Memory as Resistance: Why a Small Staged Reading in Makati Is Worth Your Attention
Sc. Scene Change’s “Bantayog: Alaala at Gunita” pairs a Chilean play about a torture site with a Filipino novel about the Disappeared—landing in a Manila that is once again arguing over who gets remembered, and who gets away with forgetting.
Words Gerie Marie Consolacion
Art by Nicole Vinco
September 18, 2026
Art by Nicole Vinco
Bantayog, Filipino for monument, marker, memorial. The physical thing we build so a memory has somewhere to stand.
This September, the independent theater company Scene Change (Sc.) is staging Bantayog: Alaala at Gunita, a limited reading cycle built around Martial Law, forced disappearance, and what the company calls ‘the difficult discipline of remembering.’
On paper, it is a modest undertaking: two staged readings, with a total of four performances.
But the timing is not modest at all.
The cycle opens the same week the Philippines marks the anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s 1972 declaration of Martial Law, in a year when the country is once again convulsed by mass protests over stolen public money, and when the machinery for softening the dictatorship’s memory into a ‘golden era’ has never run harder.
Two dictatorships, one table
The cycle’s first half, running September 19 and 20, is Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s Villa, translated and directed by Giancarlo Abrahan—fresh off a Cinemalaya win for Best Director and Best Film.
In it, three women, all named Alejandra, sit around a table arguing about how to memorialize Villa Grimaldi, the real Santiago compound where the Pinochet dictatorship tortured and killed political prisoners. Actresses Martha Comia, Meann Espinosa, and Ness Roque carry the piece.
The second half, September 26 and 27, is Desaparesidos, Guelan Varela-Luarca’s adaptation of Lualhati Bautista’s 2007 novel, co-directed by Varela-Luarca and Kat Batara.
It follows activists Anna and Roy across the Martial Law years and the long, quieter decades after, not just the violence of disappearance itself, but what the company’s own materials describe as the slower work of living in its aftermath: how memory lingers, how silence settles, how the past gets handed to people who never lived it.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer once named it among the best productions of its decade, calling it unflinching theater that never loses sight of the people history actually happened to. The cast includes Sheenly Gener, Marco Viaña, Jojit Lorenzo, Jam Binay, Ge Villamil, Gio Gahol, Yshma Aquino, Toni Go-Yadao, and Maliana Beran.
Placed side by side, Villa and Desaparesidos are doing something more ambitious than a themed double bill.
They are staging a conversation across hemispheres and dictatorships—Pinochet and Marcos, Chile’s disappeared and the Philippines’ desaparecidos about the specific, unglamorous labor of building a monument when the state itself would rather you didn’t.
An anniversary that keeps getting contested
That labor is not abstract in the Philippines of 2026. Martial Law’s anniversary each September has become an annual referendum on memory itself, and this decade the contest has tilted.
Under the current Marcos administration, historians and commentators have pointed to a sustained campaign to rebrand the dictatorship years—from social media content nostalgic for a supposed “golden era” to renewed pushes to revise how the period is taught in schools.
Academic volumes published just this year catalogue how monuments, museums, textbooks, and platforms have all become contested sites where the dictatorship’s memory is actively built, sanitized, or erased, depending on who controls the telling.
Advocacy groups have long argued that the stakes of this revisionism are not sentimental. If the Marcos family and its allies succeed in recasting the era as one of order and progress rather than plunder and atrocity, the argument goes, it also clears a path back to full political rehabilitation, which, three years into a Marcos Jr. presidency, has for many Filipinos already arrived.
The same impunity, a different decade
It’s not only the distant past that makes ‘Bantayog’ feel urgent.
Since September 2025, the Philippines has been living through its largest wave of protest in years, triggered by revelations that a staggering share of the country’s flood-control budget sums estimated in the tens of billions of pesos went to substandard or entirely fictitious “ghost” projects, even as deadly floods kept drowning the same communities those projects were supposed to protect.
Tens of thousands have marched on Manila’s EDSA Shrine and Mendiola, a fact-finding body has recommended plunder and bribery charges against sitting and former senators, and a public works secretary has refused to resign despite mounting evidence.
Promises that the guilty would be jailed by Christmas 2025 came and went without a single conviction.
What connects a flood-control ghost project to a 1972 disappearance is not the scale of the crime, it’s the shape of the impunity. Both depend on the public eventually looking away: on outrage cooling into acceptance, on institutions slow-walking accountability until the news cycle moves on, on official narratives quietly replacing lived memory.
Desaparesidos and Villa are, at bottom, both about what happens in the years after the atrocity, when the real fight shifts from stopping the crime to refusing to let it be forgotten or rebranded.
Together, these two works aim to create a conversation across countries and dictatorships: Chile and the Philippines, Pinochet and Marcos, disappearance and denial, public memory and public forgetting.
Why a blackbox reading, why now?
Scene Change is a small, text-forward company. Its catalogue includes 3 Upuan, Dagitab, and Ang Linangan, built around the idea that theater doesn’t need spectacle to land with force.
A staged reading, stripped of full sets and blocking, puts almost all its weight on the words and the people delivering them. For material this charged, that bareness is arguably the point: there is nowhere for an audience to hide from the text, and nowhere for the text to hide behind production value.
In a media environment where the country’s dictatorship history is being actively contested online and in classrooms, and where new corruption scandals arrive faster than accountability does, a small theater company reviving a novel about the Disappeared and importing a Chilean play about a torture-site memorial is a quietly pointed act.
It insists, in the middle of a very loud argument over what Filipinos should remember, that the discipline of remembering still has to be practiced—deliberately, uncomfortably, and in public.
