Sugar overflows and Teatro Obrero's Escalante story

• Main Author: Llana, Jazmin Badong
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Escalante Massacre, Negros Occidental, Philippines, 1985—Drama; Teatro Obrero; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/375
• Institution: De La Salle University

Protesting against the Marcos regime in 1985, farm workers and other activists and their supporters from multisectoral groups are 'massacred' in front of the Escalante town hall by state police and paramilitary troops, resulting in the death of twenty persons. A year later, Teatro Obrero, the 'cultural arm' of the Negros Federation of Sugar Workers, stages a re-enactment of the massacre. Thirty-two years later, in 2017, the theatre group performs the re-enactment for the thirty-second time; the group has been doing the re-enactment every year since 1986. What is the reason for this fidelity to the restaging of a traumatic event? What is the logic of the repetition that happens relentlessly in the same way every year? Drawing from a co-performative engagement with Teatro Obrero and its re-enactment theatre, I argue that the reason may be found by looking at the long history of the sugar workers' oppression, which spans centuries, and which is about more than Marcos and his repressive regime. The theatre has not changed because the social conditions that birthed it have not changed. It has become an intergenerational resource for the Escalante survivors who have once again lost their trust in promised change under the current national leadership. © 2018 International Federation for Theatre Research.