Anton Juan, giant onstage

Praised as enfant terrible at the Ateneo and the University of the Philippines in his younger days, Filipino actor, director, and playwright Anton Juan, a professor at Indiana’s Notre Dame University since 2005, has grown golden onstage, mesmerizing audiences and critics worldwide.

For more than 40 years, Juan has been knocking down walls of conventional stage production, crafting onstage clashes of sexual dichotomies; the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer. Known for producing pure theater and acting with a strange alchemy of objectivity and subjectivity, Juan has also written six poetic plays with socio-historical consciousness. For him, the stage is a perfect republic where imagination and metaphysics make action, including revolution, possible.

During Notre Dame’s semestral break, he returned to Manila where he directed and acted in “The Maids,” a 1947 opus by Jean Genet (1810-1986), at PETA in Quezon City on Oct. 28 and 29.

He also directed “La boheme,” the 1895 romantic opera of Giacomo Puccini (1858-1824), for MusicArtes. It was performed at Samsung Hall, SM Aura, on Oct 18 and 19.

In the former, Juan portrayed Solange, the submissive sister of strong-willed Clair (Topper Fabregas). Every time Madam is away, the two maids plot the death of Madam (Peter Serrano) by alternately portraying the maid and the mistress.

Entangled in an imaginary power struggle of the oppressor and the oppressed, the two sisters spit venom in a classic class struggle, which ends with Claire’s death (also during Madam’s absence). The play is easily analyzed as pro-status quo because Madam escapes death, but says Juan's writer sister Jennifer Simonek, “Genet underlines the power of the imagination in fulfilling the maids’ temporary but symbolic freedom.”

Based on the story of two sisters who were convicted for the brutal killing of their rich employer and her daughter in France in 1933, Genet also wanted young boys to portray the female characters in his play, to enhance its psychological turmoil, according to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Since then, “The Maids” is usually cast across gender.

Filipinos relate to it, Juan says, because “we have developed our own culture of servitude (and we also understand transgender issues)”. When he directed “The Maids” for MusicArtes in Manila in 2013, the characters depicted class struggle in the Philippines. Madam (portrayed by Joel Saracho then) was a new rich with a Visayan accent.

Moon Theater, which deals with issues of Philippine migration, has also produced “The Maids” abroad with a foreigner portraying Madam, and Filipinos as maids. Genet’s sense of temporary freedom through imagination helps assuage Filipinos who have “become maids of the world or subservient in dominant worlds,” Juan explains. He helped establish Moon Theater in London in 2010, in Chicago in 2011, and in Toronto in 2013.

'La boheme'

Juan’s direction of “La boheme” at the Fort in Taguig, on the other hand, was a straight production. But “ringside seats” were filled with special guests – former La bohemes of UP, where he taught for more than 30 years. One guest was his sister Jennifer, to whom the play was dedicated.

In the play’s directorial notes, Juan also waxed romantic about his student life in Europe in the 70s, after his immersion in street theater prior to the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines in 1972.

With a grant from Ministerodegli Affari Stranieri, he studied art history in Italy, a world (according to his notes) filled with “hell’s mouth and ecstacies of saints, antiquity, and Baroque [culture]; [dangerous] strikes at train stations; intense love of Dante, Albinoni, and Pasolini; glorious statues spouting verses and images; and fountains rising for or against the Pope.”

After Italy, Juan received a scholarship from Jack Lang, founder and producer of Festival du Monde in Nancy, France and then-director of the Theatre National de Chaillot. He reunited with Paris-based Jennifer at Gare de Lyon. “She brought me to lunch with her bohemian friends—refugees and philosophers who talked at the same time and were no different from the Les Bohemes of UP (in the 70s) who discussed Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and poet Rilke. The atmosphere (in Paris then also) felt like pre-Martial law rule in Manila, before 1972.” His sister’s flat above a cheese repacking factory near Place de la Republique was “bitter cold.” “As a frugal student I walked through the streets of Paris, compared buildings, bridges, balconies, cobbled stones, and thought of Genet (my favorite playwright).”

He was not that romantic and sentimental, but more politically conscious and radical when he directed Puccini’s “Madam Butterfly” for MusicArtes at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2012. Grafted into the 1896 romantic opera were images of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II in 1945; the Philippine history of colonialism; Filipinas (including prostitutes) seeking American husbands to survive economically. Juan’s opera compared pure love with the love of the colonized (Cio Cio San, portrayed by soprano Mako Nishimoto) and the colonizer (B.F. Pinkerton, played by Mexican tenor Dante Alcala).

Juan’s liberal grafting on a playwright’s original text was heightened in his direction of “Screen Macbeth,” at UP’s College of Mass Communications in 2011. Enhancing Shakespeare’s Scotland with witches and intensely clashing characters, Juan projected digital images—on white, gauze-like sheets that surrounded the theater—of modern Asian dictators, battle scenes from famous war movies, dominant religious characters and the excessive number of shoes from Imelda Marcos' collection. Creating a cross-like stage, Juan utilized all corners of it to show a world in subterranean darkness.

Juan’s direction of “Joy Luck Club,” an adaptation of Amy Tan’s 1998 novel by Susan Kim, for Repertory Philippines in Greenbelt, Makati City in 2011 was a mastery of seamless movement of props and characters, as in a dance (with less dialogue) while performers essayed age-old and usually verbose conflict between mother and daughter; between Asian and American culture (in a two-generation Chinese family in the United States).

In 2010, Juan’s direction of “Information for Foreigners,” based on Griselda Gambaro’s history of liberation in Argentina, included Philippines’ contemporary history of liberation—depicted with visual images of heart-rankling human rights violation and social injustice. Produced in several rooms at UP’s College of Arts and Letters, the play resulted in the hounding of former Army general Jovito Palparan for his alleged involvement in the murder and disappearances of activists. “That was the play’s crowning glory,” says Juan.

Known for his balletic sense onstage, Juan says, “I respect and capture the essence of the playwright’s original text. When I create images onstage for a particular work, I dwell within the physicalised expression of (the play’s) essence. I belong to the school of stylistics as propagated by the late Nieves Epistola (1926-2002, my mentor who taught literature in UP).” Romanian Radu Pennsiulescu of the Grotowsky Theater also taught him “the principle of movement in theater” Another mentor was Pina Bausch, founder of Tanztheater, which fuses dance, drama, and emotion.

Explaining why he creates layers of political knowledge onstage like no other Filipino director or playwright has ever done with beauty, consistency and passion, Juan says, “My method is semiotics. My images are expressionistic, also surreal because I always contextualize; I cross spaces between the real and the historical (in relation to the original text I’m working with). I also believe that the memory of the playwright is not his memory alone but also of the other. I transform that into a historical memory, one that is owned by the world (for everyone across several cultures). In that way, I speak to the world.”

For Juan, oscillating time frame and merging historical anomalies worldwide are easily grafted with action onstage (the play’s materiality), for comparative purposes and creative contextualization – done not by logic but by intuitive understanding  of the conflict between marginalized and dominant cultures, a favorite theme. His instinctive poetization of man’s historical and social fate is inspired by Henri Bergson’s insistence that intuition and duration, more than logic, are the best basis for real understanding.

As playwright

Juan’s six plays are superbly crafted with his signature political and visual layering onstage. He also writes as a director and actor.

“Taong Grasa ” (1981) is a Palanca award-winning play about a vagabond talking with his intestines.

“Bread of Angels” (1994) is choreographed movement and sound composition about abused children, done for Ballet Philippines.

“Tuko! Tuko (The Princess of the Lizard Moon),” was written in 1997 for contemporary Filipina sex slaves in Japan, with instructions to be performed by a Butoh actor. It won $200,000 (second prize) in the Alexander Onassis International Prizes for Theater. 

In 1998, he wrote “The Price of Redemption,” about a director in a politically committed theater group (Teatro Porvenir) that was founded by activist-playwright Aurelio Tolentino (1867-1915), who, in a surprising time-shift, betrays activist actors and actresses in the 70s who were tortured and killed. “It is about the prevalence of betrayal (by supposedly committed people) in several historical periods in the Philippines,” explains Juan.

His play, “Shadows of the Reef,” written in 2004, is about a mother who voluntarily crucifies herself to mourn a child who dies under the sea while working for rapacious fishermen.

“Hinabing Pakpak ng Ating Mga Anak (The Winged Fragments of our Children),” written in 2009, is about street children.

Juan’s fusion of political consciousness in theater was shaped in UP and, later, by mentors he met when he was a student in Europe. They include Nobel laureate Dario Fo, who fought Italy’s fascistic regime, corruption, organized crimes, political killings, racism, and war; California-born Luis Valdez of Teatro Campesino, who fought for migrant workers in California; Polish Tadeusz Kantor, who unearthed Poland’s memory of war in theater despite Soviet-imposed social realism and subsidy of state-controlled avant garde movement in theater; and Giorgio Strehler, founder of Piccolo Teatro di Milano, who fused leftist philosophy with new forms.

“I was the youngest among them. We were doing what I liked even then in theater,” he says, referring to “language in space, the narrative of my country’s ruptures and tensions and the vastness (and depth) of its pain.” In other words, his inspiration is the Philippines.

Multi-awarded and well decorated, Juan received from the French government the Chevalier de l’Ordre  des Artes et Lettres in 1992 and the Chevalier de l’Ordre National e Merit in 2002. He finished his doctorate in Semiotics at the Kapodistrian and Panhellenic University of Athens. — BM, GMA News