A Conspiracy of Priests

Virginia R. Moreno’s Itim Asu (also known as The Onyx Wolf in English or La Loba Negra in Spanish) lends itself to collaborative work since it was first staged at Fort Santiago in the 1960s. In its latest reincarnation as a multi-media dance project of Myra Beltran’s Dance Forum, Itim Asu still has something to say to a 2010 audience although what is depicted is based on an assassination of a governor general in Manila in the Spanish colonial era and the aftermath of said murder where the assassin-priests go unpunished.

Historical archives are vague about this incident that was also the subject of a painting by the master Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. Since the friars/priests were the power clique of that period, they could make records vanish.

The murdered Governor General Bustamante was ordered by the king of Spain to look into the corruption that ate the galleon trade traveling from Mexico to the Philippines and back. He was an effective fiscalizer, to the chagrin of these priests whose pockets were lined by the system of “put here, put there.” This is nothing new. Even during the time of Henry VIII, a bishop or a cardinal was virtually running England while His Majesty spent his time engaged in sports and bedazzling the ladies. Royal sovereigns all over Europe greased the Pope’s hands to get their applications of annulment of their marriages approved.

Bustamante said, “Enough!” with a fatal consequence. His cold-blooded murder moves his Aztec-blooded wife to go underground and join the peasants. She turns into an avenging angel, killing priests in various towns in Laguna. One surmises these priests were connected to her husband’s murder.

Last Wednesday’s one-night staging of Itim Asu at the Carlos Romulo Auditorium of the Yuchengco Tower in Makati City takes off from this plot. Choreographer-dancer Beltran throws in an armada of 21st-century media to add a contemporary flavor to this historical piece whose veracity has even been questioned as the clergy made sure not a trace of Bustamante’s assassination was left in the Royal Audiencia’s archives in Manila. She and her collaborators put in snatches of film and stills in the backdrop, classical piano and guitar, dissonant modern music, audio footage from the surrender of the Japanese to the Americans in World War II and a host of dance styles that have a touch of the tango, folk, Martha Graham gestures—anything but leotards, tights, ballet slippers and frail, delicate tutus.

Ms. Moreno might be uncomfortable with the word “feminist”, but her classic Itim Asu is better than any hortatory feminist tract or a year’s reading of Ms. Magazine. Like her poetry, her heroine in this dance drama has tender and tensile strong qualities. At a pause during the ovation for the dancers, Beltran and Moreno, she pointed out the dualities present in Itim Asu like the double-faced masks she is fascinated with: sacred and profane, criminal and victim, etc.

If only Señora de Bustamante can dance on other stages north and south of the archipelago. Better than countless consciousness-raising sessions on women’s issues and how repression and poverty are caused by the Catholic patriarchy.