What do Lucio San Pedro, Lucrecia Kasilag, Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Ramon Santos, Antonio Molina, Francisco Feliciano, Ernani Cuenco, and Ryan Cayabyab have in common?
They are all in the roster of the country’s revered National Artists for Music.
How about Bert Avellana, Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Gerry de Leon, Eddie Romero, Ricky Lee, and yes, Fernando Poe, Jr.?
They happen to be our National Artists for Film.
You’d remember the theater days of Rolando Tinio at the CCP and the Manila Metropolitan Theater and the great Daisy Avellana’s landmark acting in Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Filipino.
They are now immortalized as National Artists for Theater.
There are National Artists in other fields—Architecture, Dance, Visual Arts, and Historical Literature.
The most visible in dance are Alice Reyes, who re-staged her acclaimed Rama Hari, and Agnes Locsin, with the successful comeback of her acclaimed choreography, Encantada.
2025 SEARCH
There is another search for National Artists in 2025, spearheaded by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).
CCP Board of Trustees chair Jaime C. Laya noted that Filipino artists are being cheered not just on native shores but in Europe and the United States as well.
“We have heard of this phenomenal Filipino-Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski, who is now a sensation world-wide at age 23, and this Filipino tenor, Arthur Espiritu, who is making waves in Europe, from Germany to Switzerland, Warsaw, and Bulgaria,” Laya said. “These are the kind of talents we should look for. We cannot be very parochial, nominating artists in our own circle of friends. We are sure there are many Filipino artists worth nominating in various fields.”
Laya urged cultural workers to actively participate in nominating their choices for the 2025 search for National Artists in Music, Visual Arts, Dance, and Theater, adding that the nominees need not be famous for as long as they meet the criteria with solid documentation.
Laya spoke during the press conference, announcing the search for National Artists in various categories for the year 2025.
NCCA chair Victorino Manalo said the search for National Artists has always been taxing and rigorous.
“We get all kinds of feedback,” Manalo said. “We were told why this and that artist was never considered at all. Foremost of all, the artist’s credentials should be well-documented. After accepting all the nominations, a research group goes over the documents and checks the veracity of the curriculum vitae of the nominees for six months. Another six months will be spent on deliberations on the nominees before the selected ones are announced. I assure you there will be more rigorous argumentations than petty arguments.”
NO NOMINATIONS BY INDIVIDUALS
The NCCA and CCP pointed out that only a government or nongovernment cultural organization, as well as private foundations and councils, can nominate. “We no longer accept nominations by individuals,” Manalo said.
NCCA Deputy Executive Director Marichu Tellano said National Artists get P200,000 upon proclamation and P50,000 monthly allowance, plus another P750,000 for medical needs. “They also get a state funeral when they pass away,” she added.
A day after the NCCA presscon, netizens had a field day nominating their choices.
Award-winning author Ninotchka Rosca and screenwriter Gina Marissa Tagasa posted on Facebook that the late writer Lualhati Bautista should be considered for National Artist for Literature.
Netizen John Iremil Teodoro also suggested names from the Visayas in the field of literature—namely, Merlie Alunan, Leoncio P. Deriada, and Magdalena Jalandoni.
Music lovers from all over the country are one in saying that national recognition for pianist Cecile Licad is long overdue.
Vice-Mayor Nestor Alvarez of the Science City of Munoz, Nueva Ecija, said of Cecile: “She was national treasure since age ten and is one of the country’s greatest living artists, with solid credentials not just locally but on the international stage as well. My town has honored her as adopted daughter of Munoz, Nueva Ecija, because of her exemplary status as world-class artist. Very few can match her status as national and international celebrity in music.”
NATIONAL ARTISTS UP CLOSE
By fate, I was close to most of these national artists in various fields.
Along with soprano Evelyn Mandac (the first and the last Filipino soprano to sing at the Met), I had frequent dinner get-togethers with Rolando Tinio, who regaled us with funny stories of actors and singers in his theater and opera productions.
In the early 1980s, theatergoers at the CCP had the theater treat of their lives when Tinio’s Teatro Pilipino, in one of its theater seasons, staged a nude Romeo in the Pilipino version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The students shrieked with laughter, prompting Tinio to shout at his audience, “Ngayon lang ba kayo nakakita ng titi?” (Is this your first time to see a male sex organ?)
In the early 1990s, I invited National Artist for Music Lucrecia Kasilag as one of my outreach lecturers in Catanduanes.
In this island lecture, Dr. Kasilag talked about ethnic music instruments and called for volunteers to play chamber music with her. She wouldn’t stop until she had convinced her audience that music didn’t begin and end with Western composers.
I believe my last precious moments with “Tita King” (as I fondly called Dr. Kasilag) were at the launch of her autobiography, Lucrecia Roces Kasilag: My Story, when she was 79. By then, she was hard of hearing, nearly blind, and always on a wheelchair.
She pulled me aside with her book and signed it: “To dear Pablo, My Story is all yours to talk about. Love, Tita King—January 15, 2000.”
She passed away in 2008 at age 89.
National Artist for Film Ishmael Bernal was in and out of hospital before he died in 1996.
When a Kasalo (a street café) partner, the late Ed Manalo, learned that the film director was in the hospital, he reacted nonchalantly, knowing that wasn’t the first time Bernal was hospitalized.
“When he was admitted at the Heart Center one day in December some years back,” Manalo recalled, “he couldn’t stand staring at the ceiling of the hospital room. Bored, he fled the Heart Center room and proceeded to the KasaloCafé a block away, with the bottle of dextrose still attached to him. So, when I heard he was hospitalized again, I imagined it wouldn’t be long when he’d bolt again and re-appear at Kasalo in the nick of time,” Manalo related.
As he lay dying, Bernal was worried about leaving his mother. He asked his nephew, Bayani Santos, to take his mother away from the room to spare her from the grief of seeing a dying son.
Then he asked someone to call his brothers and sisters.
The late director Marilou Diaz-Abaya also felt that Ishma (as Ishmael Bernal was fondly called) walked out on her when he died. A few days before he died, they were supposed to go together to this Film Academy awards night. They had decided what to wear when Bernal begged off, saying he had a bad stomach and a bad backache.
The two had become soulmates when Bernal saw Abaya’s film Brutal and she got this congratulatory note from him. A few days after that note, Marilou was hanging out with husband Manolo in this sleazy beer joint at the corner of EDSA and P. Tuazon when the door opened and a silhouette appeared and a booming voice came: “Is there a Marilou Diaz-Abaya in this room?”
The lady director reluctantly raised her hand. He marched to her table and then sat down.
The next dialogue came even as she had yet to recover from that dramatic entrance.
“Now that we are friends, you might explain to me how it works that you and your husband work together on the set. Does that help the film? Where do you think this will lead? What is the course of your career and what is the relationship between your marriage and the film that you make?”
As Marilou admitted, Bernal was her severest critic and an intellectual sparring partner. He was a part of her film life and even her personal life.
Marilou remembered Bernal for many things.
Said she: “He demonstrated that the integrity of the artist is not compromisable and that it is not negotiable.”
Like it or not, the public and private lives of national artists would make for engrossing films and theater pieces.
(Deadline for National Artist nominations is June 30, 2024. All inquiries and nominations should be submitted to: The Order of National Artist onaa@ncca.gov.ph Tel. 8-5272192 local 507 Office of the Executive Director National Commission for Culture and the Arts NCCA Building, 633 General Luna Street, Intramuros, 1002 Manila.)
Image credits: Floyd Evangelista Flores