Sabayang pagsigaw

By Noel Galon de Leon

There is something deeply troubling about the way we have increasingly brought school-based cultural and literary performances into commercial spaces and then mistaken the resulting spectacle for meaningful cultural celebration. I recently found myself thinking about this while watching a verse choir performance inside a shopping mall, where children were asked to perform in an environment fundamentally designed for commerce, movement, conversation, and consumption. The intention may have been admirable: to provide young performers with an audience, to make cultural activities more visible, and perhaps to bring the arts closer to the public. But good intentions do not automatically produce good cultural experiences. In fact, when a performance is transferred from an appropriate theatrical or educational space into the middle of a busy commercial establishment, something essential can be lost. What we gain in foot traffic, visibility, and spectacle, we may lose in concentration, artistic discipline, vocal quality, listening, and respect for the performance itself. The children may be physically present before an audience, but the question is whether the conditions allow them to truly perform.

The most obvious problem is sound. A verse choir is not simply a group of children shouting words together. At its best, it is an intricate exercise in collective voice, rhythm, articulation, timing, dynamics, phrasing, tone, breath control, listening, and emotional interpretation. The power of a verse choir does not come from volume alone. It comes from the ability to move collectively between softness and intensity, between individual lines and choral passages, between silence and sound, between restraint and release. In a mall, however, the performers are placed in an acoustically difficult environment where ambient noise constantly competes with their voices. Conversations, announcements, music from commercial establishments, footsteps, machines, advertisements, and the general movement of shoppers create an unstable sonic environment. The children understandably respond by raising their voices. They shout because they have to be heard. But once volume becomes the primary strategy for overcoming environmental noise, vocal dynamics begin to disappear. The performance becomes louder but not necessarily stronger.

This distinction is crucial. Loudness is not the same as vocal power. A technically controlled voice can be powerful even when it is quiet. A carefully modulated ensemble can create tension through whispering, pauses, gradual crescendos, sudden silence, and controlled emphasis. But these subtleties become extremely difficult to hear in a noisy mall. The performers are therefore placed in a situation where the environment rewards shouting. The louder they become, the more they seem to compete successfully with the surroundings. Yet, artistically, the opposite may be happening. Their voices can become strained, their articulation can become less precise, their pitch can become unstable, their breathing can become inefficient, and their ensemble balance can collapse. What the audience hears is not necessarily the carefully rehearsed interpretation prepared by the students and their teachers, but an amplified struggle between young voices and an uncontrolled acoustic environment.

What concerns me most is that children may eventually learn the wrong lesson from this experience. They may begin to believe that a successful public performance is one in which they can shout loudly enough to command attention. That is not what choral performance should teach. A good ensemble teaches children to listen as much as they speak. It teaches them that their individual voice exists within a collective sound. It teaches restraint. It teaches timing. It teaches them to recognize the voice beside them and adjust their own volume accordingly. It teaches them that silence can be as meaningful as sound. It teaches discipline, not simply confidence. When the environment forces every performer to project at maximum volume from beginning to end, these lessons become difficult to practice. The children are not necessarily failing. The performance environment is failing them.

There are also aspects of theatrical performance that disappear in such spaces. A verse choir is not only auditory. It is visual, spatial, dramatic, and emotional. The positioning of performers matters. Their entrances and exits matter. Their relationship to one another matters. Facial expressions matter. Gestures matter. Movement matters. The audience’s attention matters. The performer needs to know where the audience is looking and how attention travels across a performance space. In a mall, however, the audience is fragmented. Some people stop for a few seconds. Others are passing by. Some are eating. Some are shopping. Some are talking. Some are looking at their phones. Others may have come specifically for the competition. These are completely different modes of spectatorship. A theatre audience has consciously entered a space to watch. A mall audience is often incidental. The difference profoundly affects performance.

This fragmentation creates another problem: the performer is forced to compete not only with noise but also with distraction. In a theatre, the stage commands attention because the architecture of the space tells us that something is about to happen there. The lighting, seating arrangement, stage orientation, and silence of the audience create a social contract between performer and spectator. In a shopping mall, that contract does not necessarily exist. A child delivering an important line may be competing with a passing family, a store promotion, a digital advertisement, or an announcement from another part of the building. The performer is therefore placed in a paradoxical situation: the event is supposedly designed to bring culture to the public, but the very environment may prevent the public from experiencing the culture attentively.

And perhaps this is where we need to question the larger institutional logic behind these events. Why do we increasingly feel that cultural activities must happen inside malls for them to be considered accessible or successful? Why have we accepted the idea that bringing people into a commercial space is automatically equivalent to bringing culture closer to the community? A mall certainly provides convenience, visibility, security, foot traffic, and an existing audience. It can be an effective venue for certain kinds of public activities. But not every cultural performance belongs in every space. Accessibility should not be confused with appropriateness. Just because a mall can accommodate an event does not mean that the mall can provide the conditions the art requires.

There is also a subtle commercialization of cultural participation that we should not ignore. When schools are encouraged to bring their students into malls for contests and celebrations, culture can become another form of mall programming. The children perform, parents arrive, teachers accompany them, photographs are taken, audiences gather, and the commercial establishment benefits from the increased activity. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with a mall supporting cultural events. Partnerships between businesses and cultural institutions can be productive. The concern arises when the commercial venue becomes the default cultural stage, to the point that we no longer ask whether the artistic requirements of the activity are being served. If the primary justification is that “many people will see it,” we should also ask: What kind of seeing are we talking about?

Being seen is not necessarily the same as being heard, and being heard is not necessarily the same as being understood.

A cultural performance deserves more than visibility. It deserves conditions that allow its artistic qualities to emerge. A verse choir deserves an acoustic environment in which its members can hear one another. It deserves a stage where the audience can concentrate. It deserves technical support that does not distort the voices. It deserves sufficient rehearsal time in the actual performance space. It deserves proper staging. It deserves an audience willing to listen. Most importantly, the children deserve to experience what it means to perform well, not simply what it means to perform loudly in public.

There is an educational dimension to this that should concern teachers and cultural organizers. School competitions are not merely extracurricular entertainment. They are extensions of pedagogy. When we ask students to participate in a verse choir, we are supposedly teaching them language, literature, performance, collaboration, discipline, confidence, interpretation, and artistic expression. The venue therefore becomes part of the educational experience. If the venue constantly forces them to compromise vocal technique and artistic interpretation, then we need to ask whether we are unintentionally teaching them that presentation is more important than craft. We may congratulate them for surviving a noisy environment when what they should really be learning is how to create meaningful performance.

There is also the matter of vocal health. Young voices should not be treated as endlessly renewable instruments. Repeatedly forcing children to shout above environmental noise can encourage inefficient vocal production and unnecessary strain. A competition should not reward the child who can produce the loudest sound under the most difficult conditions. It should reward interpretation, ensemble, musicality, articulation, expression, discipline, and artistic control. If the acoustic conditions make those qualities difficult to assess, perhaps the problem is not with the performers but with the design of the event.

I am not arguing that cultural performances should be hidden inside elite theatres where only a small and privileged audience can watch them. Quite the opposite. I strongly believe that culture should be public. Children should perform. Communities should have access to the arts. Cultural activities should not be confined to formal institutions. But democratizing culture does not mean placing every performance in a commercial environment. We need to be more imaginative about public cultural spaces. Schools can become performance venues. Libraries can host readings. Public parks can host carefully designed cultural programs. Community centers can become stages. Museums, universities, local government spaces, theaters, plazas, and cultural centers can accommodate different forms of performance. We should be expanding the geography of culture rather than simply transferring it to the nearest commercial establishment.

I also think we need to reconsider the obsession with audience size. There is a tendency to measure the success of cultural events by the number of people who happened to pass by. A mall can produce impressive numbers because thousands of people move through it every day. But cultural participation cannot always be measured through foot traffic. One hundred people sitting quietly and listening carefully may provide a more meaningful audience than a thousand people who happen to walk past while shopping. A performance is not successful merely because it has been photographed by many people. Its success should also be measured by whether the audience listened, whether the performers were able to communicate, and whether the artistic work was experienced as art rather than as background entertainment.

This is why I hesitate when I see schools and cultural organizations enthusiastically accepting every invitation to perform in malls simply because the venue promises exposure. We should be more discerning. We should ask what the children need. We should ask what the art requires. We should ask whether the sound system is appropriate. We should inspect the acoustics. We should consider audience orientation. We should examine whether the space permits concentration. We should ask whether the event schedule gives performers enough preparation and rest. We should determine whether the venue respects the artistic character of the performance. The children should not have to adjust their art to the commercial logic of the venue.

Perhaps we should also stop assuming that malls are automatically public spaces simply because everyone is allowed to enter them. A mall is a privately operated commercial environment whose fundamental purpose is commerce. Cultural activities can certainly take place there, but we should understand the relationship clearly. When culture enters the mall, it enters a space structured around consumption. That does not make the activity illegitimate, but it should make us more conscious about what we are doing. Are we bringing culture into a commercial space because it genuinely benefits the cultural activity, or because the mall provides free visibility and convenient crowds? Are we making culture more accessible, or are we making the mall appear more culturally relevant? These questions deserve honest discussion.

The solution, however, is not simply to condemn malls. That would be too easy, and frankly, it would not solve the problem. Commercial spaces can be valuable partners in cultural development. The more constructive approach is to establish clearer standards. If malls want to host cultural competitions, they should provide appropriate acoustics, proper staging, controlled sound levels, adequate performer preparation areas, seating arrangements that encourage attentive viewing, and technical personnel who understand the needs of the performance. Organizers, meanwhile, should have the courage to decline venues that do not meet the artistic requirements of the activity. Cultural partnerships should be negotiated, not merely accepted.

And perhaps most importantly, we should teach young performers that volume is only one element of expression. The most powerful moment in a verse choir may not be the loudest one. It may be the whispered line that suddenly forces the audience to lean forward. It may be the pause before a collective declaration. It may be the contrast between an individual voice and the entire ensemble. It may be the carefully controlled crescendo that has been rehearsed dozens of times. These moments require an audience that listens and a venue that allows listening. Without those conditions, we risk reducing a sophisticated performance tradition into what I would call Sabayang Pagsigaw—collective shouting mistaken for collective artistic expression.

I want our children to perform in spaces where they can discover the full possibilities of their voices. I want them to learn that art does not have to scream to be important. I want them to experience the discipline of quietness, the beauty of restraint, the precision of ensemble, and the intelligence of interpretation. I want teachers to be able to hear whether their students are improving. I want judges to evaluate artistry rather than survival. I want audiences to sit down, listen, and understand that these young people have spent weeks or months preparing something that deserves more than a few seconds of attention between shopping and eating.

So perhaps we need to reconsider our enthusiasm for bringing every cultural competition into the mall. Not every public activity needs to happen in a commercial space simply because that is where people gather. If we truly want to bring culture to the public, then let us build and strengthen public cultural spaces where the public can gather for culture itself. Let us make schools, libraries, theaters, museums, universities, plazas, community centers, and cultural institutions active stages again. Let us create spaces where children do not have to shout over commercial announcements just to be heard.

The irony is that the mall may give a performance an audience, but the wrong environment can prevent that audience from truly listening. And if our goal is cultural education, artistic development, and meaningful public engagement, then visibility alone is not enough. We should not ask children to shout louder simply because we have failed to give them a space where they can be heard. Our responsibility is not merely to put young performers in front of as many people as possible. Our responsibility is to give them the conditions in which their voices, their discipline, their literature, and their artistry can actually be experienced.

Because culture deserves a stage. Children deserve a stage. And sometimes, the most respectful thing we can do for a young voice is not to ask it to shout louder, but to create a space quiet enough for us to listen.

***

Noel Galon de Leon is a professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas. His poems have been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He serves as Secretary and a member of the NCLA Executive Council of the NCCA.