A week of dance

Without really realizing it, I ended up with a week of dance performances...no, not me dancing, but was in the audience for several different performances. It started out last Friday when I had a long weekend for Chinese New Year (Welcome the year of the dog). I stayed in town which gave me an opportunity to go see the dragon and lion dance on the other side of my neighborhood. It was pretty much me and a pile of small kids, but I enjoyed watching the antics in any case.

Lion dance for Chinese New Year

Sunday I headed downtown to check out a Ballet Manila performance called Ballet and Ballads. I had not idea what I would be getting, especially since I had won the tickets in a school raffle. Turns out it was ballet, but danced to live music which was being sung on stage for most numbers. I found myself a bit confused when after intermission the audience went crazy when a singer stepped out on stage. Turned out it was Christian Bautista, which meant nothing to me. I asked our taxi driver on the way home and he said he was a Filipino teenage heart throb. It definitely seemed to be the highlight of the performance for most of the audience. Not quite the experience I was anticipating as the audience sung along, yet somehow felt all the more Filipino because of it. After all people here do love to sing and dance.

Ballet Manila with live singers. Christian Bautista is in white.

Thursday I stayed late at school to watch our high school dance group run through their performance. Twenty minutes of a variety of dances with a huge amount of props (bungee cords, door frames, mini-tramps, laser lines) made me appreciate the opportunities that our students have just by virtue of being at our school. The stage they danced on was just as nice, if not nicer, than the other performances I watched this week. The time they put in was clear as the produced an impressive dance experience.

Dancers of the Bohol Dance Project

Friday night I ended up at a free performance at the Fringe Festival, a performance by the Bohol Dance Project taking place just a block from my apartment at the BGC Arts Center. They brought four male dancers in for their first performance outside of Bohol. You could see the emotion and thrill they had on being a stage in Manila, and couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement. Their two pieces were drastically different - one choreographed by a Romanian and the other a Filipino, each drawing on very different inspiration. If only more of my Friday evenings would end with a live dance performance like this.

January’s Museum: Museum of Contemporary Art and Design

Last month we headed out for what I hoped would be a double header on museums. I had seen that there was a sculpture garden in the general area that we were heading to, one that had a sculpture for each of the APEC countries. Figured that since it was cool enough to be outside and we were in the area that we should stop there first. Only it turns out the APEC sculptures aren’t actually in the APEC garden like logic might lead you to believe. Oh we saw two sculptures but none that I was expecting...guess I’ll have to give it another shot once I do a bit more research.

So then on to our actual museum. Which, thankfully, was exactly where I expected it to be, a 20 minute walk down the road. The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design is on the campus of the College of Saint Benilde's School of Art and Design and seems to be a fairly recent addition to the museum spaces in Manila. The museum has a lovely industrial warehouse feel to the open space. For the size of the space there was not much on display. Four exhibits took up a fraction of the space. One on the empty space of buildings, one an cardboard recreation of a beach scene (I found the artist’s annotated photos much more interesting, an interesting back lit display on spaces (my favorite I think) and a video installation set in Chandigarh (a city in India I’ve traveled through but never visited).

All in allI feel like the trip this month gave us a destination but not much more. I can’t really recommend the museum unless the exhibit is one you are particularly interested in. However if you’re in the area it might be worth a stop since it was free.

Requisite museum selfie,
probably our worst one yet!

Museum of Contemporary Art and Design

Tues - Sat 10-6, Sun 10-2

Free admission