Archive - Arts & Culture

Damodar Das Castillo, 13, made music history when he won his fifth first prize in international music competition recently.

Four persons who have known Arturo Luz (1926-2021) through the years shared their sweet thoughts and memories of the artist who passed away recently. Arturo Luz: Personal Views celebrates the life of Arturo Luz through four of his closest friends. (see YouTube, ArtFairPH/Talks 2021)

Dr. Saturnino Javier, medical director of the Makati Medical Center (MMC), is not Nostradamus. He cannot predict when the pandemic will taper off and finally end. But this he is sure of: “We need to move forward.”

The winning streak of the Manila Symphony Junior Orchestra (MSJO) continued after it struck gold in the youth orchestra category B of the Vienna-based World Youth Festival which transpired June 12-26, 2021.

Things are looking up in the concert world.

Erik Matti’s A Girl & A Guy has many things going for it.

In a virtual tour of Mt Cloud Bookshop on Yangco Road, Baguio City, co-owner Feliz Lim Perez showed and proved how such a business can conquer the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic that kept the place shut for the first three months of the lockdown.

We associate rats with filth and sewers and the carrier of leptospirosis in the country. And yet, cloud rats are fluffy and cuddly animals, and yes, they are rodents.

Alice Sun Cua, a perennial Manila Critics’ Circle awardee, is that rare creature. She is a physician (obstetrics-gynecology is her specialty at San Juan de Dios Hospital) by day and a literary writer and now a translator during her free hours. The Santo Niño de Cebu Publishing House recently launched its first title, and the good doctor was their buena mano. It published her translation of contemporary Spanish novelist Carmen Laforet’s novel Nada in Hiligaynon.

The Independence Day offering of Manila Pianos Artist Series featuring soprano Jasmin Salvo and pianist Gabriel Paguirigan last June 12 is a breath of fresh air in the area of virtual concerts.

A Philippine choir does it again!

It must be a blessing living in Taiwan in time of the pandemic.

It is difficult to imagine our food today without tomatoes, peanuts, chili peppers, or cacao. It means no afritada, turrones de mani, Bicol Express, sinamak, sili sigang, or even champorado, as we know it.

Into the 15th month of the lockdown that closed performing arts venues beginning of March 2020, Filipino musicians reflect on how the pandemic affected them not just as musicians but as ordinary human being.

The change of name of the fully renovated Manila Metropolitan Theater to NCCA Metropolitan Theater --scheduled to re-open June 12 with a theater piece on Lapu-Lapu – does not sit well with many in the arts and culture community in the country.

From the humble clay moulded into earthenware pottery, the clay pot tells the story of our people and our culture long before the existence of written records.

We do not have a Borobudor, or an Angkor Wat. Instead, we have colonial stone churches, hundreds of them scattered across the archipelago. Architectural influences overseas led to different styles and designs of stone churches in the country synthesized locally to suit the prevailing taste of the times. Thus, we have a distinctive church architecture, uniquely Filipino.

Striking Affinities, a solo exhibition on Santiago Bose (1949-2002), marks the second series of a three-part exhibition entitled Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician by Silverlens Galleries. Included are Bose’s journals and sketches, interviews, and recordings of art performances.