Some people simply look at the world. Akira Franco Tanglao-Aguas ’27 looks after it, noticing the small, ordinary moments that make people who they are.
As an honors theater and sociology & anthropology major, he learned to study people in two ways: as an observer who tries to understand them, and as an actor who tries to embody them. Watching and becoming, for him, are two halves of the same breath. And like any breath, it began with rhythm.
Akira’s father, a professor of theater and Asian American studies, specializes in Balinese performance, including Kecak. Kecak is a chant that was born as an ancient spiritual trance ritual called the Sanghyang and later reshaped into a telling of the Ramayana — a Sanskrit epic poem — for outside audiences. “He would be teaching Kecak, and I’d be sitting in his lap while he did the chants…chak, chak, chak, chak,” Akira said. “That’s probably my earliest memory of being exposed to any form of theater.”
It seems fitting that his first exposure to theater was a communal one, where everyone was both an active participant and observer in Kecak. Fitting, too, that it was a form carried from one world into another, the kind of translation he would one day study.
Long before he could study it, though, theater was simply part of home. He and his sisters would run up and down the theater aisles during his father’s rehearsals and go to see shows he directed. At home, the siblings would stage productions of their own. Once, they performed a musical “Humpty Dumpty” in which Akira tumbled from a bunk bed. “It wasn’t very high; we practiced actor safety, don’t worry,” he assured me with a smirk.
“It was always there, and it was always fun,” he added. “It’s always been something almost like play.”
For years, play was enough. Then, in a performance theory course with Professor Isaiah Wooden, a class we took together, the stage opened into something deeper. Akira recalled the moment that it all shifted: “Oh, this is something you can actually study and learn from academically.” Still, he won’t let it grow too heavy. “Theater can only be so serious. It’s called a play because you play.”
In that class, his two majors came into conversation with one another. Akira, now writing his thesis on theater-making in the Philippines, found that anthropology and acting sometimes ask for the same kind of attention.
“In anthropology, there’s this idea of cultural relativism, and it goes hand in hand with thick description,” he explained. “You’re trying to understand as much as possible the people you’re studying, and their practices from their point of view. It’s a very actor-y way of going about things, understanding your character’s motivations, why they might do things in certain moments.”
Among the first works he met in Wooden’s class was “The Couple in the Cage,” in which two artists displayed themselves in a cage as members of an “undiscovered” population, turning the museum’s gaze back on its visitors. “It very directly addresses what it means to write an account of another culture as an outsider, and to present it to others,” he said, “and the implications of producing work about other groups of people, especially marginalized people.”
Who is watching, and who is being watched? Once Akira began asking that question, he found performance everywhere, even in professional wrestling, the subject of two of his final papers that semester. “Anything and everything can be considered performance, depending on how we present ourselves outwardly, whether it’s in the personal or public sphere,” he said.
This fall, ethnography and theater meet in a single theatrical figure: Vanya. In the senior company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” opening Dec. 4th, Akira will be playing the titular role. “Chekhov looks at everyday life and explores the interesting parts of the mundane and the boring,” he said. “When you’re doing an ethnography of a group of people, you’re doing the same thing. You’re just looking into the mundane.”
Though most of his work on campus has been as an actor, including playing Filch in “The Threepenny Opera” and performing in “Night of Scenes,” Akira increasingly sees himself as “a collaborator.” Looking back at his time in “Bartók’s Monster,” the cast never called themselves actors.
“We were always movers,” he explained. During the performance, he remembers walking backward across the stage in a line, waiting to feel a tap before turning around. “You just have to sync up and put that trust in other people,” he laughed and continued. “It’s such a silly experience, but it’s also the most locked-in I’ve been on a show.”
In that silence, watching became a way of listening with his whole body. With no lines to guide him, Akira had to sense the movers around him, their pace, their spacing, the tap that told him to turn, until the whole line moved as one. Like the Kecak circle of his childhood, it was theater built by a community, bringing him back, once again, to the word he keeps returning to: collaborator.
When I asked what advice he would give the students coming after him, Akira said to try everything, from auditions to design and dramaturgy classes, which he wishes he had taken more of himself. But more importantly, “Take classes with Isaiah Wooden. He’s a GOAT,” he said. “Still, be mindful of your own time, and that you exist as a student, not just whatever artist you’re trying to be right now. Theater is a lot of time and a lot of fun. It’s always worth it until it’s not. And that’s for you to figure out.”
Professor Wooden often likes to quote a line from Samuel Beckett: “The end is in the beginning.” For Akira, it rings true. The child in the circle, chanting from his father’s lap, is still there, still watching, still collaborating and, above all, still playing.
