The New Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia

Collaboration Experiences in PETA
A Paper Delivered at the Asian Contemporary Theater Project Symposium,
Setagaya Public Theater, 19 March 2007

By Rodolfo Vera

The thing I want to tackle in this short report is the idea called collaboration.

I come from a theater group that has existed for almost 35 years. I was fifteen years old when I joined this organization called PETA in 1976. My first exposure to theater was when I was about 10 years old. An old priest casted us as poor slaves of India in a play about St. Francis Xavier. I don’t remember having encountered the concept of collaboration at that time since the priest director knew pretty much what his vision of the play was and most of the time got what he wanted. We were players, actors who knew just our parts, nothing else. We performed according to his express instructions. For a while, I thought that was what theater was all about. It was all about the director who had this wonderful vision that just needed other people to fulfill it. So that on my second year in high school, when I was given the opportunity to direct and write my very first play which was a terrible disaster, I imbibed that same impression of theater. And I must say it was such an ego booster to realize how my classmates and other people waited for me to give them instructions. That was my second, corollary impression of theater: It was all about ego.

So imagine my consternation and confusion when upon entering PETA, I learned that the theater process was a collective one. Right from the very start of the very first day, one teacher was talking about the gold mine theory. How everyone had something to contribute to this big pot. And that whatever we contribute will somehow find itself in the integral result that is the play production. Some of these ideas will be covered by greater ideas, of course, but the whole point is, no one can ever claim that he/she was the sole source of the final product. Each contribution is right there, pasted on stage. A tail end of an idea would probably reveal itself somewhere, a small gesture, a running private joke, a wink, or even an irrelevant conversation that we happened to have while taking a break.

However, it wasn’t like just a heap of ideas piled on top of another. It got integrated somehow. The point of the collective process is to sew all these together into a seamless whole. It was not just absorbing the ideas that was important for us, it was how to create something that included everything but transcended all that had been included. In effect, one idea that probably wouldn’t have survived a happy conversation would find a place within the process and become a lot deeper when matched with another idea from the group. It was like a tapestry more than a collage; it was a totally new … thing. More than just a barrage of images. Some of them would be contradictory, others would definitely clash, but it would be tucked in once they have been reconciled with the others. And if not, well, it would have been worth the struggle.

Of course not all of these processes were successful. In my long years stay in PETA, I have gotten used to catastrophic examples of collective work. Some of these examples are enough to discourage even me, enough to make me think that the priest director must have been right after all. Some processes just needed a deadline fast. Forget the stupid process. It’s really just a waste of time. Oh yes, there were times like those. And I’m sure you know what I mean.

But very interestingly, we never used collaboration as a term to define our processes. The word must have been quite derogatory even as late as 1970s Philippines. We were more at home with using the more politically-charged term: collective work. It felt much more aligned with the organization’s activist leanings against the dictatorship at that time. In fact, the term collaborator suggested being a supporter of the regime, the way Filipino traitors were first called during the Japanese Occupation in World War 2.

So collective work or collaboration to many of you here has been PETA’s main reason for being then and now. It’s funny how collaboration, which used to mean “the betrayal of others by working with an enemy, especially an occupying force,” has turned into its complete opposite: “the act of working together with one or more people in order to achieve something.”

It’s even funnier and a whole lot ironic to know that the best examples of collaboration work in PETA happened here, in Japan. The first example was in 1983 in Edagawa Church somewhere here in Tokyo. It was a 6-week summer workshop theater forum participated in by theater practitioners and development workers from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, India, Korea, and the Philippines. At that time, the event got some small funding enough to house around 70 participants in one big hall. We held sharing sessions about theater work in the participating countries; shared food and cooking traditions, too; we went on exposure trips to several places in Japan, and came up with a three-day people’s theater festival hosted by the Black Tent Theater at Hanegi Park right here in Setagaya, about a decade even before this public theater was built. I was fortunate to be part of that event called the Asian Theater Forum. We weren’t just representing our countries; we were forging solidarity of purpose. I can’t remember how we exactly articulated that solidarity in verbatim, but I remember how valiant we all were in pursuing a theater movement that could express the voices of small people. And oh, how we became such good friends. We promised to continue forging these bonds until we didn’t have the money to pursue this program anymore.

For most of those who were part of this program theater assumed an international perspective the minute they saw how the very medium of artistic creation and expression was so much integrated into the social, political, and cultural lives of the people. That the moment artistic creation was mere abstraction and avoided the artist’s interaction with the community, it would then become autistic creation, or solipsism prone to becoming ultra-personal. And even then, as a group of people coming from various countries staying in a city like Tokyo for six weeks, the actors improvised their own impressions of a modern city that in turn reflected their own visions and ideals and revealed their perception of a world based on their cultural backgrounds.

This was an exciting time for many of us. And I believe that for each of us, the experience in turn, gave us some lessons when we returned home.

However the most important collaboration PETA ever did recently was what could be considered a culmination of a long-term friendship with a Japanese theater group called the Black Tent Theater. PETA first met BTT people in 1979 when Hotta Masahiko brought along with him a few of the group’s members. Initially the meeting was quite formal. We didn’t know what they wanted from us. They hardly knew what to expect from us as well. We welcomed them and hoped to show them what we were doing in our repertory and training programs. This first visit must have created such a big impact on them because it encouraged them to visit the group more than a few times. They were very interested in how our performing and training program was dialectically bonded together in many of our theater processes. This inspired the group to set up their own program for training people, community members, non-artists. We, on the other hand, admired their rigorous dedication to the artistic craft.

For twenty years, BTT and PETA were exchanging artists, exchanging productions and experiences, if to a limited degree. Some BTT members would come and join a national festival in the Philippines to show their solidarity. They performed several nights in PETA’s theater season at least once. Likewise, they helped and supported a few productions that PETA managed to bring to Japan in 1986. While the styles and interpretations of a simple play were quite different, the friendship and companionship between BTT and us grew deeper. Many of us became good friends in work and in gossip. A few members from both companies even got attracted to each other, which of course made the relationship a little more spicy and complicated. But let me not digress into that.

By 1983, during the Asian Theater Forum, the friendship between BTT and PETA was close enough to make the summer project a success. And then all too suddenly, because of lack of funding support, the regular exchanges stopped. Individual initiatives of BTT members to come to the Philippines were made possible by their own money or some small grant to do something else. Hardly anything could be said about collaboration. Until one day, while on vacation, Kiyakazu Yamamoto arrived in Manila in 1995 asking if we wanted to do something together.

It was a happy meeting of reminiscing and visioning. What can we talk about together? What can we do together? Someone suggested doing a kabuki performance, which everyone promptly refused. For a while it was hard until someone suggested doing Romeo and Juliet. A love story. That wasn’t bad at all. Almost immediately the metaphor of Romeo and Juliet struck new meanings: it can reflect the love-hate relationship of Philippines and Japan since World War 2; it could also reflect the story of love and friendship between PETA and BTT, the stories of love from various sources where Japanese and Filipinos came across together. And there was simply so much material to develop.

After that first visit, Gen-san (as we fondly called Mr. Kiyokazu Yamamoto) went back and returned with about 8 people to explore and get exposed to several issues that touched on Philippine-Japan relations. We brought them to Corregidor, a historical island that marked the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines in 1942. We interviewed Mama Rosa, an old woman who lived through these days in World War 2 as a comfort woman of the Japanese soldiers. She recounted how, for a moment, a Japanese officer fell in love with her. We read a true story, written by Philippine National Artist Nick Joaquin, about a love between a young Japanese woman and a Filipino boxer in the Asian Games of 1964. And, later, while developing the story even further, we chanced upon a popular Japanese comic book titled Lovely Irene, about a Filipina mail-order bride who stayed with a Japanese farmer in rural Japan.

All these story streams somehow got intertwined by improvisation and script work. We held a 10-day collaboration workshop in Manila mixing and blending all these stories into one stream. And, through a small advice by Sato Makoto, the tragic love story of unrequited love between Tamio and Juliet became a musical karaoke-driven comedy. From this workshop, the actual scriptwriting began.

I remember how Gen-san and I developed and fine-tuned the scenario overnight in his fishing hideaway out of Tokyo. We divided the scenes to write and agreed to put them all together again afterward. Within three months, we were exchanging scenes and scripts that we both wrote in our own languages and had translated into English so we both could read what each of us had done.

A few months after, ten PETA actors and ten actors from Black Tent Theater were rehearsing in Nerima, Tokyo, from 2pm to 10pm. Some Filipino actors were playing Japanese roles, while some Japanese actors were playing Filipino roles. The play’s language switched from Nihongo to Tagalog to English. We were learning Filipino songs, Japanese-Filipino lyrics sung to the tune of Beatles and Elvis music, Enka music, and a Nihonggo version of a Bertolt Brecht ballad.

Simultaneous to these rehearsals, we were also unconsciously celebrating our 20-year friendship, giving full creative expression about our beliefs as artists, friends, and citizens of our respective countries. We began to know each other a lot better; we forged stronger bonds to relationships we already knew. Old BTT members got to know new PETA members and vice-versa. BTT members were also coping with new habits by PETA actors. To them it seemed that the PETA way was quite relaxed, and filled with humor. Conversely, the PETA actors admired the rigorous discipline and dedication of BTT people to their craft.

As we traveled on tour through Morioka, Fukushima, and a few other cities in the north, we eventually jelled almost as one theater group. Many people in the audience mistook Filipinos for being Japanese, and the other way around because of the mixed multiple roles we played. In the beginning, we were worried whether language could pose an obstacle to an understanding of the sense of humor, the socio-political meanings that the play exuded. In the end, both players and audience went beyond the level of language. In the end, we were not just Filipinos and Japanese or PETA and BTT members, although we were very much so through and through as well. Within that space and time frame, we were more than all these. Or let me rephrase that: We were all these and a lot more besides. We refused to be identified within narrower terms. We achieved a different level of identity. An identity beyond national and cultural barriers AT THE SAME TIME including respect for those national and cultural notions that we know we could not ignore. We realized that collaboration did not mean losing all that we had. Nor did it mean trying to pile all them up one over the other thus making a potpourri, or a parade of various cultural tidbits that eventually did not mean anything. Collaboration for us meant including all these to make something that would make all of them irrelevant in the end. And that was the beauty of it.

For me and, I guess, for PETA then, the most successful collaborative efforts, both within the company and those with other companies, were those that evoked the following characteristics:

Personal relationships – which cover a wide and exciting range: from physical attraction to deep friendships.
Community bonds – both among the participating individuals of the production team and with the larger community that it serves. In the PETA-BTT case, it meant not just establishing a dynamic community of theater artists but also a deeper sense of community with the audience. By this I don’t mean literal audience participation but a deeper grasp of the pulse and aspirations of the involved communities.
Artistic bonding – the development of mutual respect and admiration for the aesthetic principles and practice (I mean habits, too) of all participating members of the team.
Orientational foundation – a foundation, or a rationale for working together. By exploring the raison-d’etre of the collective effort, the premise that answers the question: Why did we decide to work together?
Potentialities of cultural differences – how we have creatively used the differences in our culture as an advantage in achieving the purposes of the project. This is not mere compromise or just being polite to each other, but rather making us understand how these cultural differences can in fact be the integrating factors that will set up our project.
Terrific sense of humor in everything we do. Humor helped us detach ourselves from being too anxious about the result of the project and instead feel the significance of the experience of the process.