Pison 63 In the choreography based on the works of cubist painter Ang Kiukok (National Artist for the Visual Arts, 1971), Locsin expands an earlier thirty-second work which she created as a commissioned work by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts for a tribute they gave to eleven national artists for the visual arts in 2001. Transformed into a fulllength work, Sayaw Likha bears the trademark of Locsin—earthbound, powerful and solid, movements—complementing the edgy dissonant sounds of Ayala. Both movement and music successfully work to surface the emotions articulated in Kiukok’s cubist paintings: a sense of subterranean desperation in urban lives. Revolving around the theme of entrapment, the seductively fierce savagery characterizing the movements provide the dark undertow of the entire work—that gripping, even suffocating sensation of entanglement and an inability to escape from one’s circumstances—those of lovers and people in various uncertain relationships. It is a sensation that we often associate with the brutal realities of city life, with the travails of the urban Pinoy. Locsin’s eye for movement and paintings capture what poet Arlene Ang refers to as the “Lowelian theme” in Kiukok’s works: “I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat... I myself am hell...” (Ang, “The Cynic”). Locsin goes deeper into the psyche in her Sayaw, Sabel, moved by Bencab’s “Sabel,” a recurring subject of his sketches which he began when he took a photograph of a scavenger in 1965. In Locsin’s words, “For Bencab, Sabel is a melancholic symbol of dislocation, despair and isolation, the personification of human dignity threatened by life’s vicissitudes, and the vast inequities of Philippine society.” Transformed in the choreography of Locsin, Sabel becomes Jose Rizal’s Sisa, who for Locsin “represent[s] an image of the country’s continuous and seemingly endless struggle to survive (“Agnes Locsin, Inspired by Bencab, Tackles Pinoy Psyche”). The titles of the dances (i.e., “Abandonada,” “Sugatan,” “Sino Ka?” “Bagong Bayani,” “Balo,” “Batak,” “Nasaan Ako,” “Kayod,” “Ako Una,” “Dalawahan,” “Mahal,” and “Ano Ako?” ) that comprise the entire work reveal the different forms of disturbances that haunt our minds. From those related to love—of gaining and losing a loved one—to those resulting from extreme hard work amidst life’s uncertainties, to obsession and fanaticism, to drug addiction, to those brought about by traumatic experiences in the war-torn Southern Philippines and hard work abroad, and to outright mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and alzheimers. This range of neurosis and psychosis is so familiar to the Filipino of the 21st century. Rizal’s Sisa remains a moving figure because residing in each of us, is a fragment/aspect of her insanity. Centuries after Rizlal’s Noli Me Tangere was published, the Filipino finds himself mentally disturbed by