Kislap At Fuego And Children Of The Algo: When Folklore Meets The Feed At PETA

- January 26, 2026

Theater has a way of holding two timelines at once. One reaches backward into memory, myth, and history. The other presses forward, shaped by technology, urgency, and the present moment.

This January, the Philippine Educational Theater Association places those timelines side by side on its Main Theater stage. In the twinbill return of Kislap at Fuego and Children of the Algo, PETA’s Control + Shift initiative moves from the experimental margins into full view, inviting audiences to consider how love, revolution, identity, and Filipino values are shaped across generations.

Running from January 27 to February 7, 2026 at the PETA Theater Center, this double feature marks the return of two works that first emerged as exploratory pieces during Control + Shift LIVE in 2024. Their evolution into audience favorites and eventual showcase at Control + Shift: Changing Narratives Festival 2025 signaled something more than novelty. These were stories insisting on staying.

A Revolution Lit by Fire and Folklore

Written by Dominique La Victoria and directed by Maribel Legarda and J-mee Katanyag, with a Filipino adaptation by Gentle Mapagu, Kislap at Fuego unfolds as an unexpected fairytale set against the Philippine Revolution against Spain. At its center is a kapre and a country girl, figures drawn from myth and history, meeting in a moment charged by desire, danger, and the promise of change.

The play resists easy romanticism. Love here is bound up with rebirth and revolt, with questions about how personal longing intersects with collective struggle. Through movement, music, and ritual, Kislap at Fuego asks how stories of revolution are remembered, retold, and reimagined, especially when filtered through folklore that has survived generations of retelling.

CJ Navato and Kyle Napuli lead the cast as Ezequiel and Gabriela, joined by Ekis Gimenez and Carlon Matobato as ensemble. The production is shaped by a creative team that treats myth not as ornament, but as a living language that continues to shape how Filipinos talk about love, power, and transformation.

Life Inside the Algorithm

If Kislap at Fuego looks to the past to interrogate the present, Children of the Algo turns its gaze squarely on now.

Written by Mixkaela Villalon and directed by Johnnie Moran, the piece immerses audiences in the mediated world of Gen Z content creators. Here, identity is curated, justice is hashtagged, and meaning is constantly negotiated within the logic of platforms that reward visibility and punish complexity.

The play follows characters who perform versions of themselves online while quietly carrying truths that do not fit neatly into feeds or metrics. With wit and vulnerability, Children of the Algo challenges audiences to see beyond virality, to recognize the cost of living inside systems that monetize attention and flatten nuance.

Otep Madriaga, Nyla Festejo, James Pe Lim, and Frances Marie Akol anchor the cast, embodying characters caught between authenticity and performance. The result is a portrait of a generation navigating relevance, connection, and truth in real time, often under the pressure to always be seen and rarely be understood.

When Myth Meets the Feed

Presented as a twinbill, Kislap at Fuego and Children of the Algo speak to each other across centuries. Folklore stands beside feeds. Revolution brushes up against content creation. Together, they ask how Filipino values persist, adapt, or fracture across generations shaped by radically different tools and languages.

This pairing embodies the spirit of PETA’s Control + Shift initiative, which seeks to change narratives by placing old questions in new contexts. What does love look like in times of upheaval. How is resistance imagined today. Who controls the stories we tell about ourselves, and who benefits when those stories are simplified.

Rather than offering answers, the twinbill creates a space for reflection. Tradition and technology do not cancel each other out here. They collide, converse, and occasionally co-exist, revealing the tensions that define contemporary Filipino life.

Production Details

Kislap at Fuego and Children of the Algo
A twinbill presentation under PETA Control + Shift

Venue:
PETA Theater Center
Quezon City

Run: January 27 to February 7, 2026

Kislap at Fuego and Children of the Algo return as a twinbill at the PETA Theater Center, inviting audiences to witness how stories of fire, folklore, feeds, and algorithms continue to shape the Filipino imagination.

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