As part of the Tanghalang Pilipino’s retrospective of  plays written by Tony Perez, he and I did a joint exhibit at the Little Theatre Lobby of the CCP. The festival lasted from 30 September to 23 October, and to my biggest chagrin, I was away on location shoot the entire time! I’m sharing it, anyway.  Unfortunately, I don’t have photographs of the paintings by Tony Perez.

About the Exhibit

Antonio Benjamin Silva Perez: Novelist, poet, playwright, painter and teacher.  How does one document someone whose work gets done mostly inside his head?  There, the challenge lurks, skulking in utmost patience, until it lunges and threatens to fling one to despair: as a writer dreads that blank piece of paper, so does a photographer feel the terror of a blank wall waiting to be filled with images she takes. As a poet wrestles with her very marrow to produce a line of verse, so does a photographer struggle to capture an image that has in it the harmony and dissonance,  the light and the darkness, the yin and the yang.

Or, as Tony Perez would put it, the Eros and the Thanatos. Only after such misery does the Muse relent, and be it poem or photo, the images come. Then, and only then, is the challenge met.  Hopefully.

*Photos chosen from over two hundred, taken over a period of nineteen months.