DSCTA Tenure Lecture

Tenure Lecture | 13 April 2026 | PM Session

We invite you to join us for the tenure lectures of Asst. Prof. Nepomuceno, Asst. Prof. Pagunaling, Asst. Prof. Ponce, and Asst. Prof. Sanoy-Alcantara at Teatro Hermogenes Ylagan, Pavilion 3 Palma Hall, UP Diliman. Be part of the conversation as they present their work and contribute to ongoing academic discourse.

We warmly encourage everyone to attend and be part of this important academic milestone.

Abstracts:

Isang Mahabang Paghihintay sa Pagkabigo, On Performing Translations
By Asst. Prof. Rex Sandro M. Nepomuceno

Performance practice and pedagogy are often acts of translation. Artists and collaborators speak in the tongues of different disciplines, across diverse and contradicting cultural materialities. In the performance classroom, students engage in registers both creative and academic, but are constantly reminded of the borders that they must learn to cross. I reflect on these performances of/on/in translation to confront points of separation, if not untranslatability, in the making and teaching of performance. What is lost and what is gained in the process of translation within performing and educational spaces?

“Translating is fundamentally domesticating”, Lawrence Venuti (2002) remarks. So, what I offer are partial views of my own processes of translation towards stage and classroom. For the launch of the UP Diliman Arts and Culture Festival 2025, I was tasked to design a performance under the theme of “nagbabagong kalikasan” (changing ecologies). My training (and limitation) as a creative writer drove me to produce a poetic text that revolved around encounters between human and crocodilian bodies entitled “Isang mahabang paghihintay sa pagkabigo” (A long vigil for failure). I envisioned it to be a dance performance. As a non-dancer, this necessitated a collaboration with the choreographer Dingdong Selga and the UP Dance Company in a process that entailed the cross-communication of poetry to dance. Simultaneously, I was teaching a course on performance and text in which I translated this poiesis into a dialogue on how students could approach their own coursework and creative performances. Perhaps in an unconscious convergence, the conceptual core of “Paghihintay” was also immersed in the entanglements and translation of two speaking bodies: animal and human.

What succeeds is an account of my translational negotiations with the limits between literary and dance practice, between art-making and pedagogy, and the value of the non-human within these thresholds. At the limits of translatability, one relies on trust in others— a genuine point of imagination, generation, politics.

Kumpletong Di-Ganap: Ang Biswal na Lenggwahe para sa Senograpiya ng Dalawang Piling Dula
By Asst. Prof. John Carlo V. Pagunaling

Ang pag-aaral na ito ay iikot sa konsepto ng disenyo na “Kumpletong Di-Ganap” na hango sa konseptong non-finito na kilalang uri ng sining noong panahon ng Renaissance. Ang papel na ito ay naglalayon na pag-usapan ang diskurso sa paggamit ng Kumpletong Di-Ganap bilang pangunahing konsepto sa pagbuo at pagpanday ng senograpiya ng dalawang piling produksyon: Pingkian: Isang Musikal (2024, 2025), at Anak Datu (2022, 2023). Ang senograpiya ng mga nabangit na dula ay mag-uumpisa sa paglikha ng kaligiran ng espasyo na kung saan ay pupunuan ng mga accent o detalye na magkukumpleto sa pagkakakilanlan ng biswal na direkyon ng produksyon. Ang mga nabanggit na dula ay mga repleksyon at produkto ng konseptong Kumpletong Di-Ganap na naka-angkla sa mga iba’t ibang salik at sitwasyon na dinanas ng mga produksyon.

Embodied Mirrors: Rituals of Dissonance and the Performance of Body Image
By Asst. Prof. Sherie Claire G. Ponce

The body is not just an object, as it is a medium for human experience and expression. The body can be considered an apparatus where cultural roles and gendered expectations are shaped, manifested, and embodied. The body is a materialized reflection of our perceptions and identities. However, what if the body’s image in the mirror clashes with societal ideals? Delving deeper, what if the perceived image is vastly different for the inhabitant of the body? This lecture draws insights from the preliminary findings of a study on the embodied distress of selected students from the University of the Philippines, Diliman and the performative struggles they experience to reconcile their corporeal dissonance. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and Mauss’ techniques of the body, this lecture examines the repeated, embodied actions through which individuals negotiate tensions between their lived and perceived bodies.

These rituals are argued to be socially learned bodily techniques that function as attempts to reconcile internalized bodily ideals with their corporeal experiences. From habitual self-surveillance to corrective practices, dissecting these rituals deepens our understanding of body image as an ongoing embodied performance shaped by culture, calling for more critical approaches to examining how adolescent body image is formed, sustained, and contested. Ultimately, this study advocates for the development of non-traditional therapeutic frameworks that cultivate body awareness, foster positive self-image, and enhance over-all life satisfaction.

Youth, Embodiment, and the Aesthetic Materiality of Worship Performance
By Asst. Prof. Justine S. Alcantara

Worship is an integral part of Christianity as it has a formative, communal, and theological role in a believer’s life. Perhaps some Christians will find the term “performance” uncomfortable when used to describe worship, as the word ontologically carries connotations of entertainment, spectacle, or insincerity—something done for an audience’s approval rather than for the divine. However, both in my observations and personal experience, worship involves performative dimensions, and can be understood as performance (Schechner, 2020).

This study examines how worship is embodied and materially mediated among the youth of Elevate Fairview, a Christian youth movement in the Philippines. Drawing from participant observation, I explore how young people enact worship through expressive bodily practices and how material “things” within the worship space co-produce the overall worship experience. Using Diana Taylor’s (2003) concepts of the archive and the repertoire, I argue that worship in Elevate Fairview emerges from the dynamic interplay of embodied gestures, from the extra-expressive, theatrical gestures, such as singing, dancing, jumping, kneeling, to the most quiet and restrained, and aesthetic material elements such as set-pieces, lightings, spatial arrangements, and other technologies.

I deem it crucial to recognize these emerging forms and acts of youth worship, as they reveal how faith is negotiated, experienced, and sustained through performance

Source: UP Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts Facebook