Austere Rex Gamao as performed in Quezon City
By Carlo Paulo Pacolor

Quezon City-based queer, trans, and non-binary collective Ang Mga Baklang Kanal played out a radiant performance of Austere Rex Gamao’s ‘Swardspeak: Ang Pulos Sang Pag Beks Ko Sa Lengguwaheyy Kag Forma’ (Swardspeak: What Queering Language and Forms Means to Me) amongst the profusion of language spoken and enunciated by Filipino LGBTQIA+.

Rekrek Bernabe and Austere Rex Gamao (standing middle, shoulder to shoulder) together with Ang Mga Baklang Kanal and University of Melbourne panel organisers Chloe Ho, Erika Carreon, Ian Rafael Ramirez for *Art + Australia* and in cooperation with the UP Diliman Department of Speech Communication and Theater Arts, ‘Baks Paki-translate!: Conversations on Queering Translation’.

Directed by Jasper Villasis, this rousing performance by the Baklang Kanal in Hiligaynon and swardspeak brimmed with raucous joy, prompted by the figuration of Gamao’s “agi”. “Agi” from Hiligaynon, a language spoken mostly in southern Philippines, intones a palimpsest of meaning for “queer”(ness). But for Gamao’s queer I or the character that speaks, the “agi” sprawled as to encapsulate movement, like a restless “passing through”–one might even say, a passing through queer time.

In the Philippines, queers are mostly called “bakla”, but as the Baklang Kanal (Carly Avila, Aldrin Bula, Johann Dale Reyes, Tojamarie Sadie, Istifen Dagang Kanal) turned Gamao’s “agi” mother tongue into a point of reference, the enunciation became even more contoured for the queer I that first emanated from his English essay, titled in Hiligaynon-swardspeak, ‘Ambot sa Essay Kwoah’ (‘I don’t Know my Essay’/’It’s up to my Essay’). And once swardspeak emerged as the binding force in the wild concatenation of the Baklang Kanal, this Filipino gay colloquialism’s rhythmic syntax subsequently evolved within the performance, morphing Gamao’s nervous text into an affective rollicking chorus.

“Once swardspeak emerged as the binding force in the wild concatenation of the Baklang Kanal, this Filipino gay colloquialism’s rhythmic syntax subsequently evolved within the performance, morphing Gamao’s nervous text into an affective rollicking chorus.”

But it was through lead performer Rekrek Bernabe that Gamao’s figuration of the “agi”/queer I appeared with such intricacy because of their precise, steady measure of the character’s countenance. Not speaking any Hiligaynon beforehand, Bernabe nevertheless fluxed impressively through the translated excerpt of Gamao’s essay in Hiligaynon, demonstrating with lucid intent one underlying aspect of translation: a gesture to mean, or the very signifying act of performance. In the instance of ‘Swardspeak’, a whole different entity was created through the meandering atonality of Gamao’s nervous text, and was then transposed into Bernabe’s eloquent rendition of the Hiligaynon language. The performance itself combined and recombined as a pulsating entity through a scene where the “agi” went through transformative awakening when the character immersed themself in the lives of other LGBTQIA+ one Pride march. It was this dive into the queer fray that emboldened the “agi” not just to speak but to enunciate.

Bernabe’s “agi” countenance. Photo by Chloe Ho. Image courtesy of *Art+Australia* and Ang Mga Baklang Kanal.

As the queer I’s language of Hiligaynon and swardspeak dissolved into a cacophony, the “agi” became more sinuous, more eloquent, one that chanted along with other queers, trans, and non-binary folks a popular mass movement call to action, “Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!” (“Fight! Never Fear!”). For as the audience witnessed the “agi” congeal within a progressive multitude, whether they were non-Hiligaynon speaking or non-LGBTQIA+, in my mind, they/we became entwined with the “agi” experience that didn’t only pass through language but time as well. We were absorbed indefinitely in and along queer time!

This was only made possible through the interactive structure of the performance that invited the audience to translate words together with the Baklang Kanal ensemble. The popular mass-movement chant translated into swardspeak, “Makibeki! Hwag mashokot!” was chanted by performers and audience at the performance’s end. Through this translation, the queer experience of time was relayed, and in that moment of embodied meaning through a collective experience of swardspeak, the queer I did not merely enunciate, they also resounded proudly as the “agi”.

“[The] future is rife with potential, uncertainty, and disappointments,” Gamao mulls in his ‘Ambot’. As a matter of course in the gestural process of translation, perhaps “disappointment” here becomes useful; like the signifying gesture of a performance as embodiment, this same embodiment can also be its own limitation. On the one hand, textual translation can denote a continuity from the source that assumes no ready completion, an unfinished, open entity that plucks an aspect from the original. Translation is always tense. Meanwhile, the “agi” in ‘Swardpeak’ appeared with a certain assurance, and in a conversation with Austere one afternoon, he mentioned Rekrek’s performance resounded for him as his queer I’s more “heightened composite”. I then told Austere that one striking passage from his essay was in fact his fascination with ‘Animorph’ paperback covers. He fixated on the characters’ mid-transformation, “How they looked non-human and non-animal at the same time. A hybrid creature with potential from any angle…”

The multitudinous Baklang Kanal: Avila, Sadie, Bula, Bernabe, Reyes. Photo by Brandon Liew. Image courtesy of Art+Australia and Ang Mga Baklang Kanal. — The multitudinous Baklang Kanal: Avila, Sadie, Bula, Bernabe, Reyes. Photo by Brandon Liew. Image courtesy of *Art+Australia* and Ang Mga Baklang Kanal.

Language’s ability to occupy a space in-between is, in my opinion, what the Baklang Kanal “mid-morphed” in ‘Swardspeak’, and what composed my very experience of queer time within it. Perhaps the anxiety of envisioning a “rife future” in the performance (potent, uncertain, fragile) cannot be grasped solely in the meaning the ensemble embodied through the recombinations of Hiligaynon and swardspeak. Rather a hybrid creature in the form of the very Baklang Kanal ensemble appeared. Unfinished and inchoate, one that spoke in many tongues along tiny variations, using a language that evolved as they spoke, as they are now probably speaking in all queer possibility, this intractable multitude of beings in fervent states of un-doing and becoming.

Swardspeak itself evokes a continuous enunciated history that I feel rounds this out precisely. Tita Swarding was the nickname of a popular out and loud gay Filipino broadcaster in the 1970s. Swardspeak could then refer to an embodiment of the more familiar Filipino imaging of the parloristang bakla (beauticians in another colloquialism; gays who work in beauty salons) that immobilises any queer to function as the punchline of a comedic scene. But to suddenly have an entire connotative mode of utterance and performance conform to the parloristang bakla expression from a period when it was virtually impossible to escape a stultifying stereotype moves the queer experience from performativity to something that is actually lived. As the “agi” arrived in various sites of queerness in ‘Swardspeak’, their language did not in fact petrify. For as the Baklang Kanal and Gamao intuited, the “agi” is a thrust along queer time, “always in motion”, “[a movement necessary] to arrive at something, somewhere”.