C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes...

The narrator of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince described an imaginary place of sorrow and detachment beyond anyone’s reach—the land of tears—as he was unable to console the Little Prince. One finds this distant space amidst the struggles of the Other, someone exiled from the status quo upon which power dynamics cause the mystification of difference. On another tangent, there also lies a Divine “Other,” the sacred idealization of a distant entity. Interrogating layered interpretations of the Other, this work juxtaposes Tagalog Biblical text, spatialized instrumentation, and the syngergy of interactions (and exclusions) between the performers. From this spatiality emerges a lamentation as a response to such Othering, as if one sings the prophet Jeremiah’s “funeral song on top of a barren hill.”