Frank Rivera on the enduring alarm of ‘Ambon, Ulan, Baha’

To understand the artistic language of Ambon, Ulan, Baha, one must trace its lineage back to the founding of Sining Kambayoka in Marawi in 1974. Developed by Rivera, the Kambayoka theatre form arose from his encounter with the Maranao bayok/bayuk, a traditional form of solo storytelling. Rivera experimented with this indigenous medium, converting the solo performance into an ensemble methodology where actors’ bodies, movements and voices became the very set, props and landscape.

This methodology resonates with the physical theatre form prevalent in the post-modernist West, and the command of one’s body to express art through dance (Butoh), which is evident in the East. And yet, the Kambayoka form manifests a localised concept of decolonisation through people’s art (Arte Povera). Rather than relying on expensive, imported proscenium designs, it mobilises what the late artist-educator Brenda Fajardo calls the ‘aesthetics of poverty’—relying on the sheer physical ingenuity and material resourcefulness of the performers.

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Sining Kambayoka challenged the cultural dominance of Manila. Ambon, Ulan, Baha was originally titled Kaingin and performed in Binisaya before transitioning into Filipino for national tours. “Sining Kambayoka helped start the regional theatre movement in the Philippines,” Rivera explains. “Even then, and up to now, I have personally believed that an imperialistic Manila cannot really claim sole legitimacy, or define what is ‘mainstream’, when it is in the provinces that local theatres continue to thrive, and thrive well. Being rooted in Mindanao, therefore, meant that Kambayoka was creating theatre within and for a community, rather than looking to Manila for validation.”

Through the lens of the late art critic Alice Guillermo’s seminal text Image to Meaning, art is never merely a passive aesthetic object; it is an active form of social reportage. Guillermo argues that art in the Philippines often functions as a historical document for the indigenous and working classes, recording realities that official state narratives seek to sanitise.

Ambon, Ulan, Baha operates precisely as this kind of living document. When Rivera wrote about logging and kaingin (slash-and-burn farming) in the mid-1970s, the modern vocabulary of ecological collapse and “climate anxiety” was not yet part of the general population’s daily consciousness. Yet, the play captured the immediate material realities on the ground in Mindanao, where commercial logging concessions were denuding ancestral mountains. By documenting these actions, the play transformed theatre into a site of resistance and historical testimony.

“Flooding was an obvious possibility then. And it happened. That was the story’s core. Through the many, many remountings of the play over the past five decades, that core has remained and continues to define its identity,” Rivera says.

Although the script exists on paper, Ambon, Ulan, Baha has been preserved through the muscle memory of successive generations of actors. In 2013, a Waray translation was staged in Tacloban shortly before the onslaught of Super Typhoon Yolanda. In a tragic illustration of the idea that art is a living, performative archive, the 2013 staging became a devastatingly prophetic text, with some of the young actors themselves falling victim to the storm right after.

The continuous, five-decade-long transmission across bodies and regions of this play somehow carries a weight similar to a panata, a solemn, devotional promise or vow made by a faithful to a patron saint or to God. The play’s journey across generations functions as its artists’ medium to keep the environmental alarm alive. In this new staging, this is carried forward by the youth chorus of Tanghalang Bagong Sibol, a student-led ensemble from Malabon National High School. Under the mentorship of founder Anthony Cruz, these budding artists represent the community of Barrio Magubat, the fictional village devastated by flood in Rivera’s play.

There is an intense, lived reality to this collaboration. Malabon is a low-lying, coastal city chronically plagued by flooding. During the rehearsal process, the student performers frequently navigated actual floods and torrential rains these past few weeks outside their school doors. Their performance is not a detached academic exercise; their bodies carry the immediate weight of the crisis. Using their bodies as vessels for communal faith and survival, these actors use their movement to communicate lived, ecological truth.

Directed by CJ Andaluz, a seasoned theatre practitioner who has lived with this play since his days with Teatro Metropolitano in the early 1990s, the current production is a confluence of traditional and modern forms. The staging features a live appearance by Manlilikha ng Bayan Rosie Godwino Sula, a master T’boli chanter. Sula’s newly created chants—developed in close consultation with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts—provide a haunting, organic sonic landscape that precedes the play’s prologue. This traditional chanting marries with the modern, dynamic ethno-pop-rock musical arrangement by Pipo Cifra on the play’s songs, and the casting of esteemed theatre veteran Anton Juan, who brings with him decades’ worth of expertise as a playwright, director and actor.

Furthermore, the production embraces modern digital projections and multimedia, a stark contrast to the cardboard, linen, and flashlights utilised by Sining Kambayoka in mounting this play in the Seventies. Rivera does not view this technological abundance as a threat to the play’s raw, improvisational spirit. “Technology does not replace theatrical imagination; it simply gives us more tools with which to express it,” Rivera reflects. “What we achieved then can now be explored through technology available to theatre artists today. The important thing is that the technology serves the story rather than becoming the story itself.”

Despite the artistic triumph of this half-century milestone, there is a sombre, elegiac weight that hangs over the production—the precarious position of local, community-grounded art. As the creator, Rivera is confronted with the reality that whilst his play has been performed several times over the past 50 years, the denudation of the mountains and the loss of lives to catastrophic floods continue unabated.

“Sometimes I ask myself whether the play ever went deep enough into the audience’s consciousness,” Rivera admits. “Have we really learned the lesson? When I see the same destruction happening again and again, as an artist, I feel I have failed. And there is a fair question to ask today: Why watch a play about floods when there may literally be floods happening outside the theatre?”

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It is within this exact space of vulnerability that the play’s vital nature emerges. Ambon, Ulan, Baha is no longer merely a warning but a critical, public tribunal. It challenges the contemporary audience to look beyond the spectacle of natural disaster and examine the human choices, political complicities and economic transactions that precede the rising of the waters.

“In a better world, perhaps this play would have become outdated a long time ago,” Rivera muses. “Instead, we are still telling the same story because we are still confronting many of the same consequences. The question now is why, after 50 years, we continue to allow the conditions that make these disasters worse. Who made those choices? Who benefited from them? And when disaster finally came, who paid the price?”

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