Tragedy often connotes a sense of misfortune, a condition of pain, an encounter of betrayal, a state of insecurity and instability. Aristotle conceptualized tragedy as “the fall of a great man” and as an emotionally charged narrative that excites “pity and fear,” possesses cathartic properties, and involves the recognition of virtues and the reversal of fates and fortunes due to varied human vulnerabilities.

Yet it is time to look beyond tragedy in its ancient, Western conceptions and consider how it exceeds individuating tendencies and takes stock of what we might describe, echoing Franz Fanon, as the ongoing wretchedness of the Earth. Within this ambit, tragedy may account for the consequences of unequal relationships among social agents from the global North and the global South; the disorders in the longstanding hierarchical linkages between humans and non-humans; the rise and return of political personalities that have caused the further breakdown of already delicate public systems and services; the decimation of the world’s resources amid unprecedented health crises and environmental disasters; and, not least, the destitute ways of life among the oppressed who are caught up in highly colonial, imperial, capitalist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and racist regimes. These notions establish that tragedy is neither simply about personal fate nor about, as prevailing beliefs from the Period of Antiquity go, the wrath of the gods. It is, instead, a structured state of existence and an outcome of accumulated human mistakes, caprices, and excesses.

To these reflections on the notion of tragedy embedded in a wider socio-historical and geopolitical field, we can also add the theatre-specific need to consider the material, tragic circumstances that impact the profession. Consider for instance the precarious labor situations that have left theatre practitioners without securities and safeguards; the withering support of state and non-state entities that has forced theatre companies, artistic collectives, and their corresponding projects to grind to a halt; the occupational hazards of theatre and performance making that have led to the deterioration if not the demise of certain artists; the diverse and multiple forms of interventions—from political orders to commercially-minded patrons and sponsors—that impinge upon artistic and creative expressions. Viewed in this way, theatre itself appears as a site of tragic practices, the locus of its own tragedies.

Through an IFTR conference dedicated to Our States of Emergency, the University of the Philippines initiates a collective gathering where artists, practitioners, academics, researchers, and scholars of theatre and performance can discuss the circumstances and consequences of past, present, and prospective tragedies that we have been variously suffering and living with. An archipelagic nation situated in the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Philippines is not new to aquatic and terrestrial tragedies. Given its geographical location, it is no stranger to hurricanes, typhoons, and earthquakes. And yet, it is this same delicate placement that renders the Philippines a strategic gateway to Southeast Asia and a much-coveted territory to successive, ever mutating, and ever expanding colonial and imperial orders. Akin to many other countries on other continents, in addition to natural catastrophes the Philippines has also suffered and continues to suffer the tragedies brought forth by its complex historical encounters and political structures. Since the sixteenth century, for example, our country was on the receiving end of the violence that its conquerors inflicted on Filipinos dispersed across the islands. Further, while the Philippines has successfully staged bloodless uprisings that led to the fall of a dictator in the mid-1980s and to the ousting of another corrupt president at the turn of this century, it still must grapple with the tensions between the dynamism of its social movements and the persistence of its political dynasties. The rise of the felonious Rodrigo R. Duterte to the presidency in 2016 and the re- installation of the Marcoses to the country’s highest political seat in 2022 are telling markers of these frictions.

Capturing these different tragedies in the Philippines are vernacular terms and concepts that relate to the lack of luck (kamalasan) or the malevolent destiny (masamang kapalaran) of a person, the severity and enormity of a calamity (sakuna), the weight and impact of a pitiful phase of being (kalunusan), and the pervasive presence or potentiality of danger (kapahamakan) and death (kasawian). This relay of ideas brings into focus the personal and social, the superstitious and scientific dimensions of tragedy. It also underscores how tragedy, in Philippine belief systems and worldviews, can be fated or self-made, intimately suffered or publicly confronted, caused by the forces of nature or by the doings of humans themselves. Even more importantly, it crystallizes the many ways Filipinos encounter, rationalize, and express the tragic both in thought and in deed.