Tanghalang Pilipino To Stage Malou Jacob's BATANG MUJAHIDEEN; Show Opens 21 Feb. 2020

Manila, Philippines - Tanghalang Pilipino, the resident theater company of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), goes experimental in its production of Malou Jacob's Batang Mujahideen. The play is about the complex dynamics between Muslims and Christians in Mindanao and how it affects the young.

The play runs at CCP's Tanghalang Batute from 21 February - 8 March 2020.

Batang Mujahideen taps artist and playwright Guelan Luarca to helm the play. "This play hopes to be a catalyst of empathy and social action," says Luarca, who also shares staging credits with the members of the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company (AC). "This production also features AC, not only as actors and artists but as ethical, engaged researchers and citizens."

Through Batang Mujahideen, Luarca, who is also the Artistic Director of Tanghalang Ateneo, hopes to highlight the undeniable connection between Art and Politics.

Luarca says: "Batang Mujahideen will use experimental, non-traditional modes of theater production, such as documentary theater, devised theater, multimedia, movement and dance, traditional, experimental, and postmodern forms, research performance, and meta theater, among others."

He emphasizes the point is to always and continuously preclude that this is a mediated narrative, filtered through the sense-impressions of the local actors and by way of the playwright's imagination.

"With the guidance of a Moro dramaturg and consultants from Mindanao, we offer this play as a mere representation of a reality in Mindanao which is far richer, more human, more complex than we can yearn to portray," clarifies Luarca. "The audience will always be uncomfortably aware that this is a play, a performance, an interpretation of a reality we are honored to portray."

The director promises to exhaust the entire production's training as artists and performance makers to tell Jacob's necessary historical fiction about a part of our nation, which we, in the capital, all too often ignore.

Batang Mujahideen features the multi-awarded members of AC who reaped awards for their critically-acclaimed productions of Der Kaufmann (Merchant of Venice), Ang Pag-uusig (The Crucible), and Katsuri (Of Mice and Men).

AC members are Jonathan Tadioan, Marco Viaña, Doray Dayao, JV Ibesate, Lhorvie Nuevo, Antonette Go, Ybes Bagadiong, Manok Nellas, and Eunice Pacia.

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