Maria Jovita Zárate

In Orteza’s and director Sigion-Reyna’s Katsuri, representations of sacada (sugar farmers in the island of Negros) veer away from the typical, almost iconic, images of the sacadas as rendered by the social realist painters of the 70s— hoodied heads, a pair of eyes peering from layers of cloth wrapped around their faces, and hunched bodies.  Katsuri’s stage harbored a diverse group of farmworkers housed in a kuwartel (quarter, usually of horses), carrying their own physicalized expressions of angas (spunk), a thin cache of spunk that fizzles out when the hacienda foreman and his overbearing son swing by to make routine inspections.