It celebrated its 50th Anniversary in April with a concert aptly titled Singkwenta (Fifty) which featured the best songs culled from around 500 plays--original, translated, or adapted--produced through the years.
The celebration was held at the PETA Phinma Theater at the PETA Center in Quezon City. This permanent home is a long way from the Rajah Sulayman Theater, converted from the ruins of the Spanish military barracks, where it all started in 1967 with the production of Bayaning Huwad, Filipino translation of Virginia Moreno's English play 'Straw Patriot.'
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PETA president Cecile B. Garucho about to receive the 2017 Ramon Magsaysay
Award from Vice Pres. Leni Robredo and RMAF chair Ramon del Rosario, Jr.
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PETA was originally envisioned as a 'national theater' by its founder Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, Ramon Magsaysay awardee for public service in 1972 before the declaration of martial law. It remained active during the dictatorship and together with other groups by 'staging theater as a medium of protest and conscientization.' After 1986, it was ready 'to respond to both new and continuing challenges, and through its collective of artist-teachers, 'to directly engaged with the realities of people's lives.'
"We were taught early on that whatever we learned as artists,we were to share by teaching others especially non-theater people," PETA president Cecille B. Garrucho informed the audience during the awards presentation. "We were to use our art to serve. We went in small teams to barangays all over the country, The purpose was always to draw out the creative power of ordinary folk: women in poor communities, students and public school teachers, child workers in the sugar cane fields, farmers, workers and fisherfolks, It didn't matter whether they were literate or not. The PETA workshop's main goal was to give people the creative tools to tell stories that tackled ways to solve their common problems, that could bring about healing from trauma, and that spoke of their dreams and aspirations. As actors we would bring the stories of the people we met to life onstage so their voices could be heard. ..."
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| Garrucho acknowledging the award with two PETA officers |
"[T]he artist members plunged into years of trailblazing work adding more productions to PETA's list of original plays," Garrucho added. "Collaborating with many sectors, PETA developed and refined its pedagogy of People's Theater, This we shared with groups across the country, with our partners in the Mekong Region and Asia, as well as with migrant Filipinos in Europe, North America and Australia."
From 2005 to 2008, PETA led the Greater Mekong Sub-region Partnership in mobilizing, mentoring and supporting performing artists from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and southern China. The mission was 'to effectively undertake advocacy-through-the-arts issues such as gender, health, sexuality, and HIV-AIDS.'
After typhoon Yolanda's devastation in 2013, the theater company launched Lingap Sining (Nurturing Through the Arts) in Leyte that creatively used the arts in various interventions like emergency relief, psychosocial debriefings, disaster preparedness and building of more resilient disaster risk reduction readiness in the communities.
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PETA Chorale rendering the Makabayan Suite, a medley of
nationalist songs from some of their play productions.
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As an integrated, people-based cultural collective, PETA has major units to address specific missions: Kalinangan Ensemble as its repertory and performing arm, the School of People's Theater for its year-round training and development engagements, and a Special Programs unit for undertaking specific advocacies.such as women's and children's rights, plight of domestic and overseas workers, environmental protection, reproductive health, and electoral reform.
Thus, in recognition of 'its bold, collective contributions in shaping the theater arts as a force for social change, its impassioned, unwavering work in empowering communities in the Philippines, and the shining example it has set as one of the leading organizations of its kind in Asia, the board of trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation elected PETA as one of the awardees this year.
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