Play about the Philippines: "The Last Ones"

This play, The lastThe performance offers an approach to the relationship between Spain and the Philippines through a series of scenes that explore different moments, images, and references from their shared history. Using a combination of documentary and fictional elements, the show prompts reflection on the heritage and narratives that permeate both contexts.

About the show:

A cast shaped by the relationship between Spain and the Philippines (or was it Maharlika?). 461 years of history through works of art: a statue of the last of the Philippines to be unveiled in 2020, Imelda Marwhat is it? Carmen Polo at a cocktail party in El Pardo, a very particular exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Retiro Park, Sister Jerónima de la Asunción and her nuns embarked on a galleon, Magellan the conqueror (or was it Julius?) IglesiasDying at the hands of Lapu Lapu, words best left unsaid, conversations that are hard to have, and mothers who bring out the karaoke when life gets rough. And life does get rough, quite often.

Note from Lucía Miranda, author and director:

Three days before I was due to fly to the Philippines to research this play, my mother told me she had cancer. When I landed and got into the car with J-mee Katanyag, the director of Peta, our partner company in Manila, I burst into tears: “I don’t care about colonialism anymore, what matters to me now is my mother.” The next day, J-mee brought me Noli Me TangereJosé Rizal's book, a cornerstone of the Philippines' independence from Spain. And there it was in the prologue: cancer and the mother, the motherland. In the Philippines, nature struggles to emerge from the asphalt like my mother's cancerous cells struggle to reproduce.

The last It's my most personal work and also the one that has required the most research (40 people interviewed). It's a mix between very pure documentary theater (the verbatim work we've done requires transcribing and embodying the characters word for word) and the wildest fictional speculation, because as Françoise Vergès says: “A decolonial exercise consists of imagining what other forms of exposure and representation could be.” It speaks of the shared history between the Philippines and Spain, of heritage, and what we do with it.

The last It is my personal panata, that of a team, inviting an audience to invoke the gods of the theater, to see if together we can heal that mother, whoever she may be, the one of each of us.

Show in English, Tagalog and Spanish with Spanish and English surtitles.