Alex of Cebu theater

Listen and listen carefully! It is not Uypuangco. It is Alex Uypuanco. And ask yourself: Why do you always get it wrong? He thought this to himself and then his excuse: “It is my age. The fact I am a teacher. I have to deal with hundreds of names everyday. And I was never a good speller. All these letters… Argh!”

And in any case, it was always Alex for him. They were never formally introduced. Didn’t need to. It was inevitable that they would be friends. No hurry. They were always there in the same places, with the same crowd, even if sometimes, as Neil Sedaka once put it, from different corners of the room.

But within earshot. And so they always knew what they each stood for. First and profoundly, the cold bottle of beer. And then there was the company, the smoke-filled evenings, intoxicated, intoxicating, dreamy like a play. The lights dim, it is noisy in the early evening becoming muted after all the early birds have left to roost. Only a few tables left. The conversations becoming more intimate. Perhaps they have all gone half-asleep without knowing it. Once after squeezing to aridity the joys and pleasures of the last show. Now, they must have to ask: So what happens next?

Ah, there is always another essay to be written, another kinutil, another random performance, another art piece, another poem, and for Alex, another unwritten script to play out, another show. It is what Alex does now: direct improvisation theater.

It seems immediately easy unless one has done it or seen it done. The audience tells the troupe what and who they want them to be. They take some minutes to discuss and then they do it. Do improvised theater.

Listen still. Theater is only a running conversation. Once it begins, the possibilities become endless. The cast steer themselves through time. The script is unwritten, unrehearsed, and mostly sadly unrecorded. They are precious that way. Because however the improv turns out, we know it will be a surprise. There is a craft to ending it. It is how we know how good it was.

It is the most interesting sort of theater now. And until we see the next big theater production, what they in the business call: straight theater as if there is a gay one; it may well be that it is the last living theater left in the city. Is theater in a decline? Alex thinks straight theater seems to have disappeared almost completely.

It might only be a hiatus. The old guards are disappearing and growing old. Is there a generation to replace them?

The previous decade had seen a strategic mistake. The mindset was to produce large theater spaces. Big auditoriums belying the dream of big theater productions, grand scale music operas such as modeled by Broadway. They did not foresee how expensive these are to mount. Where was the ROI, the return of investment? Who foresaw how big of a headache these things are to mount?

Just a few good people who pointed themselves in a direction which seems now the polar opposite of theater in the grand scale: Small theater, neighborhood theater, experimental theater, street theater, theater everywhere. Theater with a true sense of appropriate scale. Guerrilla theater, mounted anywhere, shown everywhere, and seen by everyone whether they like to or not. Theater which is the

Siamese twin of performance art. When it comes to theater in this sense, two names resound louder than everyone else’s: Crispin Ramos and Alex Uypuanco.

There, finally he gets it right! Alex and his troupe, the Performing Arts Kolektib (PAK), showed with the UP Cebu Fine Arts Program. Improv inside the guerrilla production of Mindworks 30, the longest running show of performance art in the country. It all happened in Cebu, the Fine Arts Program of the University of the Philippines Cebu, to be precise. If you missed it this year, well then, perhaps you might catch it next year or at some cafe or park somewhere. Soon. Look only for Alex. The next show is never far away.