Performative writing highlights the physical and emotional sides of José Estrella’s theaters, which traditional academic writing can overlook

In this essay, Tiatco and Javier critically annotate and document Jose Estrella’s important works, making her an important figure in contemporary Philippine performance practice. Tiatco and Javier follow strategies of performative writing in outlining and exploring Estrella’s performance works. In employing performative writing, Tiatco and Javier provided a glimpse of Estrella’s creative mind by making her “talk” about her works, particularly her dramaturgical purviews (devise, themes, and directorial principles). This way, Estrella becomes co-author of the essay and not just the subject. The essay also provides a reflexive narration, embodied language, and sensory details of Estrella’s work to evoke the lived experience of her productions. As detailed in the piece, Estrella’s works feature the precarity of human life and seeing the individual’s vulnerability as the condition of the contemporary world. Another important feature of her theatre is the presentation and figuration of the stranger – the peculiar, the different, the other. The essay has presented such a claim by illustrating the performative experiences of encountering the theatre works of Estrella.

The goal of the essay is to challenge traditional modes of documentation and offer an alternative way of engaging and representing performance events. As featured in the essay, our utility of performative writing has blurred the boundaries between theory-driven analysis and practice, incorporating creative and experimental elements into scholarly discourse. It also foregrounds the embodied and affective dimensions of performances (i.e., the theatres of José Estrella), which may be overlooked in more conventional academic writing.

This essay is significant because it engages readers in performative writing. Performative writing plays a crucial role in capturing and shaping live performances. It bridges the gap between ephemeral events and lasting records, allowing performances to be studied, shared, and remembered long after they ended. In the case of the essay, the works of director Josefina Estrella are recorded as if they were still live events.

However, we recognize that this process is not without controversy, especially in an academic setting, where research is dominated by the scientific method. Some argue that documenting performances via the usual scientific method undermines their essential liveness and uniqueness. The debate highlights the complex relationship between live art and its written representations, raising questions about authenticity and preservation in performance studies.

In this regard, performative writing can actively construct and shape the understanding of a performance, influencing how it is perceived and interpreted by audiences or, in our case, the dramaturgs, the constant collaborators of director Estrella. Our choices made in the writing, such as language, structure, and emphasis, frame and guide the experiences of the productions identified in the essay. In this type of writing, the act of writing about performance involves subjective choices and interpretations, blurring the lines between objective documentation and creative construction. Our perspectives, biases, and artistic sensibilities inevitably influence the documentation process.

Authors: Sir Anril P. Tiatco (Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman), Jem R. Javier (Department of Linguistics, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines Diliman), and José Estrella (Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman)

Read the full paper: https://www.critical-stages.org/31/staging-the-precarious-the-vulnerable-and-the-stranger-the- stage-of-filipino-director-jose-estrella/