Opera Meets Drag in Anton Juan’s Twin Bill featuring Brigiding and Soprano Kay Balajadia
Review and photos by Evzen Evangelista
La Voix Humaine
Kay Balajadia, the lone actor and soprano, delivers an impressive showcase of her skills in the first part of the twin bill. She manages to translate the piece’s innate emotion in a manner that transcends the language barrier set by Jean Cocteau’s French libretto. On the opening night, Balajadia was accompanied by Arthur Espiritu’s masterful musical direction and Gabriel James Frias on the piano.
Balajadia’s tour de force performance is powerful enough to leave some non-French-speaking audience members torn: should they focus on the raw emotions expressed in her face, or on the English subtitles projected above the stage?
Boses
If La Voix Humaine is a solemn study of despair, Boses takes that despair and injects it with distinctly Filipino humor; shaped by queerness, camp, and contemporary realities. Director Anton Juan’s translation of Cocteau’s text does not simply swap French words for Filipino ones, but instead immerses the monologue into the world of Manila drag and queer culture, making its pain feel closer, more personal especially for prospective young queer audiences.
Juan’s translation contextualizes the piece for modern Filipino audiences. Moments that could feel distant or antiquated in a French setting are instead brought into local reality, transforming what would otherwise be a straightforward tragic piece. While some changes add levity, they also shift the work’s emotional weight. The ending, for instance, diverges drastically from the original, with Brigiding’s Elle seemingly triumphant, throwing her phone to the audience in defiance. Does this undercut the grief of the piece? Or is it a reclamation of power that Cocteau’s Elle never had?
Opera and Drag: An Unexpected but Natural Pairing?
Juan’s bold decision to pair opera with drag speaks to a larger conversation about performance, emotional vulnerability, and accessibility. Though seemingly at odds, both art forms demand an extreme level of emotional honesty from their performers. Opera, often seen as an elite and distant medium, finds an accessible counterpart in the playful, irreverent, yet equally expressive world of drag. However, Boses does not merely make La Voix Humaine more digestible—it transforms it, challenging audiences to reconsider their perceptions of both forms.
By placing these two performances back to back, Juan makes a statement: vulnerability and longing are not confined to a single kind of expression. The contrast between Balajadia’s operatic devastation in Elle and Brigiding’s theatricality and biting wit as a coping mechanism underscores how different identities navigate love and loss. Yet, this stark difference ultimately reinforces the universality of heartbreak, showing how pain transcends time, language, gender, and artistic medium.
Juan’s creative vision reshapes opera into something more palatable for local audiences by integrating Filipino camp humor and queerness. The inclusion of humor, particularly Filipino-style kabaklaan wit, makes the themes more approachable without diminishing their emotional weight. It is a reminder that queerness has always carved space within traditionally rigid structures, proving that opera, despite its grandiosity, can be just as potent when infused with the language of the streets, the humor of queer communities, and the resilience of love in all its forms.
Final Thoughts
While the contrast between La Voix Humaine and Boses is stark, they ultimately share the same thematic voice crying out for love, for connection, for understanding. Whether in the form of an elegant soprano’s aria or the witty humor of a drag queen’s monologue, the human voice remains the most powerful instrument of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment