#TheaterPH - Gear Up For Tanghalang Pilipino's Sayaw Ng Mga Ilaw
A six-year-old girl watches her older sister's feet move in a pattern she can't quite catch yet. Step, tap, glide. Candlelight balanced on the crown of the head, or in this case, a small clay pot she isn't allowed to touch until she gets the footwork right. This is Laya's world at the start of "Sayaw ng mga Ilaw," and if you've ever tried to learn something from someone you idolize, you already know the particular ache of almost getting it.
What you might not know, unless you grew up hearing it from a lola who lived through it, is what the year 1981 actually meant. It was the year Martial Law was officially lifted in the Philippines, a moment that reads as a footnote in most textbooks but reshaped ordinary households in ways that rarely make it into the curriculum. Tanghalang Pilipino's new production doesn't lecture you about that history. It hands you a little girl learning to dance the Pandanggo, and lets the weight of the era arrive quietly, the way it actually did for most families back then, through the front door instead of the headlines.
Juan Ekis wrote the stage adaptation, working from Cheeno Marlo Sayuno's short story, a children's book published by Tahanan Books that earned recognition from the International Board on Books for Young People, one of the more meaningful honors a Filipino children's author can receive on the world stage. Krina Cayabyab composed the music. Jonathan P. Tadioan directs. Between them, and a creative team that includes dramaturg Kat Batara and choreographer Al Bernard Garcia, they've built something that TP is calling a movement-based piece for young audiences, though calling it "for young audiences" undersells how much it asks of the adults sitting beside them.
Laya wants to learn the Pandanggo sa Ilaw the way every younger sibling wants to earn a place beside their ate. Her father works construction, specifically on the Manila Film Center, a building whose troubled history has quietly haunted Philippine memory for over four decades. When the structure collapses and Tatay Ondeng doesn't come home, the play doesn't turn into a history lesson about accountability or politics. It turns into something harder to sit through and more honest: a household learning to carry absence. Nanay Lucia has to hold a family together with the kind of resolve that never gets its own award, and Laya has to figure out, at six or seven years old, what it means to keep dancing when the person who was supposed to watch you get good at it is gone.
That's the sleight of hand this production pulls off. It uses a children's story, staged with puppetry-adjacent movement and Cayabyab's score, to talk about collective grief without ever naming it as such. Wincess Jem Yana and Annika Co alternate in the role of Laya, with Noel Rayos and Shiela Valderrama anchoring the parents. The Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company rounds out the ensemble, including Ynna Rafa and Earvin Estioco, performers who've spent years building the kind of physical, disciplined stagecraft TP is known for.
There's a reason companies like TP keep returning to stories set during Martial Law, and it isn't nostalgia. It's maintenance. Every generation that doesn't hear these stories directly is one generation further from understanding why certain family silences exist, why some households still don't talk about specific years, why grief sometimes gets handed down without an explanation attached. A play built for children ends up doing the quiet work of explaining something to the adults who never got a straight answer either.
The design team leans into that duality too. Marco Viaña's set and costume work, D Cortezano's lighting, and Justin Santiago's video projections are being used to build a world that reads as gentle and dreamlike on the surface, with the historical weight embedded underneath rather than announced. It's the kind of production where a child in the audience might just see a story about a girl learning to dance, while the parent next to her recognizes the year, the building, the specific kind of loss, and feels something land differently.
"Sayaw ng mga Ilaw" runs at Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez inside the CCP Complex in Pasay, opening September 18 and running weekends through October 11. Regular tickets go for 1,800 pesos, VIP at 2,000, available through TP's official ticket link.
Opening Week
SEPTEMBER 18 (FRI) – 8:00 PM
SEPTEMBER 19 (SAT) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
SEPTEMBER 20 (SUN) – 3:00 PM
Second Week
SEPTEMBER 25 (FRI) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
SEPTEMBER 26 (SAT) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
SEPTEMBER 27 (SUN) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
Third Week
OCTOBER 2 (FRI) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
OCTOBER 3 (SAT) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
OCTOBER 4 (SUN) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
Closing Week
OCTOBER 9 (FRI) – 8:00 PM
OCTOBER 10 (SAT) – 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
OCTOBER 11 (SUN) – 3:00 PM
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