Kasaysayan at Estetika ng Sinakulo at Ibang Dulang Panrelihiyon sa Malolos
This article is from the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art Digital Edition. Title: Kasaysayan at Estetika ng Sinakulo at Ibang Dulang Panrelihiyon sa Malolos Author/s: Doreen G. Fernandez URL: https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/7/59/720/ Publication Date: November 18, 2020 Access Date: November 13, 2023 Copyright © 2020 by Cultural Center of the Philippines
(History and Aesthetics of the Sinakulo and Other Religious Drama in Malolos) / Published 1975 / Author: Nicanor G. Tiongson / Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press)
The first book written on religious drama in a Philippine context and the first in Filipino, this historico-critical work set a pattern for research in Philippine drama. It focuses on the sinakulo or dramatizations of the life and passion of Christ, and other religious dramas and playlets in 12 barrios of Malolos, Bulacan. These are classified first according to length: full-length (e.g., the sinakulo and the elena) and short (e.g., the osana, salubong, flores de Mayo, panunuluyan, via crucis, siete palabras, santakrusan, and pangangaluluwa). The latter are further divided according to whether they were part of the liturgy or were additions to it.
Each form is examined according to source. Sinakulo scripts, for example, are shown, in charts and by line count, to have come from written and oral sources—the different pasyon, the novel Martir sa Golgota (Martyr of Golgotha), the Bible, prayers, stories from metrical romances and magazines—and from the writer’s imagination. Each is then described in detail as performance, with each of the elements analyzed: the samahan or producing group, the stage, sets and props, lighting, sounds, special effects, director and crew, characters, costuming and makeup, music and musicians, and audience.
The appendices include the entire script of the Barrio Tikay sinakulo, including songs, chants, and marches; source information for the other sinakulo; and music for some of the short dramatizations like the panunuluyan. The illustrations consist of photographs of actual performances, sketches of stages and stage devices, and a page from a handwritten sinakulo script.
All the above are presented against the background of Malolos and its religious tradition, and then brought together in the concluding chapter, “Ang Estetika” (The Aesthetics). Tiongson points out the conditions favorable to the growth of religious theater: the agricultural cycle that gave the peasants space and time for the performances, and the religious culture that had unquestioning belief in the tenets of the Catholic faith. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the change of lifestyle had an impact on community involvement in the acting, staging, directing, and financing of religious plays. More people were working at eight-to-five jobs, less on the soil. Many were employed outside their barrios, outside the town and in the city. Gradually the traditional religious culture of Malolos weakened, became “modern,” and was replaced by a more worldly culture, one with a “scientific” worldview, brought in by education and the popular media—film, radio, and television.
The aesthetics of folk religious theater, which had grown from poverty and a feudal worldview, Tiongson concludes, had produced a “palabas” (show) aesthetics—colorful and entertaining, full of “pakitang tao” (pretense), reaching outward, presentational without an inward view, without analysis. The entry of realism into the folk view and expectations, with its view of multidimensional truth, changed the practice and perspective of religious drama in the barrios of Malolos, Bulacan.
In this book the scholar went out into the field and returned with a load of raw data on performance, production, and community dynamics, which he then ordered and analyzed for the reader, in order to answer the questions one must ask—what? where? how? why? what now?—in order to understand the history, aesthetics, and future of religious theater in the Philippines. The book received the Gawad Balagtas from the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa in 1976.
Written by Doreen G. Fernandez