Emotional Weather Reports: Online performance as affective practice in the MonoVlogs of Layeta Bucoy and Olivia Kristine Nieto

Abstract

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, playwright Layeta Bucoy and performance maker Olivia Kristine Nieto collaborated to produce what they call a MonoVlog. A portmanteau combining the terms ‘monologue' and ‘vlog', this form of brief, technologically mediated and completely online production aided Bucoy and Nieto to transmit various emotional and social weather reports from the privacy of Nieto’s home to the communal spaces of the Internet. Ranging from six to twenty-six minutes long, episodes of the MonoVlog feature Nieto wearing either special costumes or ordinary outfits; delivering before her web camera spiels layered with personal anecdotes, social commentaries, and thoughts on diverse matters; and initiating virtual conversations and interactions with her actual or make-believe spectators. First streamed via Facebook Live in March 2020, the MonoVlog is often hilarious, aimless, frivolous, satirical, and amateur in both form and content. But it can also be overtly or obliquely laced with critical insights, disturbing ironies, and subversive acts and utterances.

In this article, I make a case for the MonoVlog as a kind of performance and a performative practice that shows how Bucoy and Nieto sought to at once lay bare their affective states or structures of feeling and chronicle the social histories of their time. Despite or maybe because of their exhaustion, sadness, and despair in the pandemic-stricken Philippines, Bucoy and Nieto developed and deployed their MonoVlogs as testaments to how the Filipino people, while mired in the national consequences of a global health crisis (i.e. rising unemployment rates, ballooning prices of market commodities and diminishing quality of life in the country), continue to put up a fight, reach out to others and affirm their desires of participating in and contributing to a highly compromised but never vanquished public culture. Hence, as a response to a generation-defining period rife with political and pathological risks, these MonoVlogs show how Filipino performers and artists have asserted their will to live and demonstrated their agency not only to document everyday life but also imagine and, even more importantly, externalize creative modes of survival under conditions of suffering and emergency.