There have been many dance productions inspired by literature, in particular, poetry. But rare are dance performances truly meshed in poetry. Such is Myra Beltran’s Ars Poetica, whose choreography is based on the rhythm and language of poetry. The production’s—this in its entirety is a first in the Philippines—third piece, Order for Masks which Myra Beltran co-choreographs with two other dancers, is an outstanding text where the worlds of dance, poetry and women converse in a common plane.

Based on Virginia Moreno’s “Order for Masks,” the piece is exemplary of a collaborative work by three choreographers—Paul Morales, Sharon Buendia, and Dance Forum’s Artistic Director Myra Beltran—whose individual aesthetics come together in rendering the complexity of the poem. Indeed, “collaborative” has come to be in vogue for quite some time as it has been dubbed the politically correct term in the academe, media, arts, and even in politics. But how “collaborative” is “collaborative” anyway, and how does the process of collaboration give birth to the melding of a vision? Beltran’s Order for Masks, shows the extent of the process, its evolutionary nature, and potential in bringing out the talents of independent dancers closely working together.

As her piece takes off from Moreno’s poem, Beltran knew from the inception of her vision, the responsibilities of an artist who wishes to yoke her work on another genre. A poem, as any text, has its own historicity which explains both its politics and aesthetics, and thus cannot simply be borrowed and performed without considering its particularities. Aware of this, Beltran spent days speaking with Moreno, discovering the milieu of her generation, and imbibing the socio-political and cultural landscape that produced “Order for Masks.” This was not was easy because “Order for Masks” is a poem written by a poet who does not quite belong to her generation of writers who were mostly, if not all, schooled in the American tradition. Moreno admits this in her “Aide-Memoire on ‘Order for Masks’” where she writes that she could not find anyone among her tribe of the Ravens, or of the pre-war elders of the UP Writing Club, and post-war professors in literature who could enlighten her on the philosophy behind European aesthetics. In the fifties and sixties, the poet realized that she was alone in her interest in French Impressionism and Symbolist poetry, the rest of her generation, having been immersed in English and American literature. This particular intellectual trajectory of Moreno, Beltran had to contend with in drawing out the possibilities of the poem.

Paul Morales and Sharon Brendia also had to be conscious of the social and cultural fabric of “Order for Masks.” As the poem’s complexity does not merely emanate from the mental landscape that gave birth to it but the nuances of the images presented—of course the choreographers, too, had to read on Impressionism and French Symbolist poetry to get a grasp of the world of the text— Beltran allowed her co-choreographers to create from what they “read” in the poem; Morales was assigned to work on the part of the lover while Brendia, that of the brother, with Beltran, working on the part of the father. As the three choreographers began rehearsing, they realized that the collaborative process complemented the poem’s rich texture. Morales and Brendia have been working as independent artists before getting together in this production, but Beltran’s open curatorial style gave them the space to express their particular aesthetics on a common ground, a common area, a common text.

Beltran’s philosophy provided the atmosphere conducive to collaborative work but one cannot not see her aesthetics merging with those of Morales and Brendia. As Artistic Director, Beltran—aside from choreographing the part of the father— supplied the scaffold for Order for Masks; the music she chose and the props she specified held the piece together.

Thus, was created a performance art with a contemporary idiom. Order for Masks must be commended for its aesthetics which could only have been possible within Beltran’s paradigm of dancing, a paradigm that not only translates into the dances she curates but into the very physical space her venue provides. To say that the range of movement visible in Order for Masks is “wide,” is an understatement. The chamber set-up of Dance Forum Space makes it possible for the audience to experience a world of dance that traverses classicism and the contemporary; the intimate and minimalist venue cannot not but inspire the dancers and choreographers to work within the space available and in the process adjust their aesthetics to the realities of dancing in a postcolonial nation such as ours. For the audience on the other hand, the essence of performance art becomes obvious, the lines of the dancers’ bodies more visible and felt, and the collaborative nature of dance, more ostensible.

At this point, it is imperative to cite a few comments of the choreographers involved. Morales cherishes the experience—creating and presenting a work in a theatrical context—and sees it as having contributed to his growth as a dancer/chorographer. His collaboration in Order for Masks allowed him to articulate the constantly evolving aesthetics of his dance; the collaborative process proved that dance could only be enriched by fearlessly expanding its boundaries. Brendia feels the same way and claims that “collaboration” occurred on two levels. That between poetry and dance showed how words could be “written on a body” and how body is likewise visible in words. On another level, there was a collaborative process between her as choreographer, and Beltran as dancer who provided the body she worked on.

One must also note that Beltran’s notion of poetry in dance and dance in poetry is difficult to successfully articulate —the other choreographies in the entire production actually show that dancers who move and recite the poems at the same time burden themselves with the huge responsibility of doing justice to both the choreography and poetry— because it is not simply a process of the dancer moving to the words of the recited poem. The dancers had to weave in and out of the reading of “Order for Masks” or, it could also be said that the person who read the poem had to weave in and out of the choreography. Our inability to distinguish which is which—is it the choreography that informs the reading of the poem or is it the other way around?— points out to the embodiment of the collaborative process in Order for Masks.

At a certain point in the performance, the line that differentiates the audience from the performers diminish—both find themselves reading the text and producing a “meaning” not solely based on Moreno’s poem but on the poem’s performance, that is, on the dance itself. Ultimately, the collaborative work involves all who are present in the studio; Morales, Brendia, and Beltran who worked on the piece for months, offered the choreography to the audience whose reading of Order for Masks are multiple and varied. The entire text—dance in poetry or poetry in dance —has become truly a performance art, a performance in the “presence,” constantly becoming and being.

Aside from Order for Masks’ success as a production, its contribution is not only to the development and strengthening of the contemporary aesthetics in dance. The very choice of text says much about the vision of the production. As a part of the Feminist Centennial project, Order for Masks gave the well-deserved recognition to the poet Virginia Moreno whose figure continues to loom large over Philippine women writers. As an artist who also wanted to become a dancer but eventually found herself in the world of theater, Moreno as the featured poet in Beltran’s production was the best choice to exemplify the inextricable link between and among literature, dance, and women’s interests. It is not just Moreno’s flair for language that makes her texts ideal for performance art; it is the weight and passion of her images which strike choreographers such as these three choreographers who have worked on her poem. Perhaps they saw in Moreno the same vision of independence and a similar commitment to art she has been espousing and living in the past decades.

Although the poet has shunned the limelight so much enjoyed by other writers, critic Dolores Feria attributes to Moreno, a “public presence [which is] most often that of a high priestess of culture, conducting literature via ritual, with her inimitable tone of utter contempt for the banal, the homeopathic, the strong arm or the one-dimensional martinet.” Her meticulous care for her art, notwithstanding, Moreno, as Feria continues to proffer has, “the most aggressive political insight among women writers born before the Second World War, journalists included.”

Beltran, Morales and Brendia’s Order for Masks is a successful tribute to a poet whose range of vocation traversed the fields of art, literature, theater, history, and politics (i.e., including sexual politics). Moreno’s plays and poems embody the axis of art, gender, and history and Beltran’s production attests to this. Generally reductively read as a poem whose female persona orders three masks to enable her to change her face according to the presence of the three men in her life—the father, brother and lover—“Order for Masks” as staged by Beltran draws out a more nuanced and complex process of how a woman negotiates her identity/identities. Such is no mean feat as the persona, Moreno explains in her “Aide,” has to assume different positions as she “disguise[s], alternately confront[s], baffle[s], beguile[s], waylay[s], mystif[ies], [and ] at last to lure, but as a survivor over the three ruling men in her life.”

The performance of the poem recognizes not only Moreno’s unorthodox understanding of power and sexual relations and the rare clarity by which she articulates her incisive insight on human relations. What contributes to Moreno’s works’ enduring presence is not just what critic Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz calls “exquisite workmanship,” but the historicity embedded in every text she writes. The harlequinade mentioned in “Order for Masks,” – the atmosphere evoked in the poem—alludes to the Vienna “masked” balls in the pre-War fabulous Manila Carnival where the revelers in domino costumes, wore various kinds of masks. Given this particular historical juncture upon which the poem is propped, and reading “Order for Masks” vis-à-vis Morenos’ other plays such as Itim Asu and Bayaning Huwad, one cannot miss the political undertones of the poem. Could the father, lover and brother, then, allude to the different faces and phases of our colonial history? Curiously, it is the performance of the poem, that is, Beltran’s production, that presented this reading so often eclipsed in literary analysis.

Truly, it was high time that Moreno was recognized not only as a poet but as a Philippine woman artist whose vision of art includes both aesthetics and politics. As a poet whose works are deeply imbricated in her country’s socio-political and cultural milieu, Moreno has, however, managed to marry form and content and create texts whose polyvalency of idioms allow readers to contend with their very own historicity. And Moreno in Beltran (i.e., the text in Beltran’s performance art) allows for such a re-reading of the poem.

Beltran’s Order for Masks, means so much to both the disciplines of literature and dance, to women in literature, and dance. Interestingly, the production re-draws the boundaries of feminism by re-creating a “woman’s poem” into dance with the help of a male choreographer. And herein lies the greatest strength of Order for Masks: it is an outstanding work that extends and challenges pre-conceived notions of literature, dance, and feminism. It has taken upon itself, the precarious undertaking of articulating a vocabulary that does not quite fit into textbook understanding of literature, dance and feminism. As a performance art, Order for Masks reveals the possibilities of new performance strategies that seek to re-awaken our sensibilities to the various hues of both art and sexual politics; it pokes at our intellectual, moral, and emotional compass and makes us reconfigure it. Indeed, Beltran, Morales, Brendia’s Order for Masks, is as embodiment—both literal and metaphorical—of the tenacity and inner resources of independent artists in the country. It is a tribute not only to a great Philippine woman poet but likewise a celebration of the aesthetics of contemporary dance in the Philippines.

Like Moreno’s “Order for Masks,” Beltran, Morales, Brendia’s Order for Masks is charged with a controlled intensity that implodes and resonates enduring revelations.