Fiesta as art

Inspired by how theater provided the ancient Greeks a venue for shared catharsis, the 19th-century composer Richard Wagner tried to turn opera into a “total art,” in which the auditory, visual and the literary elements would come together into one big art that expresses common sentiment of a people, in his case, the German folk.

Guided by a unifying “Dionysian” force, this art would break down not only the barriers that divide the arts but also that which distinguished the ordinary folk who are given to passion from the elite who pretends to have a more discerning taste.

Such synthesis Wagner calls gesamkunstwerk. He saw its potential in the opera of his time. In his own work, he mined German folklore in an attempt to draw ordinary people to the stage. This inspired not only artists who dreamed of art as an expression of a “national spirit” but also dictators like Hitler who tried to turn parades and field demonstrations into public art. Total art gave way to totalitarian art.

But long before Wagner thought of it, such synthesis has already been a common characteristic of art in non-Western cultures. In fact, the natural fusion of all creative expressions makes it hard for Westerners to categorize it as art.

There’s always the mix of beauty and magic, decoration and ritual, which defies the idea of objects made purely for aesthetic delight. In such creative cultures, there is no distinction between craft and fine art. The maker of beautiful images is also often a healer, magician or priest.

This seems to be the case when the Spaniards came to Cebu. Pigafetta noted makeshift shrines and altars that contained carved wooden idols hinting rituals performed before them. This could pass for art installations or performance art in contemporary art practice. Then, of course, the natives adorned their bodies with tattoos as part of a social ritual to mark important events and achievements in life.

Much of these precolonial practices were lost in the onslaught of Christian campaign to banish pagan culture. Still, native creativity persists in what we now call folk religion or the local adaptation of colonial faith.

This is evident in the religious and secular rituals of the fiesta. Amidst the strict requirements of borrowed liturgy, the natives were able to improvise, often insisting their own passionate and creative ways of expressing faith.

The result is a strange combination of piety  and pageantry, belief and magic, and—as in the case of the Black Nazarene festival in Manila—prayer and violence. The fiesta itself is a paradox in which the same occasion for collective veneration for a martyr or mystic is also the time for indulgence in gluttony and vice.

But nothing comes close to the spectacle of the religious procession, which goes ablaze in dizzying lights, color, music and drama. No theater is big enough to accommodate the coming together of the entire community for collective outpouring of emotion, in this case, not catharsis but a mix of desperation and ecstasy.

The enthralling use of sounds, symbols, and imagery helps to give participants a sense of shared sentiment, on the very least the mystical and comforting feeling of beauty. As in the Greek tragedy, it is this emotional bond that gives assurance among participants against usual dangers of mob hysteria.

It is thus no ordinary catharsis for what is purged is not simply antisocial feeling. At the procession, the participant joins his community, submitting himself in the public purging of guilt. To pay for yearlong indulgence in comfort and excess, the participant feels pressure among peers to do more than prayer.

And in the collective memory of the modern-day pintado, milestones can only be etched by pain. He therefore walks on his knees to the altar or risks a stampede or heatstroke just to be able to get close to the beloved icon.

It may seem absurd for outsiders. But it is also true that it is only in the encounter with death that we are able to truly relive our lives.