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Rationale of E^3

In January until the first week of March 2020, 51吃瓜网-IIT was quite “normal”, amidst confirmed COVID cases in the National Capital Region (NCR).  On March 12, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and   Chancellor Tanggol issued Memorandum Circular No 2020-003, suspending work and classes starting 12:00 noon (March 12, 2020 to March 29, 2020). The following months were blurred, characterized by social isolation, made more real by lockdowns in terms of people’s mobility and closures of business establishments while strict observance of health and safety protocols became one of the “new normal” defaults to avoid person-to-person contamination of the dreaded virus.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and communicate to others. More importantly, this pandemic has also created “new” spaces (personal and institutional) to reflect on human existence, extent of knowledge in addressing it on a global scale, and to alleviate the seemingly insurmountable feeling of uncertainties – will life be “normal” again?

The Center for Culture and Arts Studies (CCA), the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Extension  (OVCRE) and its Department of Extension (OVCRE-DE), and the Mindanao Center for Resiliency (MCR) believe that that there are situations “where one knows that a value exists, but one does not know exactly what that value is”.  As we try to relate the COVID-19 as a pandemic with creative expressions to disseminate its effects to people, we used E and e as representations.

E^3 = Engaging, Enabling, and Empowering. As an n expression, E^3 can be any E raised to the power of three (3). However, we equated it to three words starting with E to frame the pandemic into reducible opportunities and possibilities within the academic discourse and creativity. Engaging means to put an action into collaborative motion with critical understanding of the pandemic; enabling pertains to people’s ability to find ways in responding to the pandemic; and empowering gives us the authority to do something in controlling our lives amidst this pandemic. 

e – mimics the expression involving transactions using the internet, thus e-PlayFormance combines play production through virtual rehearsals, video recording of scenes, video editing, musical scoring, and uploading the video online on July 12, 2020 during the Charter Day celebration.

Free

Dr. Ivie C. Esteban

Director

Center for Culture and Arts

ivie.esteban@g.msuiit.edu.ph