), wrote about "wasak" signifying a breaking of boundaries in how certain kinds of art interact with each other. This sounded very familiar. It reminded me of what a certain arts festival promised to do this year. In late August 2011, de la Cruz had his .MOV festival with a promise to bring together film, literature, and music. But as Teddy Co reminded me since, such ambition often falls short because in many ways the scenes are ring-fenced around each other. 

 

However, the festival's relative age and lack of prominence meant that there was room to define what the contours of that boundary-shattering would be. A good case in point was the 2010 final performance at, of all places, the Victoria Court Suites in Pasig. Anticipating the motel chain's moves toward promoting a higher-end image of itself, it agreed to host an arts event. As one of the fifty guests, I was treated to the Innovative Noise Collective's performance involving a bathtub, sewn lips, a loud screeching electric guitar fed through a synth, and little paper speech bubbles. Then there was Tad Ermitano doing a video manipulation of footage from director Lyle Sacris accompanied by Juan Miguel Sobrepeña's own feats with sound. The grand finale, which fell flat for me in part due to an inability to hear the soundtrack (broadcast on FM) and a much-talked-about climax, was my own introduction to the Sipat Lawin Ensemble. Nevertheless it was a very interesting night.

 

The ambitious program last year led them to decide this year it would be more about smaller gatherings rather than big public spectacles. Ironically, the shift meant that it would garner more support from venues willing to explore such things. Two artist-run spaces, Kanto and Light and Space Contemporary, hosted Fete events, while the Ayala and Lopez Museums played host to segments of the Bedroomlab Lecture Series, an ongoing and periodic series of interdisciplinary arts symposia. The musical (and sound art) performances were the main draw. Light and Space Contemporary hosted the first of these; Blackbird hosted two, including a gathering of some of the best synthesizer/keyboard players in town with a special appearance by Indonesian duo Bottle Smoker. Nova Gallery hosted the final public performance. There were far less warm bodies watching Tatong Racheta Torres's virtual space on Second Life hosting a Spanish avatar band than there were avatars present that evening.

 

I have nothing against alternative arts festivals like Fete, and indeed these should be encouraged. But there is something about the wasak ethos that may lead to holding back a culture of professionalism and excellence, no matter how much they try to manifest it. If one particular recurring concern that made me lose my faith in their capacity to get it right could be named, it was their quintessentially Filipino inability to start any event on time. What made the sin more egregious was that they did not start on time in venues that demanded such professional behavior, such as the two museum venues.

 

So what do I make of this Fete? It is still young, and I suppose the Fete can learn from the mistakes the team made. I think their learning curve is less steep, mainly because I saw that it is easy for them to learn and adjust. And maybe the key is for the fringe, like indeed virtually every sector of the arts, to get over the politics and the ego-building, and to get their act together, for all our sakes. –KG, GMA News

 

Fete dela WSK was held on Dec. 8 to 18, 2011 in a number of art venues in Metro Manila.