The Good News

BAGUIO CITY—Not bad for this team of artists whose pleas for funding went largely ignored by politicians and corporations, whose members spent an extra night at a South Korean airport for lack of hotel money, and who had one member briefly detained there for carrying a bloodstained knife.

That’s just “chicken blood” from some previous home-cooked dish, the detainee said, before finally convincing authorities to let him go.

Despite this series of unfortunate events, the Philippine delegation to the 3rd Delphic Games held on the resort island of Jeju, South Korea, gave brilliant performances in what was considered the “Olympics” of the art world.

The 17-member team, mostly composed of Cordillera-based artists, placed third overall out of the 44 countries that competed in the games held on Sept. 9-15.

Ifugao woodcarver Ernesto Dul-ang, 60, bagged the gold medal in sculpture for transforming, under time pressure, a 150-cm block of wood into a human figure pouring water from a pot.

Winning the Lyra Award (a special prize given to collaborative works) was a group of Filipino puppeteers headed by EV Espiritu, who wowed the audience with a shadow play dealing with the environment.

The Delphic Games are all about “peace engendering competition of the arts,” according to German founder J. Christian Kirsch, who drew inspiration from the original Greek competitions of 582 B.C.

The first games were held in December 2000 in Moscow with the participation of 27 countries. The second was held in September 2005 in Kuching, Malaysia, with 21 countries taking part.

The event serves as the artistic counterpart of the Olympic Games, said Divina Bautista, a Filipino co-founder based in Baguio.

Dul-ang was given three days to finish the sculpture and often had difficulty communicating with the Korean organizers whenever he requested equipment to speed up his work.

On the third day, Dul-ang recalled, the statue was still without a face, prompting him to ask the team’s videographer Joel Arthur Tibaldo to be his face model.

Earlier, percussionist Ruel Bimuyag served as Dul-ang’s model for the body, while Baguio-based painter Rishab produced sketches that helped the sculptor come up with the best composition.

Declined Singapore job

Dul-ang even missed the awarding ceremony—again due to the language barrier with the hosts.

Coming from a service at a Jehovah’s Witness temple, he got lost looking for the venue. “They had to reenact my portion of the awarding,” Dul-ang told the Inquirer.

It was the first overseas trip for Dul-ang, an artist probably known to only a few Filipinos despite being the creator of an iconic totem pole that welcomes visitors to the Bell House inside the Camp John Hay Historical Core.

The wooden pole features the busts of the country’s nine American colonial leaders and that of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the first Philippine Republic.

When unveiled in the 1990s, the masterpiece earned Dul-ang an offer to spend two months in Singapore and work on a new totem pole that would adorn a building facade.

“But I did not [accept the offer] because that was the time the Flor Contemplacion case [made headlines],” he said.

The artist was referring to the widespread furor in 1995 over the execution of a Filipino domestic helper in the city state for the murder of another Filipino maid and the latter’s 3-year-old Singaporean ward.

Improvised puppets

Due to lack of preparations back home, Espiritu said, he still had to conduct a quick workshop in Jeju to familiarize some of his teammates with shadow plays since the Cordilleras have no known tradition close to this particular type of puppetry.

With puppets improvised from plastic sheets, Espiritu’s team felt awkward during its performance, which told the story of a man who saw his frightful dream—about monsters destroying the environment—turning into reality.

“(That’s why) we were surprised that we even received a special Lyra (medal),” said Espiritu, who is also an Inquirer Northern Luzon correspondent.

The Cordillera artists braved the competition despite failing to get financial support from politicians and from companies reeling from the economic downturn.

“We asked everyone—from the President of the Philippines down to local officials—for funds, but we did not receive any reply,” Dul-ang recalled.

Espiritu said some members of the Philippine delegation ended up sleeping on the airport floor in South Korea because they arrived too early for the connecting flight to Jeju and had no money even for cheap hotel rooms.

Dreams of dying

A team member was also briefly detained at the Incheon International Airport on his way to Jeju for carrying an old bolo stained with blood, Espiritu said.

Korean officials let him go after being convinced that the bolo, which the detained artist said he would use in one of the competitions, was earlier used to slaughter chicken.

Espiritu said another Baguio artist, illustrator Leo Agtuca, worried so much about the debts he incurred for the trip that, during the competition, he had recurring dreams of dying.

As told to Espiritu, one of Agtuca’s dreams had doctors finding a medal stuck in the artist’s throat during an autopsy.

Curiously, Agtuca went on to win a silver medal in the graphic storytelling category in the Delphic Games.

Many of the Cordillera artists said they returned home scrambling for extra work so they could pay for their “Jeju debts.”