JOEY AYALA
Musician / Songwriter
Given a choice, Jose “Joey” Ayala would rather not be composing songs and poems of loss and lamentations of forests in the Philippines and their biodiversity. In the early 1980s, he was part of a generation of visual artists and musicians and poets that produced seminal work on environmental awareness. Born to a family of artists, his family moved to Davao in Mindanao in his early youth, and earned him fame for writing poems, composing songs, and directing and performing in theater musicals relating to the environmental and socio-political situations that the Philippines was then starting to realize. He independently produced in 1982 a collection of 10 songs that spoke of the social and the environmental volcano simmering, especially in Mindanao.
Joey’s creativity is associated and acknowledged with the care and concern for the environment, something that he persistently and consistently reminds Filipinos about. His song composition on the Philippine eagle, Haring Ibon, and its endangered status made people appreciate and understand better the eagle’s role as a barometer species. He unerringly linked the disappearance of the eagle to the disappearance of forests.
This ability to communicate relationships and systems thinking provides much room for taking action in Joey’s songs, beyond the usual appreciation of catchy melodies and witty lyrics. The images he conjures up through his songs translates scientific terms to ordinary people’s thoughts and layman pictures, provoking people into thinking and responding.
His early experience of forests he describes as something so basic that he took it for granted, as he spent a lot of time inside forests, which meant for him the trees. He got an air rifle at a certain stage and did target shooting of birds, until he realized that there was a link between forest creatures, the trees in the forests, and the forests itself.
This thinking permeated his songs and was confirmed by the various readings he managed to get hold of. He learned that trees are not discrete, and the inseparability of lives and relationships inside forests made him better understand impact, effect, and consequences. Damage one tree, change its chemical composition, and there is an effect on the rest. Thus for Joey, the forest is one creature.
Then he learned to dive and the marine environment opened up a whole new vista of life with all its variety and diversity.
Mount Banahaw in Dolores, Quezon is the most intimate place for him and offered a venue whereby he could reach and transcend a different state of being while inside its forests. The effect of forests for him is in the dilation of the senses and where forests become much more than their resources. This spirituality confirmed for him that when you lose a forest, you lose your spirit.
“We must find a space for the forestal spirit, so that the spirit nature of man will survive accordingly with nature, with capitalism, with the drive for efficiency,” Joey says, while acknowledging there is much less focus now on efficiency.
As in theater where he put into motion much of his early craft, there must be the right casting in the right role.
The management system needed must be indigenous to the Philippines and must be considerate of the land. Where this system can be found in the forest cultures he met, there are concepts that do not exist, such as “sakripisyo” (sacrifice) and “basura” (garbage or waste). Unfortunately, in today’s mainstream society, this value system inherent in many of these cultures either gets subverted or isolated, thereby diminishing their contribution.
For Joey, “nature is like a chameleon, it adapts to its environment.”
He dreams and fantasizes about the Philippines in terms of what can be done. He discovered that the highest return on investment in land is in memorial parks. In the Philippines, these plots of land are sold pre-need, with the living paying for when they die. If he applies this concept to forests where he can sell forests like a pre-need product, but as land for the living rather than the dying, perhaps he can get somewhere with securing forests and their survival.
In the pervasive and prevalent “mall culture” in urban centers and even in suburban areas, the connectivity between the youth and forests needs to be established beyond nature and trekking clubs, or the seasonal availability of volunteerism opportunities for young people. The alternative lifestyles that captured the imagination of young people in the 1960s, 1970s, and even in the early 1980s do not have parallels with their counterparts in this 21st century generation. Questions remain as to where the shift will come from, how this will occur, how to manage the undoing that must be done, and how to sustain the knitting together that’s got to be done as well.
Joey sees an answer in education and in assisting curriculum formation where it is now disintegrative. He goes back to the application of systems thinking, knowing and understanding the left/right upper/lower backward/forward development, and balancing the visioning with the doing.
The balance Joey seeks in the interaction between the logical and the intuitive is addressed in some form through the workshop design and facilitation that he now actively pursues through his Bagong Lumad productions. He related his experience in working with five coastal villages in the country, recording their songs, singing and talking with people, collecting their stories. As a musician, he listened to people singing, did songwriting workshops, and translated these activities as an exploration of an area’s cultural geology.
Continuously exploring and innovating, Joey also dreams of a time when the songs he will compose and the poems he will write will no longer be dirges nor elegies of treasures and wealth we lost as a people, but rather of hopes and dreams turned real, seizing opportunities and taking action on what matters.
“We must find a space for the forestal spirit, so that the spirit nature of man will survive accordingly with nature, with capitalism, with the drive for efficiency,” Joey says, while acknowledging there is much less focus now on efficiency.”
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