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| THEATRE TRANSSEXUAL & EUNUCH: An Indo-Philippine Theatre Collaboration Spices. Exotic foods. Colorful dresses. Interesting but always jam-packed trains. Auto Rickshaws. Beggars. Cows. Elephants. Malls. Bollywood films. Slums. Cricket. Colorful nightlife. Food peddlers. Unfinished roads. Beautiful colonial buildings. Warm and hardworking people. These are just among the tastes, smell and sights of India . I spent 28 days in Mumbai, India working on a collaborative theatre workshop with Actor's Cult , a theatre company founded by graduates of India 's National School of Drama (NSD). The project, funded by Arts Network Asia (ANA), was a collaborative theatre workshop working on a play about a transsexual subject from the Philippines and a eunuch from India . Leslie Nanolan , who is currently at the Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail in Cagayan de Oro City, became my transsexual woman subject for this project. (Her drug-related trial is still ongoing for the last 3 years now.) I visited her for days to get to know her story. Leslie worked for seven years as a female singer in Taipei before she decided to undergo the sex change in 1990. Her life is a story of what I call "rags to riches and riches to rags." Leslie is Higaonon, a lumad from Talacag, Bukidnon who went to big cities in search of a luxurious life. She worked as a dishwasher, beauty parlor cleaner, manicurist, and beautician, and went on to become a sensational "female" singer who travelled to Sydney, Guam, Beijing and Taipei. My Indian co-actor, Sanjay Gautam, interviewed Aarti , a hijra (eunuch) guru in New Delhi . Hijras have close-knit communities; they live together in one house headed by a guru. They are males who dress up in saris (Indian garb for females) and wear heavy make up. They are considered good luck and are invited to bless the bride and the groom during weddings. Some earn their living by begging in the streets and as the lowest commercial sex workers. When a young boy is found to have undeveloped genitalia or behaving differently from what is expected of a boy, the eunuchs, or even the family of the child, take him away to live in the house of the eunuchs. In India , having a eunuch in the family is an abomination and an insult to family prestige. Sanjay and I explored the lives of Leslie and Aarti in a three-week collaborative theater workshop. The whole process involved a lot of improvisations, working on characters' physical gestures and later moving into the psychological make-up of the characters. We utilized music, movements, emotions, and images to express each character. The day's workshop would start with a make-up session and dressing-up-as-a-woman session. The challenging part of the workshop was to discover how these two characters, who come from different cultural backgrounds and geographic location, would meet. However, using what most people call the "magical realism of theater," the problem was resolved. We decided to forget about realistic boundaries of space and time. These would not matter in this work. We made them meet in a place somewhere, sometime where they could enjoy each other's similarities while trying to understand each other's differences. What resulted was a story of rejection, desire, and wanting and dreaming to be a woman. At the end of the workshop period, a theatre piece evolved and was filmed on April 4, 2006 in Mumbai , India . The piece, called My Sister. My Friend (also the name of the project) becomes now a story of two new characters, Desiree and Vandana, inspired by the real Leslie Nanolan and Aarti. It dawned on me while doing this project that these eunuchs are actually homosexuals, and because the Indian society sees homosexuality as a possible curse to the family-they would rather give these boys to live with the so-called eunuchs. I see hijra as an expression of their homosexuality. Homosexuals in the Philippines are not also accepted, but the Filipino family is more tolerant of their sexuality. My Sister. My Friend will be premiered to theater audience in Singapore during the 2nd Initiation International Festival to be hosted by The Funstage come December 15-17, 2006. Kalyani Hiwale directed the whole project. Assisting her is husband Maneesh Verma, a Mumbai-based actor. Both co-founded Actor's Cult with the goal of bringing good theater to a metropolis-and-film-city—Mumbai. |
photos: gauss obenza, maan chua, IPAG, kumbingan ensemble, geejay arriola, sining kambayoka, bobby timonera
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