Review: Salima
By Fe Remotigue
FROM the first note to the last, Earth Music Foundation's music theatre entitled "Salima" kept my entire person hostage to its powerful reality. Twenty years ago, Mindanaoan artists defined a Mindanao aesthetics to possess such qualities as: a) powerful source; b) powerful material; c) powerful form, and; d) powerful delivery. In all of these, "Salima" raised the bar of excellence when it performed at the Tanghalang Francisco Balagtas (Folk Arts Theater) at the CCP complex last night. It was a fitting finale to a series of artistic renditions of the peace and development experiences of Mindanaons mirrored by homegrown artists.
Geejay Ariola's concept and direction embodied the collective mastery of the librettist, composers, musicians, and craftsmen and craftswomen of the source and the material. After the show, I believed that "Salima" was not acting, but was a living testament to a girl's life, whose fate was beyond her comprehension and control.
Popong Landero's immersion into the multicultural Mindanao communities, plus his deep engagement with mainstream music, provided the play with a melodic and rhythmic variety that came handy for every emotional shift, guiding the audience like a boatman steering the boat in Rio Grande. Arnel Mardoquio's libretto stretched the rules of literati by using deep symbolisms to describe the extent of the war. Gauss's lullabye to a dear child commands every listening heart to bleed and act. Ikoy San Pedro and Eugene completed the cast of veteran musicians who, together with Gary Granada, completed the aural spectacle that haunts the audience to face that reality over in the south. After the show, no sincere individual will dare reduce the war to a mere Muslim-Christian conflict because it is not just this. What the broadsheet headlines failed to convey, "Salima" did-successfully.
But of course, the musical does have a number of what ifs.
I may be too carried by the material all throughout as a mere audience, but I do not represent the communities from whom the source was drawn. I wonder how the Muslim communities would react to the imagery of musicians in Muslim costume playing an electric guitar, or for Salima's father singing a melody that is characteristically coming from a settler culture? I, too, noticed that Salima sang about Diwatas-a practice that is attributed to the un-Islamicized indigenous peoples?
If the visual spectacles are turned to neutral, albeit eclectic characters, so that the storytellers become anyone else who cares for Mindanao, this may be another approach that will get away with questions of source and representation. It is when the musical tries to speak as the people from the source that the responsibility becomes too great-and will lead to the same debate that has plagued Mindanao cultural workers over the years: who represents whom, and by virtue of what?
Despite the ifs and shoulds that may have welled in the consciousness of many of those in the audience, "Salima" deserves a national tour as a showcase of Mindanaoan's experience, struggles, and hopes-more so as narrated by the artists in a form that can only be called Filipino.
