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Rizal X: Little more than good musical moments


The music was what I came for. Of course there was also the premise of Jose Rizal, and the promise of popularizing him and making him hip and exciting, which is really what pops into your head when you hear about Rizal X. Conceptualized, directed, and choreographed by Dexter M. Santos, there is much here other than the music. However, there is also much here that doesn’t work. There’s just too much, actually. Way too much. Which is not to question the concept itself, one that should be lauded in terms of its insistence on collaboration across various media and cultural forms, cutting across film and literature, the visual arts and music, history and dance. Nor do I have a problem with pastiche as a way of establishing fragments and vignettes as valid parts of a whole. But there needed to be a whole here to begin with, one that shouldn’t – and couldn’t – just be about Jose Rizal as national hero. For the fragments in Rizal X to make sense, they needed to tie neatly – no matter how difficult, or ambiguous – into a whole. And if the goal was for these fragments not to tie together at all, then at the very least these fragments needed to be powerful individually. These needed to explore aspects of Rizal that would have changed our understanding of his heroism, given a sense of contemporary times. I get the fact that the various fragments are sandwiched between two intertwined vignettes on a reminiscence of our childhoods, a going back to the kind of dreaming and possibility of flight that these memories serve. However, what’s within those two bookends barely take flight themselves.

Rizal X proves that sometimes pop ain't enough
What does one have when pieces don’t make a whole puzzle? Well, we’ve got Sisa for one, as reconfigured into three female Overseas Filipino Workers who are telling their stories of oppression and suffering. Here, what could’ve been a highly dramatic rendering of the insanities of our times and how these are symptoms of the current political system, is ruined by two things: (1) costumes that don’t work, and (2) choreography that doesn’t work. The latter is crucial to this fragment, but stilted and sudden as the movements are, it could only elicit laughter. For such a highly-charged fragment, well, you can imagine how messy it looked that they were doing these movements surrounded by the playground that was the stage. Because there were slides here, ones that were pushed together and apart, used as platforms, as stairs, as pedestals. And in the “Women of Rizal" fragment, alongside a seesaw and swing, this playground of a set could really only ruin it all. This is what happened alongside the strange but indistinct accents of the women, their names withheld until it barely mattered, with Leonor Rivera high up on the tip of one slide, tearing letters apart, the ones she never read. Played by Maita Ponce, this poignant touching portrayal of Leonor could only be ruined by the other women onstage, doing choreography with the uncertainty of the seesaw, the drama of the swing, all of which weren’t needed. They could’ve sat in one line and read those letters ala monologue and it could’ve worked. As Rizal had taught us, sometimes words are enough. Sometimes words could only be the point. The point of “Pasya" meanwhile was little else other than the requisite literal performance of activism and fighting to the death for one’s beliefs, UP activism style, layering it with some anti-Hitler and North Korea sentiments for good global measure. All of this was lost on the audience and almost funny, given the choreography that was frenzied and inexplicable. This was the one fragment that ended with the audience thinking: ano raw? The same question might be asked of the melodrama that was in the social realist fragment “Bros" which was nothing but a scene from a soap opera circa 1990s, or a Robin Padilla movie ... circa 1990s. That kind of drama complete with darkness and candles, and a Lola, meanwhile were in “Ina ng Himagsikan" mode which would’ve worked if it were a little angrier, less of the usual tribute to mothers who let their children be part of the revolution, and more of a contemporary mother’s own crisis in letting the child be citizen of a nation. For other fragments, it would be the text and music that would allow the possibility of power. The writer’s inner debate between self-serving interests and the need to be relevant is in “Kimera at Espinghe" by Vlad Gonzales which, alongside Leeroy New puppets, rendered the writer’s intellectual struggle to be more about confusion in praxis, to be about praxis as a matter of struggle, because there’s no other way. The fragment on Leonor Rivera as Rizal’s one true love, “El Dolor de Amante" works mainly because of that beautiful song sung hauntingly by Ponce. The rap song in “Rikipedia," while fun, could’ve been written better, the Taglish sacrificing content for form. As expected, the Dong Abay songs in the fragment “Ang Rebulto" had no problems capturing the audience’s attention, rendering wonder succinctly as Rizal comes to life in these times. But the music and lyrics were wasted on Reuben Uy's screaming and self-conscious acting. The one fragment that had it all together, the one that should’ve been the peg for the rest of the other fragments, was “Alisbayan" by Layeta Bucoy. The narrative sees the OFW leaving and living, with the requisite amount of dying with every breath, with every need to change the self, with every instance that home takes precedence over self. With singing and acting done competently by Red Concepcion, Yanah Laurel and Ponce, the choreography and costume design wonderfully thought out, this was the one moment in Rizal X that seemed to matter. Maybe that's because this segment cared to redefine the migration of Rizal into the contemporary migrations of Filipinos. Maybe because it deemed these stories worth telling with poetry, and more importantly with imagery, of changing faces and oppressed bodies, of a resignation that’s a dead end but also reason for one final act of liberation. Maybe because among these fragments, this one seemed to care about the audience taking home an image, a concept, a rendering of Rizal’s times that’s so powerfully connected to ours in the present, that it could only resonate. Now is that fragment worth watching all of Rizal X for? Are these fragments, good and bad, able to form a whole? More like a huge gaping hole really, which is not at all what we need in the discourse on Rizal. Rizal X, ill-conceptualized and staged as it was, ended up falling into the trap of both the trivial and banal. And while it might be said that this is about getting Generation X to care about Rizal, that the music videos and pop songs are about precisely that, very little can be said of a popularization of Rizal that sacrifices intelligence and critical thinking. For something that wanted to address the apathy of Generation X, Rizal X sure allows for that apathy to continue. - YA, GMA News
Tags: joserizal
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