Connect with us

Arts & Culture

Balak: Cebuanas Writing Their Heart Out And Speaking Their Mind

Spoken word poetry in Cebu has been celebrated by a ton of people in different cafes and restaurants. With perhaps a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer in hand, one may have witnessed the beauty of literature through spoken word in a number of Cebu’s venues and hubs.

It’s not always that people start from the top, nor are they blessed with all the talent and skills to cultivate themselves fit for what they wanted to do or pursue. Valerie Tesing started her journey as a poet back when she was in elementary school, reminiscing her childhood when she pushed herself hard to find words that rhymed to perfect her first few poems.

For Valerie, she never really saw herself as someone who could write poems—she didn’t even love literature in the first place. She would love to think that it was fate that brought her towards literature, and she thanks the universe for it.

It is said that when one is such a bookworm, it would reflect in their writing, just like two peas in a pod. But for Valerie, she hadn’t read that many poems to master the art before she began writing one.

“I could not exactly remember the very first poem I wrote, but I know it only took me a piece of paper and pen to write all the words down. It was as if my mind was already an attic of words, and I never knew it existed until I tried to uncover it,” shares Valerie.

Spoken word poetry in Cebu has been celebrated by a ton of people in different cafes and restaurants. With perhaps a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer in hand, one may have witnessed the beauty of literature through spoken word in a number of Cebu’s venues and hubs.

For the rest of Valerie’s college life, she was known to be one to enjoy slam poetry and the balak. She would go to events catering such an activity and share her pieces which come in a variety of genres.

One of her favorite pieces include one called “Love and War”. On why she deemed it her favorite, she shares that it spoke of her story to the LGBTQIA+ community. It is also one of the very first poems she performed to an audience, an event, the “Bundak! Balak! Pride!” The poem speaks about a love not accepted, a love that would mean “suffocation”, “loss”, and being “wrong”. It is part of her advocacy to voice out and express the woes of those seen as minorities in the society.

“Only Warm When I’m Naked”, another piece of hers, speaks about her invisibility as an artist in our family and with her peers.

“Poets are not commonly recognized as artists I think, pretty much because we use words rather than paint or cameras, and even recently, some poems are reduced to just “hugot” in our culture so they’re not taken seriously as they should be,” says Valerie.

Poetry has been a way for Valerie to express her feelings, although it hasn’t been easy for her. There are no exact words to describe feelings and emotions such as being in love, or being happy, and according to Valerie, in order for these feelings to be described, poetry has shaped her eyes to search stories she can write about that truly speak out.

“You are able to express love in a story as small as finding a raindrop on your windowsill, or listening to your dog’s breaths. Poetry simplifies feelings/emotions in a way that it concretizes the abstract,” says Valerie.

When asked how she’d get millennials like her to appreciate literature in today’s age, she advises them to read more and sail to a sea of stories because they’re all just waiting to be read.

Writing poems and performing spoken word poetry in front of an audience is just some of Juanita Romualdez’s talents. You probably know the Cebuana as a video of her doing balak got viral a week ago, a proof of how her words touched a number of people. She is also a nationally renowned singer under Viva Records and has released a number of albums and singles such as “Inday” and “We’ll Never Know”. Graduating with a Linguistics and Literature majors in college, Juanita is set to be a woman of words.

 

“This (balak or spoken word poetry) really opened me up to a wide range of poetry styles and forms of literature in general,” shares Juanita. Through her Cebuano Poetry major subjects back then, she fell in love at how poetic the language can be. She shares that back then, Balak  would be seen as something baduy, and sarcastic remarks such as “ka lawom ba uy! (how deep!)” would ensue.

It was a struggle for Juanita to write her own balak, due to her lack of vocabulary and metaphors that “sprout from a Cebuano sensibility”. However, this did not stop her as getting into Cebuano spoken word poetry allowed her to create pieces that work around her writing capabilities.

She recalls her beginnings in poetry writing, which she has done since at a very young age.

“I remember that my yearly gift (for all occasions) to my parents were poorly written poems, but they did come from the heart. And they knew very well that’s all my 7-year old self could afford to give,” Juanita muses.

Overwhelming support from the family showered Juanita the encouragement she needed to keep on writing, as her family framed these poems she gave out, a testament of how they loved the pieces.

High school came and Juanita started taking writing seriously by entering essay competitions and poetry contests.

“I just love words. Even the simplest ones. Can you believe that my favorite word is ‘blue’?”, shares Juanita. “I always share this in my workshops. I am not particularly fond of the actual “color blue” , but I love how the B and L roll so naturally into the U and E, it’s just such a delight to say! That’s the secret of writing, I guess,” she adds.

To write with passion, one has to enjoy the words and use the words one is comfortable with, and those that you know how to manipulate to your advantage. Contrary to popular belief, Juanita shares that in writing poetry, it’s not all about writing to impress. As much as she can, she made a vow to try to veer away from “lofty” words unless needed.

“The magic happens when you can take simple words and form something wonderful out of them. Because there is no perfect form of literature, but people will fall in love with genuine pieces/stories,” Juanita says.

Although she got into writing Bisaya Poetry a little late, she takes pride in some of her pieces. One of her first creations was about a time when she was late for a workshop. It circled around the struggle she went through of finding a ride and resorted to taking a habal-habal. Not only that, the piece also talked about her having to finish putting make-up while the driver zoomed through the streets. With this piece, Juanita was able to see the comical nature of the balak, which was what made her enjoy creating it.

Another Bisaya Poem she loved among her pieces, and was also definitely a crowd’s favorite was the one entitled “Isturyahinubog” (drunk talk). It starts with the line  “gihigugma rako niya kung hubog siya (but in English I start it with” he never loved me sober”), which makes the crowd go crazy all because at one point in time, we’ve all experienced this.

When asked of her writing technique, Juanita shares that part of writing a piece is to take a “general concept” which is something that everyone has either experienced or can relate to, and place ideas and words that make it personal to you. The effectiveness in the details would speak to your audience.

Juanita, aside from writing songs, has turned to poetry writing to express herself. She says that poetry is both therapeutic and traumatic. Its ability to let you release your feelings and pour them out on a piece of paper gives you the beautiful work of immortalizing your feelings.

A growing number of millennials have ventured in this art of spoken word poetry. Juanita takes pride in this literature appreciation trend in Cebu, and it is continuing to grow through Cebu LitFest, an avenue promoting literature, most especially spoken word poetry. This 2018, Cebu LitFest is set to kickoff its various activities during the month of July, conducting workshops all over the city and putting up “Open Mic” nights for everyone to express themselves through poetry as well.

The Literary Festival, which is a celebration of the rich literature and art found in Cebu’s local scene and all over the world is how Valerie and Juanita learned to master the art of manipulating words through the different forms it can become, more fuller, more beautiful.

 

Related Topics:
14 Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Arts & Culture

Pasulong; Anton Quisumbing at the Yuchengco Museum

by Mia Durano | photography by Zach Aldave

There is something about walking into the Yuchengco Museum that sends a signal before you’ve even seen the artworks. Situated in RCBC Plaza, right in the middle of Makati’s financial district, it is an institution with a point of view — a forum as much as a gallery. So when the energy of an exhibition opening spills past the main hall and into the corridors, something tells you that someone has earned their way in.

Pasulong is Anton Quisumbing’s first solo exhibition in over two decades. Twenty-nine sculptures that took two years to complete, all cast in bronze, made from propellers salvaged from boats damaged by Typhoon Odette in 2021. Those who knew what that ill-fated period was like understand why the timeline matters. This is not decorative bronze; rather, it is marine-grade, built to resist corrosion and force. It is a material that does not yield to the ravages of the ocean.

There is a reason why metalwork is described in physical terms — it is cold, harsh, brash, forceful, and resistant. And when you walk into a room full of bronze sculptures, that experience becomes resonant. Propulsion, with its loops, arcs, and curves that rise, descend, and turn back into shape, embodies this. There are no right angles and no hard stops here. In this particular piece, the artist is remarkably aware of its sinuous movement and instead finds its voice within the medium.

This is the tension Anton Quisumbing works with. His practice has always tested what a single material can hold, allowing every movement to maintain the weight of its volume. Pasulong does not present a clean arc of recovery; instead, it delivers the full range of its intentions.

Sight, a warped figure with an almond eye and armor along one side, carries what the exhibition describes as a sense of lightness despite the weight we carry in our lives. The work stands with the authority of something that has found its own gravitas. The artist leans toward the idea that recovery is not resolved in one sweeping gesture.

Anton Quisumbing spent years away from sculpture, turning instead to painting as his primary medium. In Pasulong, he returns to bronze and to the physical demands of the material, which, in a way, becomes an act of pushing further toward his original vision. The outcome is an artist in full control of both subject and medium.

Anton Quisumbing ‘s practice as a sculptor is anchored in testing the strength of a single material.

The artist’s primary concern in working with bronze was its malleability.

Pasulong marks Anton Quisumbing’s return to sculpture.

Propulsion, bronze sculpture 83×44×35cm 2024

Sight, bronze sculpture 63×40×22.8cm 2024

Gilo Sarmiento, this writer Mia Durano and artist Ramon Orlina

Continue Reading

Arts & Culture

Kundiman–A Collaboration Between Charles Lahti and Francis Dravigny at the Qube Gallery

by Oj Hofer

“Collaboration is like carbonation for fresh ideas “-Anonymous

Kundiman—drawn from the Filipino tradition of lyrical love songs marked by longing, devotion, and emotional depth—unfolded not merely as an exhibition but as a dialogue between two artists whose practices, though formally distinct, share a common goal: that creation is never singular, never complete, and never entirely one’s own. The word itself carries weight. In the Philippine cultural imagination, kundiman is not passive sentiment but a mode of endurance—a way of loving what one cannot fully possess, of honoring what exceeds one’s grasp—and to name an exhibition after it is to make a claim about the nature of making itself: that art, like the song, is an act of devotion directed toward something larger than the maker’s intention. It is a form that does not declare but lingers; not spectacle, but the quieter and more demanding thing called intimacy.

The collaboration between Charles Lahti and Francis Dravigny operates at what might be called the threshold of language—the place where gesture becomes structure and structure, over time, turns into meaning. Their working relationship is less a merger of two styles than a negotiation between two modes of listening: one drawn to the decisive mark, the other to the patient accumulation of woven form. Lahti’s mark-making is grounded, deliberate, and unambiguous in its commitment to presence; his lines carry the quality of breath, each stroke an event rather than a flourish. Observers familiar with East Asian ink traditions will recognize this sensibility immediately, for in Zen ink practice and Japanese calligraphy, the practitioner does not decide what to draw so much as prepare the conditions under which something may reveal itself—the mark that emerges from this discipline is not decorative but testimonial, evidence of a moment of full attention. Lahti’s work operates within this logic even when the cultural references are Western, and what anchors it is not style but stance: an ethical relation to the act of making that distinguishes genuine presence from the mere performance of spontaneity, a distinction far rarer in contemporary visual art than it ought to be.

“The line is not drawn but revealed—through stillness, breath, and a quality of awareness that the discipline of reduction alone makes possible.”

Dravigny’s woven interventions introduce a different, though deeply complementary, temporality. Where Lahti works in the decisive instant, Dravigny works in accumulation—the slow building-up of material over time—and his use of abacá, a fiber indigenous to the Philippine archipelago, is not incidental. Abacá carries its own history: long harvested by hand, traded across colonial networks, woven into ropes and sails, and more recently reclaimed as a medium of cultural expression, so that to bring it into an art context is to activate this history without necessarily declaring it. In Dravigny’s hands, textile transcends its usual function as background or support and becomes instead an act of preservation—a material archive that holds within its weave the gestures of another artist. This concept, which the exhibition implicitly explores, speaks to something the atelier tradition has long understood: that a work of art may pass through multiple bodies and multiple intentions and still emerge with coherence, provided each maker brings to the passage not assertion but responsiveness, the capacity to receive another’s action and carry it forward without erasing it. Dravigny’s woven interventions propose a similar ethic, made visible rather than concealed.

What Kundiman ultimately stages is not the product of collaboration but its conditions: the particular quality of attention required when one artist’s gesture enters the field of another’s practice, and the willingness to wait that such attention demands. The Japanese aesthetic tradition names this interval ma—the generative pause, the charged space in which meaning gathers before it resolves into form—and the exhibition’s restraint is precisely its argument. There is no excess, no spectacle, no rhetorical gesture toward significance, only a sustained attentiveness to process that runs counter to the dominant logic of contemporary exhibition-making, in which legibility is prized and impact must be immediate. Kundiman refuses this, trusting the viewer to do the work of attending, and in this refusal it finds its deepest kinship with Zen aesthetics: the discipline of reduction, the clarity of intention, the respect for what is essential over what is merely present.

“What Kundiman proposes is more radical than most exhibitions dare: that the self, in the act of making, becomes temporarily permeable—open to the gesture, the material logic, the devotion of another.”

The concept of interbeing—rooted in Buddhist philosophy and carrying the understanding that nothing arises independently, that every form is the result of conditions and every maker is in part made by what they make—finds in this exhibition its material proof. What was created here does not belong to one hand alone. It emerges in the space between, where gesture is received, transformed, and returned; where material listens and form responds and meaning unfolds not as conclusion but as continuation. The exhibition ends. The dialogue does not. This is the space between hands: where making becomes meeting, and where interbeing quietly, insistently gives rise to form.

Charles Lahti with his latest works—layering print with bandana textiles to create tactile, hybrid surfaces where image, pattern, and material converge.

Francis Dravigny in his Cebu studio—transforming abacá and found materials into layered, sculptural weavings.

A wall of interbeing—where weave, gesture, and form dissolve into quiet harmony and non-duality.

A flat surface transformed into a quiet weave—drawing the eye inward, where structure softens into stillness and resonates with Zen practice.

Continue Reading

Arts & Culture

Kundiman After Dark: Traditional 19th Century Filipino Musical Genre Continues to Inspire

by Kingsley Medalla

The Kundiman is a traditional 19th-century Tagalog musical genre that served as a profound source of inspiration for many sophisticated, classically trained artists. The name is derived from the Tagalog phrase “kung hindi man,” literally translating to “if it were not so.” These musical pieces were often performed as poignant love songs characterized by smooth, flowing melodies containing emotional depth. Originating as a serenade in poetic Tagalog lyrics, it features a minor-to-major key progression expressing longing, devotion, patriotism, and a yearning for freedom.

Sine Pop, a boutique theater in a 1948 post-war heritage house located in Cubao, Quezon City, serves as a charming venue for cultural events and intimate performances with a small ensemble. Recently hosting Kundiman After Dark, a recital honoring the legacy of Nicanor Abelardo (1893–1934), a highly esteemed Filipino composer and pianist hailed as the “father of the sonata form in the Philippines” and a master of the art of the Kundiman. Carlson Chan, founder of Sine Pop, clarifies their unique model: the performances are open to the public and are, as such, complimentary, as its primary focus is to promote the performing artists per se.

The performances featured beloved Kundiman classics including Mutya ng Pasig (1926), Naku… Kenkoy (1930), and a personal favorite, Bituing Marikit (1926). These musical pieces were brought to life through the solo acts and live vocals of tenor Erwin Lumauag, Japanese violinist Shiho Takashima (who has since made the Philippines her permanent residence), and the renowned composer, pedagogue, and pianist Augusto Espino.

“Nasaan Ka Irog,” written in 1923, drew inspiration from a romantic tale shared by Nicanor Abelardo’s friend, who went overseas leaving behind his beloved in the Philippines. Years after, this man eventually became a doctor and, upon his return, discovered that the love of his life had been married to someone else. He also learned that the letters he had sent were never delivered to her, as they were kept by the doctor’s family, secretly away from her. A classic case of unrequited love. Kundiman serves as the heart and soul and the pinnacle of Filipino musical artistry.

Violinist Shiho Takashima and pianist Augusto Espino

Tenor Erwin Lumauag

Art patrons; Pacita Agoncillo Sode, Marilou Khan Magsaysay, Patricia Cepeda-Sison and this writer Kingsley Medalle

Continue Reading

Trending