#TheaterPH - The People You Never See Are the Reason You Feel Everything at Virgin Labfest
You walk out of a Virgin Labfest play and something lingers — not just the dialogue, not just a performer's expression, but a feeling you can't quite name. A particular shade of amber light that made a character's loneliness feel three-dimensional. A low hum underneath a scene that tightened something in your chest before you even registered why. You didn't notice these things consciously. That's the point. And that's exactly where the real craft lives.
Now in its 21st year, VLFXXI: Hubo't Hubad is doing what the Virgin Labfest has always done best — handing 12 brand-new, never-before-staged scripts to a group of deeply committed artists and saying: make this true. The playwrights get the bylines. The actors get the curtain calls. But lighting designers Roman Cruz and Loren Rivera, and sound designer TJ Ramos, are the ones quietly holding the emotional architecture of the entire festival together.
What makes their job particularly extraordinary — and honestly a little terrifying — is that there is no precedent to lean on. Every script that arrives for VLF is untried, untested, and unstaged. There's no production history to reference, no previous director's cut to borrow from, no recorded version somewhere on YouTube. Cruz, Rivera, and Ramos are building visual and sonic languages entirely from scratch, for works that don't yet fully exist until they do.
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| Roman Cruz |
Cruz talks about the particular nervousness that comes with that process. You can study a script for months — and they do, spending weeks attending meetings, observing rehearsals, mapping out technical requirements before a single spotlight is angled. But you still don't really know if your design will land until the actors are on stage and the cues are running and the whole thing either breathes or it doesn't. That vulnerability, Cruz notes, mirrors what the festival's theme — Hubo't Hubad, or stripped bare — is actually about. Everyone in that blackbox theater is exposed.
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| Loren Rivera |
Rivera works within that same compressed, collaborative intensity, and she's learned to hold two things at once: the need for speed and the need for care. Festival settings are logistically unforgiving — lighting rigs are shared across productions, technical schedules leave little margin, and a cue designed for one play has to coexist with the needs of several others being staged in the same space. Every decision carries downstream consequences. And yet, Rivera says, this is also what she loves most about coming back to VLF. The familiar faces who've grown into trusted collaborators over years. The unfamiliar ones who push you somewhere new. The feeling, even on the most chaotic days, that you're part of something that actually means something.
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| TJ Ramos |
That's a feeling Ramos understands well, too. As head of sound for the festival, his role has evolved over the years from primary designer to something closer to mentor-conductor — overseeing a team of designers assigned across different production sets, offering guidance while giving each artist room to find their own interpretation. He describes his creative process with a kind of grounded openness that feels rare in any industry: he pitches his ideas to the director, and if they don't work, they try something else. No ego. No digging in. Just problem-solving in service of the story.
That openness extends to the people around him, including apprentices who show up with fresh eyes and unexpected angles. He doesn't dismiss them. He listens. And sometimes, as he puts it with a laugh, you realize — oo nga, pwede nga 'yan — yeah, actually, that could work.
This year, Ramos is also pushing the sound design forward technically, experimenting with surround sound technologies that could deepen how audiences are immersed in each production. The stories at VLF have always been rooted in specifically Filipino experiences — community, culture, the textures of a shared humanity. What's changing is the sophistication of the tools used to render those stories, to make them land in the body before they land in the brain.
And that, ultimately, is the quiet argument that Cruz, Rivera, and Ramos are all making through their work: theater is not just a visual medium. It's not just a literary one. It's a full-sensory experience, and the people managing light and sound are not support staff — they are co-authors of meaning. The moment Cruz describes as the most rewarding is telling: when all the elements finally converge, when the lighting cues blend with sound and projection and the actors are moving through it all, the thing stops being a collection of components and becomes a unified experience. It becomes real.
VLFXXI: Hubo't Hubad runs at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez — the CCP Blackbox Theater — until June 28, 2026, with shows from Wednesdays to Sundays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. If you've been on the fence about going, consider this your nudge. The stories are new. The scripts have never been staged. And somewhere in that blackbox, a lighting designer is nervously watching cues, a sound designer is trusting the collaboration, and together they're building the exact conditions for something to move you.
You probably won't notice them. You'll just feel it.
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