sandaang panaginip review
Sandaang Bangungot: The Unofficial Review of Sandaang Panaginip
There’s nothing dreamlike or esoteric about Entablado’s most recent play: Sandaang Panaginip. The best thing I can say about is: woah, look at the immensely humungous budget they laid out for the costumes and the sets! As Ateneo’s first ever outdoor play (that’s according to my Fil prof) it’s understandable to be a bit outlandish, to go the extra mile and give the audience what they want - plenty of slapstick, song and dance, romance, the works. But it’s not acceptable if the play contains nothing more, and that’s exactly what this two-hour enchilada lacks: substance.
Of course you could mention the spectacular production, the star-studded cast and crew, the repertoire of vastly original songs, blah: but as someone who lives on the premises right next to the stage and has observed Enta’s rehearsals for the past month and heard the songs being played again and again like a broken record that just won’t shut up, the aesthetics were nothing new. An avid fan of Ateneo plays for their intricate levels of meaning and subtle social relevance, I was absolutely distraught by the sheer banality of this grand production. My blockmate and I even had this conversation, when he tried to justify the play and all it represented: “Ang babaw!” “Baka nasa kababawan niya ang kalaliman.” WTF?!?
What is Sandaang Panaginip’s deeper purpose, but an opportunity to showcase pretty costumes and to serve as an overblown vehicle for Enta’s silver anniversary? Probably, the producers thought that February being the month of love and the EDSA Revolution (two mutually incompatible concepts, obviously), they decided to combine them into one barf-fest glittering bonanza of epic-Walt Disney proportions. An indisputable photocopy of every cheesy romantic fairy tale ever constructed, the romance arc of this Cinderella-esque tale is necessarily flimsy, drawn on stock characters and inflatable convenient stereotypes. The romantic angle was too contrived, too unreal, like everything else on the stage.
Social relevance comes in the form of the “masses”’ revolt, an obvious allusion to the upcoming EDSA Revolution anniversary. Queen Leona is a thinly veiled disguise for Imelda, with her royal entourage of sycophants and fantastic castle projects at the expense of the common people (the CCP?). Her opponents, of course, wear yellow (observation c/o Joseph Castro) and if these symbols weren’t evident enough for the average thick-skulled Atenean to ingest, the Enta staff has thoughtfully placed slideshows of KKK revolutionary movements on the side of the stage. The masses are stereotypical voiceless farmers and fishermen in straw hats and malongs with angry fists raised high in the air - nothing new in this portrayal. They aren’t even fleshed out as characters in their own right; they are pushed aside as abstractions, foils to the queen’s regal posture.
The main theme of the play is of course the susceptibility of spectacle to mask the real problems of human society. The king’s attempts to know the truth are drowned out by the insistent cacophony of insipid song and dance. Sadly, this theme is too big for the Entablado people to express in a state of sobriety without themselves falling prey to its lethal clutches. We, the unsuspecting audience, also become victims to this endless array of spectacle and dance. More analytical members of the audience (if ever they do exist) may ask: were the problems of the masses ever resolved? What about those common people who died in the construction of Leona’s summer palace? What about those ravaged by the typhoons, by the natural calamities, those insignificant masses insatiable in their hunger for revolution and change? None of these questions are answered by the play. Instead, it closes with…more song and dance. Flashing costumes, sparkling glitter, nicely choreographed fight scenes and romantic moments. And if the play weren’t held on an open-aired set: confetti.
Contrary to the Inang Diwata’s assertion, the faraway kingdom of Tralala does not exist only in our imagination. Obviously it’s an allegory, and a badly constructed one at that. These aren’t vignettes of fantastical dreams the play presents us; more and more they are what seem to be the stuff that constitute the reality we reside in. Filipinos have always been guilty of giving in to the gratuitous temptation of spectacle and color; we Ateneans are no exception. After all, which shows seem to dominate our primetime TV? Aren’t they so-called fantaseryes, shows that appeal to our imagination simply because we are too lazy to construct anything creative on our own?
One distinct disadvantage of the fantastic over the real is its inflexibility: it cannot be analyzed as anything else but that. That is why Filipinos love these fantastic series, because everything is pre-packaged and pre-digested for popular consumption, for their convenience. Entablado, at least in this case, is guilty of the same heinous crime: spoonfeeding images and symbolism for the unsuspecting student to swallow, allowing him no personal input of his own. This, then, is the pinnacle of our degredation as a non-thinking generation: a fabricated dreamworld that is at the very tip of our most superficial notions about fantasy, one that cannot be negated simply because it asserts nothing new in the first place.
It is this non-assertion that then becomes the root of my argument that what we thought we were watching are not fantastical dreams, but something quite the contrary: nightmares. Nightmares because they spell the inevitability of our society’s doom, of our tendency to resurrect universal themes in overblown productions just to please everybody, in lieu of finding something new, something risky, something that’s not always palatable. Nightmares because after the play is over, everybody walks away happy, because it affirms their inane beliefs in life on something they already knew, but was never told before in such a grand, fantabulous manner. Nightmares because the play does not expose society’s ills much as Enta has been doing for the past twenty-five years, but rather masks it horribly in a complex sing-and-dance production. Nightmares because in the end, it’s all going to be worth one reaction paper due for class, before students file it away in the back of their minds after a week and move on, content, happy, entertained.
There’s nothing dreamlike or esoteric about Entablado’s most recent play: Sandaang Panaginip. The best thing I can say about is: woah, look at the immensely humungous budget they laid out for the costumes and the sets! As Ateneo’s first ever outdoor play (that’s according to my Fil prof) it’s understandable to be a bit outlandish, to go the extra mile and give the audience what they want - plenty of slapstick, song and dance, romance, the works. But it’s not acceptable if the play contains nothing more, and that’s exactly what this two-hour enchilada lacks: substance.
Of course you could mention the spectacular production, the star-studded cast and crew, the repertoire of vastly original songs, blah: but as someone who lives on the premises right next to the stage and has observed Enta’s rehearsals for the past month and heard the songs being played again and again like a broken record that just won’t shut up, the aesthetics were nothing new. An avid fan of Ateneo plays for their intricate levels of meaning and subtle social relevance, I was absolutely distraught by the sheer banality of this grand production. My blockmate and I even had this conversation, when he tried to justify the play and all it represented: “Ang babaw!” “Baka nasa kababawan niya ang kalaliman.” WTF?!?
What is Sandaang Panaginip’s deeper purpose, but an opportunity to showcase pretty costumes and to serve as an overblown vehicle for Enta’s silver anniversary? Probably, the producers thought that February being the month of love and the EDSA Revolution (two mutually incompatible concepts, obviously), they decided to combine them into one barf-fest glittering bonanza of epic-Walt Disney proportions. An indisputable photocopy of every cheesy romantic fairy tale ever constructed, the romance arc of this Cinderella-esque tale is necessarily flimsy, drawn on stock characters and inflatable convenient stereotypes. The romantic angle was too contrived, too unreal, like everything else on the stage.
Social relevance comes in the form of the “masses”’ revolt, an obvious allusion to the upcoming EDSA Revolution anniversary. Queen Leona is a thinly veiled disguise for Imelda, with her royal entourage of sycophants and fantastic castle projects at the expense of the common people (the CCP?). Her opponents, of course, wear yellow (observation c/o Joseph Castro) and if these symbols weren’t evident enough for the average thick-skulled Atenean to ingest, the Enta staff has thoughtfully placed slideshows of KKK revolutionary movements on the side of the stage. The masses are stereotypical voiceless farmers and fishermen in straw hats and malongs with angry fists raised high in the air - nothing new in this portrayal. They aren’t even fleshed out as characters in their own right; they are pushed aside as abstractions, foils to the queen’s regal posture.
The main theme of the play is of course the susceptibility of spectacle to mask the real problems of human society. The king’s attempts to know the truth are drowned out by the insistent cacophony of insipid song and dance. Sadly, this theme is too big for the Entablado people to express in a state of sobriety without themselves falling prey to its lethal clutches. We, the unsuspecting audience, also become victims to this endless array of spectacle and dance. More analytical members of the audience (if ever they do exist) may ask: were the problems of the masses ever resolved? What about those common people who died in the construction of Leona’s summer palace? What about those ravaged by the typhoons, by the natural calamities, those insignificant masses insatiable in their hunger for revolution and change? None of these questions are answered by the play. Instead, it closes with…more song and dance. Flashing costumes, sparkling glitter, nicely choreographed fight scenes and romantic moments. And if the play weren’t held on an open-aired set: confetti.
Contrary to the Inang Diwata’s assertion, the faraway kingdom of Tralala does not exist only in our imagination. Obviously it’s an allegory, and a badly constructed one at that. These aren’t vignettes of fantastical dreams the play presents us; more and more they are what seem to be the stuff that constitute the reality we reside in. Filipinos have always been guilty of giving in to the gratuitous temptation of spectacle and color; we Ateneans are no exception. After all, which shows seem to dominate our primetime TV? Aren’t they so-called fantaseryes, shows that appeal to our imagination simply because we are too lazy to construct anything creative on our own?
One distinct disadvantage of the fantastic over the real is its inflexibility: it cannot be analyzed as anything else but that. That is why Filipinos love these fantastic series, because everything is pre-packaged and pre-digested for popular consumption, for their convenience. Entablado, at least in this case, is guilty of the same heinous crime: spoonfeeding images and symbolism for the unsuspecting student to swallow, allowing him no personal input of his own. This, then, is the pinnacle of our degredation as a non-thinking generation: a fabricated dreamworld that is at the very tip of our most superficial notions about fantasy, one that cannot be negated simply because it asserts nothing new in the first place.
It is this non-assertion that then becomes the root of my argument that what we thought we were watching are not fantastical dreams, but something quite the contrary: nightmares. Nightmares because they spell the inevitability of our society’s doom, of our tendency to resurrect universal themes in overblown productions just to please everybody, in lieu of finding something new, something risky, something that’s not always palatable. Nightmares because after the play is over, everybody walks away happy, because it affirms their inane beliefs in life on something they already knew, but was never told before in such a grand, fantabulous manner. Nightmares because the play does not expose society’s ills much as Enta has been doing for the past twenty-five years, but rather masks it horribly in a complex sing-and-dance production. Nightmares because in the end, it’s all going to be worth one reaction paper due for class, before students file it away in the back of their minds after a week and move on, content, happy, entertained.