Minda News – Felimon Blanco
I spent 28 days in Mumbai, India working on a collaborative theatre workshop with Actor?s Cult, a theatre company founded by graduates of India?s National School of Drama (NSD). The project, funded by Arts Network Asia (ANA), was a collaborative theatre workshop working on a play about a transsexual subject from the Philippines and a eunuch from India.
Leslie Nanolan, who is currently at the Misamis Occidental Provincial Jail in Cagayan de Oro City, became my transsexual woman subject for this project. (Her drug-related trial is still ongoing for the last 3 years now.) I visited her for days to get to know her story. Leslie worked for seven years as a female singer in Taipei, before she decided to undergo the sex change in 1990. Her life is a story of what-I-call ?rags to riches and riches to rags. ? Leslie is Higaonon, a lumad from Talacag, Bukidnon who went to big cities in search of a luxurious life. She worked as a dishwasher, beauty parlor cleaner, manicurist, and beautician, and went on to become a sensational ?female? singer who travelled to Sydney, Guam, Beijing and Taipei.