He walked his talk and he talked when he walked. Many knew him as Manila’s ultimate tour guide, but Carlos Celdran, who died Oct. 8 in Madrid, Spain where he had been in “self-exile” since January this year, didn’t consider himself one. Carlos, one of PeopleAsia magazine’s Men Who Matter awardees in 2013, shared with writer Denise Roco how he became a tour guide, cultural activist and performance artist who couldn’t keep his opinions to himself.
If there’s anything John Charles Edward “Carlos” Pamintuan Celdran never runs out of, it’s an opinion. And it’s usually spiced with a little bit of buzz, controversy and sometimes a dash of trouble. The predicament comes expected when one carries the title of cultural activist, performance artist and tour guide, all rolled into one fearless, naughty 40-year-old bloke.
As son of well-established pediatrician Dr. Miguel Celdran, Carlos was born with a silver spoon. “I completely hated my Dasmariñas (Dasma) existence back then. I grew up in Dasma and then I went to CSA (Colegio de San Agustin). My world was only 1.5 kilometers big, until I went to the University of the Philippines (UP); that was the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Malate was just on its way up. I’d find my way from UP to downtown Manila and pretty much got obsessed by this area of town,” says this Scorpio-born man who has been enthusiastically doing his “Walk This Way” tours of Manila for 12 years now.
When asked about how his parents reacted to his chosen career path, he replies, “I was a pretty bad teenager, so nothing I do shocks them anymore.”
On the Manila stage
After coming from New York where he lived for two years and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, he worked for the Heritage Conservation Society. This got Carlos into tour guiding. He handled a program teaching Filipinos about Philippine architecture.
“I devised a three-point program: Spanish era and pre-colonial architecture which is Intramuros, and then American Colonial architecture, which is Escolta and the National Museum. Then you have modern architecture which is the CCP (Cultural Center of the Philippines) to the Film Center. After they restructured everything and pretty much got rid of the tour guiding program, they gave me the tours. I was pretty much the only one doing it,” he says.
But having a stable job is not the end-all of his goals. Knowing that he was doing this on his own, Carlos decided to make it more interesting. “I started to involve my obsession for performance art and multimedia with the touring. So basically I’m just doing street theater or busking inside Intramuros and the CCP complex. I really wouldn’t say its tour guiding. While I go from site to site (which makes it seem like tour guiding), what I’m really doing is a performance about Manila’s history using Intramuros as my stage and making the story unfold through its architecture,” narrates this animated guy.
Carlos constantly tweaks his tour to keep abreast with the changing times. His tour today, in contrast to when he started in 2001, is a completely different animal. “Our history is written by colonizers, written by people with an agenda, today we have to re-analyze everything we went through and where it brought us today and how our history benefits us. I’m giving you a personal version of what happened, I can’t say that what I give is cut and dried history, ‘cause there’s no such thing. All history is written with an opinion. So I’m just giving my opinion. What I hope I do with the performance is give people enough leeway or enough inspiration to study Philippine history to come up with their own opinion.”
Behind bars
Incarceration might be inevitable for Carlos due to his opinion on the Reproductive Health Bill (RH Bill), which is now the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012. Last January 28, the Manila Metropolitan Trial Court (Branch 4) found Celdran guilty of offending religious feelings under Article 133 of the Revised Penal Code. He was given an indeterminate sentence of two months and 21 days of imprisonment to a maximum of one year, one month and 11 days of imprisonment. Yet Carlos tells without a hint of remorse that what he did is something he is proud of.
Dressed as National Hero Jose Rizal, Carlos entered the Manila Cathedral on Sept. 30, 2010 and stood before the altar with a sign bearing the word “Damaso,” a reference to the oppressive clergyman from Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere. He yelled, “Stop getting involved in politics!” before he was taken away by police.
“Everything I was aiming for in my performance art found itself in one moment. If I came in there without using literary references, without using cosplay, references to Philippine history, if I went there in jeans with a sign that said pass the RH Bill, it would not have flown. But (with what I did), there was a simulacrum that all Filipinos understood.” On a side note, even though the RH Bill has been passed into law, there is a 120-day suspension from its implementation.
Another colorful incident happened to him in March 2012 when he was commissioned by Art Dubai Projects to perform his Livin’ La Vida Imelda tour as a one-man act in Dubai. Interrupted by robed authorities in the middle of his performance, he was asked to tone down or remove parts of the performance, but he opted to cancel the rest of his shows instead. He comments, “It was a case of misunderstanding and miscommunication. It had to do with religious references. The Art Dubai Management did not give the police of Dubai my script. They were confused. They thought I was insulting it. What Art Dubai taught me is that freedom in the Philippines is something we should appreciate.”
Carlos is currently working on bringing his Imelda performance to a wider audience, hopefully New York, if not Cebu. Late last year, his Livin’ La Vida Imelda tour was featured in a special report by The New York Times. Carlos emphasizes the greatest lesson he’s learned so far. “It’s hard enough to do performance art in the States and get a job, but to do performance art in the Philippines and have the career that I have, it’s an absolute blessing! If you want to be crazy and if you want to do what you want to do, and if you want to take risks in your life, believe it or not the Philippines is the place to do it. My story would not work anywhere else.”
Happily married for 13 years to Tessa, a yoga instructor, with whom he has raised two dogs (a Jack Russell and a dachshund), Carlos remains unstoppable. Wherever he is, wherever he goes and in whatever he does, he presents reality with glittery humor and a hard punch of truth.
