#CulturePH - The Two People Making Sure Philippine Theater's Most Daring Festival Stays That Way
There's a particular kind of creative courage it takes to put a play in front of an audience knowing it has never been performed before — no test runs, no proven blueprint, no safety net of prior reception. The entire thing is a bet. And for over two decades, Virgin Labfest has been making that bet, year after year, on Filipino playwrights and stories that have never yet had their moment on stage.
This year, the festival runs under the shared leadership of two people whose approach to the whole enterprise says something worth paying attention to — not just about theater, but about what it actually looks like when collaboration is treated as a value rather than a buzzword.
Toni Go-Yadao and Marco Viaña are the co-festival directors of Virgin Labfest's 21st edition. Viaña is back for his fifth time in the role. For Go-Yadao, this is her first. And the way they describe their working dynamic — not with corporate language about "complementary skill sets" or "division of responsibilities," but with two Filipino words, sabay and tiwala — tells you everything about the kind of festival they're building.
Sabay means moving together. Tiwala means trust. Those aren't poetic flourishes. They're the actual operating principles.
The dual directorship wasn't a structural accident. When Viaña first took on the festival director role in 2021, he pushed for it himself — not because he lacked confidence, but because he understood that a festival built around diverse, untested voices shouldn't be shaped by a single perspective at the top. Having two directors with genuinely different vantage points was, for him, philosophically aligned with what VLF has always tried to do: give space to stories that don't fit neatly into existing molds.
Go-Yadao wasn't a stranger to the work. She's spent years inside Tanghalang Pilipino's Actors Company, directed VLF plays before (including last year's Don't Meow For Me, Catriona), and understands the festival not just from a leadership angle but from the inside of the rehearsal room. That ground-level awareness shapes how she defines her role. "This is not just about leading," she said. "It is about taking care of the process, the artists, the production staff, and the stories being told."
What's quietly remarkable about how they work is that they didn't start by dividing the labor. They moved through the whole process together first — reading scripts side by side, meeting playwrights together, shaping the festival's overall direction as a tandem before anything was carved into separate responsibilities. The theme for this year's edition, Hubo't Hubad, came out of exactly that kind of convergence. A tambalang salita, a compound word — two distinct ideas meeting to form something neither could be alone. As a description of the festival itself, it's almost too perfect.
Over time, their natural strengths did pull them toward different areas. Viaña has leaned into VLF's regional and international connections, particularly through the Theater Talks that bring Asian collaborators into the conversation. Go-Yadao has focused on rehearsal preparation and artist welfare — specifically on making first-time and emerging playwrights feel safe enough to be fully themselves in the process. It's not a split, exactly. It's two people who know their strengths and trust the other to know theirs.
For anyone who's worked in the arts — or honestly, in any creative field — this kind of partnership is harder to pull off than it sounds. The instinct to protect your vision, to assert your way of seeing, runs deep. What Go-Yadao and Viaña seem to have figured out is that their differences aren't friction. They're the point. "Our differences allow us to look at the work from different angles, ask better questions, and make more grounded decisions," Go-Yadao said.
Neither of them, when you get down to it, seems particularly interested in being remembered as the people who ran the festival. What they want is for audiences to walk away carrying the plays — the specific moments, the stories that landed, the feeling of being in a room where something was happening for the very first time. That instinct, to disappear into the work, might be the most theater-maker thing about them.
Virgin Labfest continues to be one of the most genuinely exciting things happening in Philippine culture — a space where Filipino writing gets to be risky, unfinished, alive. The fact that it's being stewarded by people who take sabay and tiwala seriously, rather than treating leadership as a solo act, feels like exactly the right energy for a festival that has always been about more voices, not fewer.
For schedules and tickets, follow the official pages of VLF, CCP, Tanghalang Pilipino Foundation Inc., and Writers' Bloc on Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.
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