Sydney-raised Filipino Clarizza Fernandez, reviews the performance and art installation that explores the cultural contradictions of her birth city, Manila.

Within and Without is a performance that is as hybrid as Manila, the city it explores. Image: Performance Space

For some, what can take many pages and years to explain, they can pull into focus and make clear in a heartbeat. For me, as a second-generation Sydney-raised Filipino, this has been achieved by ‘Within and Without’, a performance and installation piece that tells the story of the Philippines’ capital.

The complexities and contradictions of this place have always seemed “normal” to me. Yet I never understood how democracy could exist where church and state intertwined and religious taboos heavily dictated the culture. To an outsider, the old Spanish churches wedged in between high-rise buildings and streets swarming with Catholic devotees during religious feasts can be a strange sight.

Sydney artist Deborah Pollard, who collaborated on the installation with fellow Sydney artists Paschal Daantos Berry, Valerie Berry and a Manila-based group called the Anino Shadowplay Collective, was certainly surprised.

“You can overtly see how the different colonial histories have created the hybrid of people who can speak English [which came] from the Americans and who have Spanish names, have Spanish architecture, Western architecture and McDonalds,” Pollard says.

Within and Without rejects the traditional theatre set-up, breaking down the fourth wall to physically bring the audience along for the story. The audience is taken through walking tours of the set, a miniature scaled Manila made out of recycled cardboard cut outs. An old Heinekin beer box and a tower made out of a KFC ‘bucket’ help to recreate the city. The Pasig River is marked by white tape; the Chinese quarter or Binondo is created out of Chinese money bags (the kind I receive come New Year’s Day); and there are tiny American, British and French flags littered across one building.

A combination of theatre, song and dance (with a dash of karaoke), video projections and Anino’s modern take on shadowplay, the performance is a theatrical melting pot just like the city it describes.

In one part, Pollard retells her experience of The Feast of The Black Nazarene, an annual procession of a wooden sculpture of Jesus that attracts thousands upon thousands of Filipinos to Quiapo. In her description, Pollard tries to recapture the enormity of the masses and her overwhelming feelings of being in the thick of it; she asks the audience to participate in the recreation by shouting “Viva, Viva”, twirling tissues in the air.

Earlier on, one character introduces the audience to the upper-class district of Makati but is interrupted by sirens and the sudden appearance of an idle Spanish priest, rendering the city silent.

Filled with unexpected turns, the performance always keeps the audience involved. And that is how Within and Without presents the complexity of Manila; the city’s diverse history has given it many faces and Within and Without takes the audience there showing them each expression. A place heaped with cultural contradictions, the cardboard cut outs aren’t made of branded beer boxes for no reason. Manila is literally built out of scraps of culture attained from past colonial powers and what remains is what the Filipinos have made of it.

Perhaps Pollard best surmises the character of the city: “You get this hotchpotch or mish-mash of different periods of times coming together and how they impact upon the contemporary condition of the people.”

Within and Without is playing to a limited audience at The Blacktown Arts Centre until July 2.