The BlackBox Ritual

Following the Liminoid

A SHS Theatre Arts Research Project SY 2021 - 2022

This research project investigates the rites of passages encountered in my life and theater practice through the use of ritualistic methods. This study aims to articulate the shifts in my identity by exploring the structures of performance and space sharing through ritual

Ultimately, these explorations aim to push the boundaries of sharing stories online through ritual making as collective gathering.

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Ethan King Alec Velasquez

Get to Know Me

I am a theatre artist from the Philippine High School for the Arts. My performance credits include; Dario Fo’s “The Pope And The Witch and Caryll Churchills “Mad Forest”. I am interested in explorations of space and time compositions grounded in larger societal contexts.

A Note From My Advisor

What a joy it has been to walk with King through the creation of this ritual. Like a pilgrimage, I’ve watched him push himself past thresholds, trust a process that refuses to be predicted, feel his way down the dark corridors of the soul by the soles of his feet. And, as from a pilgrimage, I’ve watched him return with a gift. That is what I feel most about this work: it is a gift to us, now. Not only to those of us here in the lockdown-ridden Philippines, but to anyone in the world who stumbles upon this doorway of the Internet and makes the choice to step through.

The pandemic brought about sudden - often violent - change to the lives that so many of us had built and known; abrupt separation from the identities we’d spent years carving out for ourselves. In this post-COVID landscape, many of us must reconstitute ourselves – our craft, our purpose, our place in an ever-changing society. We’ve been thrust into a liminal space. We’ve become, as King likes to call it, liminoids.

The Blackbox Ritual explores these veils of identity – the separation from who we’ve been, the void in between all we know and all that awaits us, and the question of what it means to reintegrate. With each step further into the unknown, we feel a synecdoche begin to take hold: the initiate’s body becomes our body, his passage, our passage. We are both apart from him, and a part of him.

In bringing this ritual to digital life, King has created a work that is as deeply personal as it is universal. It is an intimate invitation to get to know a visceral and brave young artist; but, in equal measure, it is an invitation to deepen our understanding of ourselves... The parts of us we cherish. The parts of us we share. The parts we shed. The parts that remain.

It’s been an honor to have had a small hand in helping King bring this work into your living rooms, your laptops, your headphones, your lives. I invite you to immerse yourselves in the experience, and let the boundaries that keep you you begin to loosen. You’re in good hands.

Daniel Darwin
April 2022

Dramaturgical
Notes

I am Abigail L. Ravalo, an eleventh-grade theater arts student recently introduced to dramaturgy. Navigating through the maze of the abstract and ambiguous nature of the work, the question of what a student dramaturg's role is has constantly risen at every morphing point of the process.

From my standpoint, the process itself manifests the separation, liminal, and reaggregation phases, with endless questions arising, and the whole collective continuously wrangling with possibilities, shifting roles to conform to what is needed, and unceasingly garnering new knowledge every step of the way.

How can we make this performance a social act? How do we define something as 'liminal'? Once King mentioned these questions, the process of unearthing and working with the multiplicities of voices to figure out which trajectory the performance shall lead to was exhilarating, yet scary at the same time. But one thing is sure, this experience has left its unexplainable imprint on me as a “liminal” experience.

COLLABORATORS

MARIA TERESA S. JAMIAS

TESS JAMIAS is an actor, director-dramaturg, acting teacher/coach, filmmaker, voice talent, contemporary dancer-choreographer, hair cutter and machinator. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philippine Studies (Theater Arts and Film) and Master in Arts in Theatre Arts from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She is a founding member of the Dulaang Talyer and KoLab Co. Among others, Tess has been awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship and the Japan Student Services Organization scholarship. She is currently a Theatre Arts teacher in the Senior High School of the Philippine High School for the Arts, in Mt.Makiling Los Banos.

DANIEL DARWIN

Daniel Darwin is a filipino-american artist, writer, performer and teacher who lives and creates in Manila, Philippines.

ABIGAIL RAVALO

Abigail Ravalo is a theater student. Venturing into acting, stage management, performance studies, and now recently into dramaturgy. Her first formal training in theater took place at Tanghalang Pilipino’s Musical Theater workshop. With her affinity towards performance, she then pursued Theater Arts at the Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA) now as an eleventh grader.

Among others, she took part in various productions inside and outside of Makiling, both on stage and backstage; such as Virgin Labfest 14: Silip’s staged reading, and at PHSA’s resident theatre group, Dulaang Sipat Lawin.