“Because with the grace of God, we have persevered to dynamically apply theater as a mirror of our respective identity and common humanity, as a memory bank of our history and language. An armor against social ills. An anchor to the wealth of our heritage to recharge conscience, generate creative industries and serve as a lighthouse for good governance and responsible citizenship. Theater is public service,’’ she said in her acceptance speech.
One of those workshops took place in Davao City and Manis was among the participants. “I first met Cecile when I was 12 years old, while she was giving a theater arts workshop to farmers whose farmlands were taken over by multinational agribusiness corporations,” Manis recalled. When Manis migrated to the United States and worked as a nurse, she never forgot her theater background and formed Kinding Sindaw in 1992 in New York City. By that time, Guidote-Alvarez had returned to the Philippines from exile together with her family.
The theater’s sterling list of alumni includes Diane Lane, Bette Midler, Sam Shepard, Philip Glass, Harvey Fierstein and the Blue Man Group, among others. In her years of exile in New York, she acted in landmark La MaMa plays like “Jilsa” which was directed by Duk-hyung Yoo of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Bertolt Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle” directed by Fritz Bennewitz of the Berliner Ensemble, and “Juana La Loca” by Miguel Sabido of Mexico.