The last 3 months have been bumpy rides over dusty highways, on undulating sea crests and air packets. After weeks living in dorms, hotels, and bus stations, IPAG ends its 31st Season welcoming a respite from our suitcase-lives before the next grueling season that starts after the summer.

When the Oxen Year started, immediately IPAG sailed to South Luzon to meet the Batanguenos. With enthusiasm, Batangas greeted our shows as did Davao, Iligan, Cagayan de Oro, and Manila enthralled by Tales From Mindanao, Tatlo sa Isa, and Ranaw: Isang Alamat.

In the first half of the 31st Season, IPAG did Manila, Cagayan de Oro, Alabang, and premiered a transcreated work of Marge Evasco's poem "Origami".

Only the CCP-run of Ranaw in mid-February to celebrate the Center’s 40 years was audience-challenged. (Perhaps, the hefty ticket prices did us in without saying that marketing flubbed.)

So too did we share our craft. Our pedagogical experiments and three decades of stagecraft practice have been finally documented in the test edition of Making Theatre: The Craft of the Stage (2007). The book (now out of print) will be published in its first edition minus the typographical and grammatical errors (hopefully), and with fonts that are more readable and a design that will be more acceptable.

Audiences have listened to our principles of transcreation (where one medium transforms into another) and in our "anti-realism" explorations in Pagadian, Cagayan de Oro, Roxas, and Manila in the recent International Writers Fest.

In March, Tula Tugma sa Sayaw at Dula capped the IPAG fill of a multi-media repast with appreciative crowds in the intimate MSU-IIT Mini-Theatre.

The Batangas State U, the Davao CAP auditorium, Philippine Women’s College and the University of Mindanao (also both in Davao City), Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro, in 8 marathon Tales shows at the Centro Escolar University in Manila, La Salle Alabang, Xavier School, in malls, and Tula in Iligan all joined our 31st season party!

We gathered an approximate sixty thousand audiences in about fifty full-feature shows while involving participants to our theatre frenzy. While not filling up the last gala show, Ranaw at CCP plucked good notices. We also had the street children of the Asilo Institute in Ermita gawking in awe at what was perhaps their first theatre experience, a treat we thought was inspiring. Also, the raves were as elating as when we first mounted “Ranaw” 21 years ago.

Tula squeezed our creative juices concocting performance from poetry. The transcreations recognized our sources and saluted the audiences who for many times kept watch even during our hard times. The poets deserve a wider adulation than what they are recognized for now, and the audiences equally deserve the exulting experience of top-rate poetry performed. We prepared the poets’ pulpits above the throngs through Tula that reincarnated their written incantations to moving shapes and sounds.

After the show, master poets dialogued with the audiences and revealed their insights and processes allowing us to peek through their geniuses. The experience showed to us how well poetry was loved, and how magical performed words enthralled.

Like the breaks between acts, the next few weeks will be transitions for the IPAG. This is the proverbial calm before the next theatre frenzy. And we plan even in these times of mass layoffs and tight budgets. There will be road shows, for sure, and the workshops and seminars we have to facilitate (it is summer after all when our audiences take a break!)

Most of all, we will have time full when we study the establishment of a future Institute that will train performers and art managers and truly mark the MSU-IIT as a culture mecca of sorts.

And, after the respite, when the 32nd Season opens, we break loose again the innovative and engaging creations ensuring that the spell of the theatre lingers, and that our art rubs on our audiences' lives in so many ways.

SP. Fernandez, DFA, Artistic Director