Ten years after the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology opened, we formed a local theater group called the Integrated Performing Arts Guild (IPAG) to help cultivate theater and the arts in Iligan’s insipid industrial setting.

 

It was 1978. Iligan was called “The Pittsburg of the South” for its robust economy. Manufacturing made it Mindanao’s second wealthiest city and, correspondingly, the MSU-IIT was established to sustain that industrialization.

 

But while the industries were generating much income, the city’s cultural climate remained arid. Except for imported Manila talents, occasional appearances of the defunct CCP Dance Company under Alice Reyes, and performances by the Bayanihan, Iligan’s cultural landscape was impoverished.

 

IPAG remedied these gaps, in a university without a theater tradition and an urban center without a cultural soul. On its first few years with MSU-Iligan, IPAG embarked on a serious direction—arts in the city, even though the founding members had little training, no organizing skills, no money, and no following. But we had a simple dream: Put up a multi-media performing group and produce plays.

 

Things began to happen when MSU-IIT head (and now DepEd consultant and Undersecretary) Manaros Boransing took in the services of Ligaya Fernando-Amilbangsa.

 

It was she who gave direction to IPAG by writing its constitution and by-laws, putting order into its system and training its artists. But her most significant legacy is the “pangalay,” our closest claim to indigenous classical dancing, which Amilbangsa studied, assiduously documented and brought back from the Sulu archipelago.

 

Signature format

 

Under her tutelage, the “pangalay” metamorphosed into IPAG’s signature format, now clearly etched into the countless productions we created. IPAG reshaped the dance by merging it with other mediums, creating a theatrical discipline of movement, stillness, pose and balance with an authentic Asian flavor.

 

With dance, music, text, and visuals culled from cultural sources such as literature, history, regional lifeways and local tradition, IPAG sought to retell the narratives of Mindanao’s Christian, Muslim and indigenous inhabitants. These “integrated” expressions, founded on the Mindanao experience, have become the IPAG “brand”—a form borne of and celebrating the symbiosis of community and its native expressions such as the “pangalay,” the music of its “agong,” the cadences of its “bayok” or folk literature, the epics and poems, the communal participation and improvisations of the people in this region.

 

From the beginning, IPAG has maintained a theater season that followed the school calendar from June to March. We churned out one original production after another, with the more successful ones eventually kept in repertory: “Sarimanok,” “Ranaw: Isang Alamat,” “Ming Ming,” “Uwahig,” “Kawing,” “Suhi,” “Datu Matu,” “Dalawa,” “Babuyan Island”—each production gathering its own following, helping expand the audience and inevitably enriching southern Philippine theater.

 

But theater is dynamic and robust only as far as the audience supports it. Even with a captured campus audience, we saw that the compulsory requirement of having students watch IPAG’s performances year in and year out could only be effective up to a point. And provincial cities like Iligan cannot provide a regular theatergoing audience that would fill up the venue whenever a play is produced.

 

Difficult situation

 

This difficult situation was exacerbated in the ’90s, when the Asian economic crisis led to Iligan’s decline. Local theater saw its audience dwindling; the sponsorships and programs for audience expansion ground to a halt.

 

To get out of the rut, we began looking for audiences elsewhere. IPAG reinvented itself from a single-based, multi-disciplined repertory company into a production team that could easily get its various productions on the road.

 

Happily, there was a whole archipelago opening its arms to theater. Silliman University in Dumaguete City, for example, gave us our first major success with “Sarimanok” when IPAG was barely five years old. Those first few successes gave the group the confidence to perform outside of its base. Soon, we were touring our productions in cities, schools and communities.

 

IPAG’s unique format and its exciting productions drew in the crowds and the interest of serious theater folk. After its first international exposure as the Philippine entry to the Singapore Festival of the Arts in 1994, IPAG’s “Tales From Mindanao” (a modular production of Mindanao dance-stories) became a staple, and has been performed in over a hundred cities worldwide. It visited Europe four times and was seen by Monaco royalty; it joined the South Korea World Cup and engrossed Hawaiian and American audiences in a coast-to-coast road show that celebrated the Philippine-American centennial.

 

Stalwart presence

 

IPAG is arguably the most-travelled Philippine performing arts company today. It has gone to the most number of islands in the country, is a stalwart presence in Philippine theater festivals, and counts Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam, among others, as countries where it has support among mainstream and alternative audiences.

 

The cliche that no man is an island is nowhere truer than in the theater, where support, collaboration and multiple engagements are the norm. IPAG survives because of its fundamental connection to MSU-IIT. This July, with the university turning 45 and IPAG turning 36, the two are even more keenly conjoined. Very soon, IPAG and MSU-IIT, with the support of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, will launch a Culture and Arts Studies Program that will help upgrade the skills of artists and arts managers in the region.

 

IPAG’s almost four decades in theater has educated and entertained audiences in Mindanao and many other places, and, more importantly, has helped secure and celebrate the expressions of culture in these parts for the next generations to imbibe and learn from. We can only commit ourselves to another four decades or more of theater practice and culture-building, so that our legacy lives on. Steven Patrick C. Fernandez, Contributor

 

The author is artistic director of the Integrated Performing Arts Guild and professor of the Humanities, Literature, Dramatics and Stagecraft at Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology.