The 29th SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER Theater Festival, a gathering of selected emerging thespians from art institutions across the globe, recognized the Philippine representative De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB) resident theater company Dulaang Filipino and its member Uzziel Delamide with the SWAG of SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER Award.
The five-day event recently concluded at the JanáÄek Academy of Music and Performing Arts Brno (JAMU) in Brno, Czech Republic.
Delamide was part of the ensemble of Dulaang Filipino’s award-winning production Oedipus of the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, which was noticed for its “original use of unconventional staging resources or for the originality or a distinctive generational statement dealing with current cultural, social, political and ethical topic.”
Led by the Theatre Faculty of JanáÄek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, this year’s celebration connected theater companies from Czech, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Austria, Germany, Russia, Poland, Slovakia, and the Philippines.
SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER Theater Festival was originally designed as a non-competitive event but the participating jury, which consists of foreign and local experts in the performing arts and theatre education, recognized the batch’s most innovative performances.
The Mantra Award went to Peter MartinÄek from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia as the outstanding actor; Maja Wolska from the National Academy of Theater Arts in Krakow, Poland as the outstanding actress; Pamela Butane from the Latvian Academy of Culture, Latvia for scenography; and Ölinger and Andre Menrath from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria for the scenic music.
Meanwhile, industry expert and event head Michal Zetel granted the Award of the Festival Director to Petr Erbes a Boris Jedinák from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic for category directing.
Dulaang Filipino’s Oedipus, first presented in 2014, is a one-hour reduction of Sophocles’ Theban trilogy, consisting of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, in Filipino translations by Rolando Tinio and Onofre Pagsanjan.
Directed and choreographed by Riki Benedicto, the production has been performed at the UP Theater Council’s Curtain Call play festival in 2014, where it received the Special Citation for Outstanding Production Design, and was a finalist at the Mont-Laurier International Theatre Festival in Quebec, Canada in 2015.
Dulaang Filipino’s Oedipus has garnered a number of awards and citations from all over the world including Best Performance by Amateur Theatre and Special Prize from Jury for Best Physical and Sound Solution at the Teatralny Kufar in Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus and Premios EscenAmateur at the International University of La Rioja, Madrid, Spain for Best International Show in the IV “Juan Mayorga” de las Artes Escénicas in 2017.