Wazzup Pilipinas!
Havoc is the comfort zone of the kaiju and the sentai. One wreaks it, the other usurps it. Marcushiro Nada is a fanboy of both in the most fundamental sense. He has a thing for the biometric costume design, for the wanton destruction of paper cities, for the gaudy colors and the poetry of chaos. But it’s not as if you can boil his fourth one man show down to the sort of one-note outpouring of affection that is what often comes from a purely nostalgic impulse. Unguarded Moments is something else entirely. Call it revisionist nostalgia, if you will, for the way it goes back to a particular past but forces it to change shape when it gets there.
An unguarded moment implies candor but it goes further than that. By taking these characters, some of which Nada never grew up with, out of their comfort zones of mayhem, leeching them of their candy-bright hues and having them strike poses that suggest an unthought-of sense of normalcy and even propriety, capturing them with their defenses down if you will, Nada is exploring, and celebrating, the interstitial, breaking the fourth wall not only of an imaginary world, but of his own imagined childhood, by turning the touchstones of his youth into elaborate, gorgeous, self-reflexive puns, and using a medium he’s unfamiliar with that serves almost as an act of solidarity with his subjects, as if he, too, is placing himself in an unguarded moment of his own.
- Dodo Dayao
The solos shows of Marcushiro Nada willfully resists an easy peg, in terms of style and philosophy and temperament, as he jumps from one discipline, one ethos, one style to the next, finding ways to push his own envelope as if he were aggressively veering away as far as possible from the other work he’s known for, mainly the graphic design he does for his group Electrolychee, and the books and comics he’s illustrated. Unguarded Moments, his fourth one man show, is no different, both a return to basics, to a medium he last worked with back in college, and a venturing into relatively alien territory.
The show is on Sunday, October 20 at 6 pm. Venue is at the G/F of Ronac Art Center, Ortigas Avenue in Greenhills.
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