Earlier this week, I chanced upon a Facebook post announcing that Rama, Hari will be on Youtube live today at 3PM. I watched the 2PM show in 2012, but for some reason, I was not able to blog about it. I remember falling in love with the music, especially the drums, not caring much for ballet although the performers were all really good. Stage props were not given much effort but I loved the costumes.
This afternoon, I was trying to focus on studying Business Mandarin but the sweltering heat is too much that I fell asleep, waking up shortly to check out FB and found that Rama, Hari had already started. Good thing I saw that post, or I would have totally forgotten about this free Youtube offering.
I chose to watch on my laptop and was disappointed that the video is not on HD, the sounds were equally bad. I wonder why CCP did not opt to make this more worth it for viewers at this time of Covid-19 lockdown. No wonder the performance arts in the Philippines are not popular and the average Filipino will choose low quality entertainment which does not enrich one's intellectual experience. While I am grateful to CCP for relieving memories of this excellent collaboration among our five National Artists, I will have to say that there is much work to be done to promote the arts among the people. I envy my parents' time when everybody seems cultured (yet maybe in the wrong way because they are too flooded with American stuff) that my parents at least know musicals. In my generation, I have few friends who are into theater. In our family as always, I am the only one among us siblings who is into these kinds of things.
I cannot help but compare this to UK's The Show Must Go On! Youtube channel. Weeks prior, they made The Phantom of the Opera and its sequel Love Never Dies available for everyone for 48 hours in order to gather donations for The Actors Fund. So HD version is uploaded and memories of utter awe came back to me. I wonder if Filipino performance artists are also being cared for in the same manner. But I guess they are left to fend for themselves. This country has been made poor by corrupt government officials especially by political dynasties for so many decades now and nothing has changed. Truth be told, although I worry about people having financial issues during this time, I cannot bring myself to donate to organizations because the money will eventually be controlled by politicians who will just pocket most of it, leaving very little to those truly in need.
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On another note, I remember the paper I wrote together with other Southeast Asian students on Ramayana. Last year I chanced upon a Mashable article on the Ramayana versions in SEA which is like an article version of our group's paper. I don't know who the writer is, but it does not even acknowledge its source which I suspect is our paper because that exactly is our paper topic. I suspect that it being a group paper and it being submitted to the program organizers, the paper must have fallen into the hands of an intellectually deficient academician-wannabe in search of an easy paper to write. Of course I find it insulting because I headed that group paper and contributed the most to it, spending sleepless night poring over sources and revising the paper to make it coherent and consistent given that there were six or seven of us with our own assigned parts, each with his/ her own writing style.
So anyway, since I remember our paper, I will share a bit of information about Ramayana and the Philippines. The Maranao people have their own version and the title is Maharadia Lawana. Curiously, the title name focuses on Lawana, the indigenized version of Ravana. And watching Rama, Hari now makes me wonder how come CCP or Ballet Philippines do not use this material instead for the performances to inform the audience that we receive many Indian influences which the average Filipino does not even know of. As always, it is the elites who keep these things to themselves and those "intellectuals" who reside in their ivory towers.
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