To our distinguished honorees for this evening, Mrs. Roxas, friends ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Graduations and awarding ceremonies are occupational hazards for us in the Department of Education, whether we are awarding honor students as valedictorians or summa cum laudes, or finding most outstanding teachers, or even participating in awards for dynamic youth project.
However this evening, and every evening when there are artistic awards being presented, I share with you an excitement of an entirely different nature. Perhaps it is because artistic awards, unlike other achievement awards and outstanding awards, are arrived at in an entirely different fashion. The road to many other awards are road of efforts, diligence and commitment. But the reward for artistic excellence cannot be achieved by these alone. The one essential element is artistic genius, the spark of divine fire, that very few people on earth are born with. And therefore, whereas many other awards can be strive for and achieved, artistic awards recognize both an achievement and a gift. It is only with the combination of these two that artistic excellence is attained.
I realized, of course, that this gift is simultaneously a burden and a responsibility, and when the artist recognizes this talent in himself, he has to make the decision to commit his whole being to it, to scale the heights of this art form, and finally to stand lonely at the peak. I recognize, especially in the context of the Third World country, that living up to this commitment to artistic excellence entails great personal sacrifice and exacts a high personal price. One of our artists already mentioned poverty as the almost inevitable companion of artistics excellence. In other more development countries, this excellence is very often rewarded and recognized, but in a country of scarce resources, such a talent is honed at the expense of sacrificing, in many instances, a more lucrative career, the companionship of family and friends, and a host of everyday pleasures. It is for the reasons that we feel especially grateful for the lifetime contribution of our eight awardees this evening.
Of course on a more personal note, many of us here in this evening wish to offer individual tokens of thanks to tonight's awardees. Many of us remember and recognize that they are given us those cinematic slices of life that cut deep into our consciousness (Brocka). They have given us those dramatics scenes that awaken in us emotions that we did not realize we had (Guerrero). The have given us literary panoramas of the social context from which we emerge, telling us more accurately that the mirror tells us every morning, who we really are (Jose). The have given us creative expressions of figure, line, shape and color to push back the frontiers of visual artistic creativity and design (Luz). They have given us treasure chest of Filipino music that will not only remain with this generation but, thanks to them, will be preserved for generations to come (Maceda). They have given us through a lifetime of painstaking dedications, an assembly of different folkloric and other ethic roots of our identity, to remind us that we are only what we were (Manuel). They have given us notice that Philippine culture is not a monolithic culture but the mosaic of many parallel cultures from all parts of the country, and that each sub-cultures stands as a giant in its own right (Muzones). Finally, they have given us creative artistic gems, temporary yet eternal fashioned by the most wondrous of instrument - the human body - and delivered in the most disciplined of art forms - the dance (Reyes). So on these personal notes, I think we owe all of the awardees out true debt of gratitude.
There is one other thing that we must be grateful for this evening, and that is the Cultural Center of the Philippines itself, for being our instrument through which the Filipino people can express this gratitude, for being the vehicle through which we are able to put forth eight outstanding artistic achievers for the artists of the future to emulate and to be inspired by. Thanks to this recognition, not only are the eight awardees benefited, but so is every struggling dramatist, film-maker, writer, researcher, dancer, novelist, and musician. Thanks to the CCP Awards, the aspiring artists of the future (especially as we are launching the Decade of Culture and the Decade of Nationalism) will recognize that talent in the end is its own merit, and that recognized or not, it plays a fundamental role in the future of the development of a Philippine identity and a Philippine culture.
But tonight belong not to the future generations of artists, not even to the CCP, it belong to the awardees themselves. Sa ating mga pinararangalan ngayong gabi, mula sa hardin ng puso ng bawa't Pilipino, kami'y namimitas ng bulaklak na pasasalmat at aming taos-pusong inihahandog sa inyo.
Maraming salamat po
