Tonight, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 9 p.m. at the second floor of Handuraw in Gorordo Avenue, Cebu City, performance artist Russ Ligtas will be presenting “Three Lullabies” for all who want to be there. Entrance is free but he will be passing the hat. This might be his second to last performance in Cebu for a short while. He will travel to Japan towards the end of this month for performances to protest the slaughter of dolphins there. The hat is passed to help him along for this trip.
Performance art is a fast-growing art discipline here and Russ is gaining wide recognition for his work. In the past months he performed at various spots in the National Capital Region including the Ateneo de Manila University campus there. His works are always arresting and thought-provoking, involving costumes and devices that are linked to characters he develops over time. They are characters of fantasy each inhabiting their own universes that link to ours only in the most metaphysical sense. But Russ makes them real for us. They grow over time. They change. They feel. They talk. And always they move in a manner he appropriates from the Japanese alternative-performance medium “Butoh.”
Russ began performing in the early 2000s when he was still a student at the Fine Arts Program of the University of the Philippines Cebu. That program has a yearly presentation of experimental art including installations and performance art. He performed here with former college-mates James Neish, Liyo Denorte, Ronniel Compra, Clifford Remollador, Chai Fonacier and others who by now have established themselves and their art at various localities on the planet. They took what they learned in school and now test it in the real world, both “out here” and “out there.” And they are doing well as in “surviving” and “getting better all the time.”
Soon after graduating his degree, Russ hooked up with and helped organize “Performa” together with musicians Chai Fornacier, Pradiip del Mar, Nino Baring, Oliver Seville, the late Winston Rallosa Velez and visual artists Roylu and Raymund L. Fernandez who also writes “Kinutil,” a Wednesday and Sunday column for Cebu Daily News.
Because the name “Performa” hit too many sites in the Net when searched, the group changed their name to “XO?” (pronounced So?). The name had only a few other similar namesakes in the Net. Certainly, none with the question mark at the end of it. The name works well for them even now. Still, every member of the group has his or her own “private practice.” Russ Ligtas has so far been the most active at his. And he is now reaping the recognition he deserves. More than any other performance artist he has done the most at promoting the medium to students and viewers who have a taste for the exotic, the provocative and the new.
For now, performance art is not easy for everyone to love especially if we are used to regular theater, which incorporates complex sets and narrative plots. By comparison, performance art requires its audience always to be open-minded and plumb the hunger for unexpected possibilities. Performance art plays with time. It is painting or sculpture that moves. It is, of course, always a multisensual phenomenon. At the end, we put in our own interpretation and ask ourselves: What did we see? What did we hear? What did we feel, taste and smell? What did we do when we took in all these? Didn’t it seem as if we were part of the performance? Did we like it? What were we thinking?
Performance art is not like Cebu lechon which is easy to like and which, indeed, mostly everyone likes. Performance art is like caviar. You always wonder what it is and what it tastes like even when it is melting in your mouth. It is like ginamus, which might seem repulsive but only to the uninitiated. After the first good experience with it one finds it quite addictive, in the sense of opiate, which becomes with time too hard to do without. So one must be easy with it. One must follow the discipline loosely. In time, one finds there is a small community here of people who love it and see it when they can. And one may find they are nice people to talk to and the best to be with, some nights. And then you might bump across a friend whom you did not expect would be here.
You might even think to yourself: “Hey, this is not a bad way to spend a Wednesday night.” For this series of performances by Russ, add also this rhetorical question: “And I’m helping send this person to Japan to help save dolphins?”