Life and death in Battalia Royale

Watch at your own risk. This is an invitation. This is also a warning. Battalia Royale is not some romantic weekend date that begins with flowers and ends with a kiss, not that there's any suggestion of that. There will be blood, they warn. You will run, and you will fight. This isn't a play—it's a live action game performance. It's a mouthful, but simply put, it means the audience is part of the performance. As Shakespeare put it, all the world's a stage. Battalia Royale is underground, but it's also everywhere, including online. Even before watching, audiences prepare for the bloodbath, hunting down tickets to the show, and stalking the characters on Facebook. Each character has an active Facebook page, with posts leading up to the battle itself. For those unfamiliar with Koushun Takami's novel and its film adaptation, students are forced to kill each other or be killed in the process. It's absurd, it's gruesome, and it makes people ask, "what for?" "Magkakasama yung audience and actor unmasking their inner desires, and blurring this line between reality and fiction that they don't know na parang, let's have them killed, because this is fiction. But it's still human," Sipat Lawin Ensemble artistic director JK Anicoche said. Sipat Lawin Ensemble, together with the Mapua Institute of Technology's Tekno Teatro and Our Lady of Perpetual Help's Dulaang Perpetual, are behind Battalia Royale, which was written in 2011 together with Australian playwrights David Finnigan, Sam Burns-Warr, Georgie McAuley and Jordan Prosser. The play features Bodjie Pascua and Gabe Mercado, who play the game master Fraser Salomon. Selected shows have live music by Radioactive Sago Project, Brigada, and Tarsius. For shows without live music, the score is by Radioactive Sago Project. According to Sipat Lawin’s Mia Marci, Battalia Royale is a 100-member performance, from the performers to the backstage crew. “It’s the biggest collaborative theatrical event in the Philippines,” Marci said. Finnigan said they were surprised by the scale of the response. During the first run held at the ramp of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the first night had 250 people. The next night had 450, and on the third night, there were 900. "They had to close the venue down. It was so unexpected and overwhelming," he said. Apart from the strong attendance, the mere fact that people question its message is in itself one of the play's successes. To their credit, they don't just let their stunned audiences go home and deal with it on their own. To facilitate discourse, they've set up a Facebook page where audiences can talk about the play. "The theater becomes a platform for discourse for everyone, and it doesn't stop here. We have the online performance still ongoing.  People talk, discuss and fight against each other," Anicoche said. They also reveal what they call Easter eggs online—little treats for the audience to look for when they actually watch. For instance, one character has an anting-anting, and it is when he removes the charm that he gets killed. For a month of weekend shows, they have a lot of Facebook pages—but the use of social media is complementary, and the shows are where it all happens. They have a pre-game warm-up, to help the audience get into it. And then it begins. The opening scene sets the premise, and from there it branches out in different directions. The audience is split into groups, and the groups scatter in different directions, chasing scenes. At certain points, the audience becomes part of the scene—and they become more than spectators. If they wish, they could even stop the show. Of course, the question is would they choose to stop the show, after having paid for their tickets? "Discourse siya about the idea of buying tickets, yung stakeholdership mo, parang, I want to see them kill. So what does it say about us?" Anicoche said. For Finnigan, there were several reasons for doing the play, including very personal ones, such as the fact that it pits old and young against one another. He says the older generation isn't necessarily looking out for the younger generation. "The powers that be use young people that haven't really got skills or wisdom or facility to kind of reject their promises, and they do fall for propaganda and lies told by people in authority. This play for me, one of the strongest things it says is to question what authority says," he said. Another reason to portray this sort of extreme violence is acknowledging it exists in the first place. "We're very able to filter that out, especially in an urban middle class environment we're very able to sort of close the shutters. This kind of puts it out there and says, this thing is actually happening, how would you respond? What do you think about it?" Finnigan said. Marci shares that the audience can really get into it. "They jeer, and they root for their favorite characters," she said. Battalia Royale even has a fan group called Class Love, after Class Hope, which the students of Battalia Royale belong to. On the other extreme, some actually walk out, "because they can't take the expanse of the play." It can get tiring, because the audience is involved, at the very least, in a physical sense, because they're following 40 characters who are spread out all over the grounds. In response to criticism that the audience just screams and cheers without really thinking about it, Finnigan says they've observed the opposite. "In fact what we've seen has been the audience really engaging with the premise and sort of thinking about, okay, how would I respond? What's right in this situation? What happens, what are the kind of core ethical values that we can hold on to in a situation of extreme violence and stress?" he said. Anicoche shared that with Battalia Royale gaining cult status, there was danger of losing meaning because of the hype. "In our first run it was like a rock concert, you cannot control everyone... when we contained it, this whole discourse about morality and mortality, mas naging apparent. Mas na-highlight," he said. With all the reactions, from generated fan fiction to academics discussing the work, Anicoche says they realized that "it's not really about the violence, but the conditions that propel one to be violent. So we had to make the conditions more punctuated," he says, adding that the current run includes the additional provocation of letting the audience choose if they want to continue or stop. On the first night that the audience was asked to choose, those who wanted the bloodbath to continue outnumbered those who wanted it to stop by a large number. As Anicoche said, there is the idea of wanting to get your money's worth. Besides, it's just a play. Or is it? After walking out during the performance, audience member Jose Cruz explained his decision on Facebook. In his photo, which Sipat Lawin Ensemble shared, Cruz said he felt walking out was what the show asked of him. "Ang mamili kung gusto ko pang maging bahagi ng kultura ng karahasan o umalis at mapatunayan lamang, kahit sa konteksto ng palabas, bilang simbolo ng pagdedesisyon na hindi maging bahagi nito. I think it is a gesture of compliment. But, it could also have been a much bigger success to have seen every audience member walking to the right side of Gabe Mercado choosing to end the battle. We should also look into Theater as a rehearsal for life." And then there are those who find that watching Battalia Royale helps them deal with their own experiences. Sipat Lawin Ensemble’s Mia Marci shared that one of their audience members, who had been kidnapped before, expressed that watching the show “unlocked a lot of that rage but managed to help him process part of it.” As expected, such a violent show will have extreme reactions. There are those who love it, and there are those who hate it. Not everyone will agree, but it is in conflict that Battalia Royale lives, even after so many of the characters have died. Battalia Royale shows at 7 p.m. on September 28, 29 and 30 at the Museo Pambata along Roxas Boulevard in Manila. For information on how to watch, visit the Battalia Royale front desk on the Battalia Royale Facebook page. — BM, GMA News