Arnel Francis

My years of studying Linguistics offered me the windows of fathoming dance. Like verbal language, I came to understand more its structure- the morpheme it offers and the semantics it conveys. The Chomskyan in me is just starting and I suppose I may “structuralize” it. When I first came to learn the formal “words” of dance, I was mesmerized by the selective high-sounding ones. Later did I know that the meaning of Modern Dance could oppose yet equal the beauty of Classical Ballet. Like a child babbling its first words, I mustered a few and began lavishing it, augmenting my lexicon. But it was still a raw battle for LEARNING. I felt I only knew its derivational properties and not the inflectional side of it. Come to think of it, a second language sprouted just when the first language was still substandard. When my vocabulary grew to a handful ones, I realize the functions of each and how it could be used in a sentence called dance phrase. Now the theories I cling to...

I am now a confirmed LECTURER!...an arduous task built on what we call DETERMINATION. The evening my doctoral professor, Dr. Riceli Mendoza offered me the job through an internet chat, the urge to ask her..”WHY me?” was kept at the back of my mind. It was four weeks away and the idea of me becoming a RESOURCE PERSON for a two-day seminar was a scary joke… I have never made a seminar in my entire life and it is not only a seminar but a “Seminar-Workshop”… Giving it a thought, I said why not? I immediately rummaged resources from the internet, skimmed on what was available on my booklists and “designed” on what was to be the SCENARIO..Suddenly, flashes of ‘what if’s ‘ adorned my idealistic fancy and imagined myself with the ambition. I need to make it. The problem of creating activities seconded my worries on how I could SUFFICE my heterogeneous attendees. I was told that teachers and English-major students would be my participants and “jury”. The idea of both teachers and stud...