The Virgin Labfest—an annual festival of theatre acts which usually being held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, opened its red curtain for this year and continued the storytelling virtually while the country is still in the midst of battling COVID-19 outbreak.

The new VLF director JK Anicoche made a bold decision to continue the festival through online this year during the pandemic.

“As a theater educator, being invited to lead a 16-year old festival is a big opportunity to expand the possibilities of text-based theater-making, deepen conversations about theater and society and bring in present-day sensibilities,” Anicoche said in an interview with ABS-CBN. 

The festival also launched the Writing Fellowship Program—a two week mentorship program for aspiring writers on the “the study and practice of dramatic writing for the stage” which started last June 16 and ends on June 28 when they will be having an online staged reading of the participants’ works.

There are fifteen debuted plays—ten of which are featured works which was scheduled from June 10 to 14, and five are staged readings which was scheduled from second to third week of June. There are also the three revisited plays from last year's festival. 

The festival offers a very affordable viewing fee, from P100 to P200 to access all plays and other events. This is to still support the artists and staff amidst the pandemic. 

"We are in a very difficult period in our lives and as long as we secured that artists and staff are compensated and supported well by the CCP, it is time to think about our audiences and also rethink ways of engagement in this new platform that we are exploring," said Anicoche

The ‘virtual’ Labfest has already presented different filmed performances in the likes of “Titser Kit” by Jobert Landeza, “Blackpink” by Tyron Casumpang, “Gin Bilog” by Luis Nario, “Mayang Bubot” sa Tag-araw by Mark Norman, two short plays “Lolo Doc,” and “Lola Doc” by Layeta Bucoy, and the revisited plays such as “Wanted: Male Boarders” by Rick Patriarca, “Anak Ka Ng” by U.Z. Eliserio, and “Fangirl” by Herlyn Alegre.

Although presenting the plays online hinders some of the audience to watch smoothly due to technical issues and unstable internet connections, the event allows CCP to earn with Vimeo’s video-on-demand option that cater a wider audience to watch the play.

For the festival’s schedule, click here