Around me - Cafe Adriatico, the then relatively newly opened and overly brightly lit Racks, Guernica's, and of course, Penguin Cafe where the idea and plan for the project at hand then was hatched, and beyond that, the row of shanties including a few holes in the wall offering tapsi meals, mami and cheaper beer. This was my de facto home then.
And right there in the middle of the rotunda, an elevated round concrete platform which in the afternoons is the arena where imaginary battles between superheroes and villains were reenacted by children from the neighborhood, and at night turns into a hunting ground for carnal and other illicit needs, and later in the night, sleeping quarters for the homeless or for those who do have homes nearby but are lured by the cool breeze coming from Manila Bay which blows directly towards that platform.
There is that sweet spot between the hunting ground hours when deals have already been made and the players have gone to consummate the deal, and before the sleepers come, usually around midnight to 2:00 AM when suddenly the rotonda would be almost empty, save for a few stragglers. That's when I'd usually find myself there to smoke a lonely cigarette.
Anyway, looking around at the open air performance area before me, I said "Open Space Productions."
I collaborated almost exclusively then with Joel, whose bedroom was our workshop. He named the room "Hell's Kitchen."
In Hell's Kitchen a few nights later, Joel and I worked on a logo for Open Space - he came up with a simple design with just the text (the O in open and E in space slightly bigger than the rest serving as prosceniums that framed the name) and a symbol I asked for, the Infinity symbol.
Back in Penguin, RJ and I continued to work on the production meeting with various artists we wanted to feature - Jet Melencio, Raul Roxas, Rina Reyes, Lolita Carbon, Waling-waling, a youth symphony orchestra. During nights in Penguin, aside from my lonely cigarette at the rotonda, another memorable, and often poignant, moment would be my trips to the bathroom after I've had one drink too many, and I have a silent conversation with a framed illustration of a conversation with a guy named Zeke about hedonism, and another framed work called "Bacchus Asleep."
Soon after that production, I found myself falling in love with Baguio, although it would take me and RL another year before finally packing all our belongings and moving here (back here, for her), where Open Space would eventually take root and blossom.
In my first couple of years, aside from the productions, I conducted a lot of acting workshops for various groups and individuals, mostly students. I remember being obsessed with the idea of transcending the Fourth Wall of the theater at the time, a result of the monologues RL and I have been staging/performing, and most of my lectures on acting revolved around that.
After an attempt at a restaurant and a desktop publishing shop, and after the birth of our first son, RL and I opened a gallery at the 3rd floor of Dali Building in Guisad in 2000. We appropriated the name that my mother used for her series of workshops for underprivileged children back in the 80s which I also attended, which I thought perfectly captured what Rl and I have been doing, surviving, creatively and we called the gallery The Workshop for Creative Survival. It ran for a few months, until other callings, along with the then unprofitability of stand alone art galleries, made us decide to close it up and move on.
We ventured into other forms of creative expression and production - so in addition to theater, we learned about graphics, photography, videography, I started exploring musical compositions, writing columns for local newspapers, and got into media and multimedia production. We informally called all that Altomonte Multimedia.
Looking back at the last 25 years, a word cloud forms in my head -
With these words, I know, you know.
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