Anteroom Sessions 2 & bringing Cubao X back to life

Jen of Punchdrunk Panda shares her “abbreviated” thoughts on Anteroom Sessions 2, which was was held at Cubao X last March 31, 2012.
She would be overjoyed if you read until the end. :)

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Anteroom Sessions 2: A celebration of creativity & passion
A novel by Jen Horn 

I don’t even know how to begin writing about Anteroom Sessions 2 by Punchdrunk Panda & Heima.
I get goose bumps thinking about Anteroom Sessions and what I feel we achieve when we put it together.

But I guess I can start with A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who helped make Anteroom Sessions 2 such a happy, heart-warming, memorable event. My current Punchdrunk Panda team is little, but through our collaboration with so many other groups and individuals, and with help from people we’ve worked with before, we managed to pull off yet another Anteroom Sessions.

Thanks to Heima for co-presenting the event with us, whose store interiors also inspired us to create our tent decor. One day, we hope to have a PdP office/store that evokes similar feelings of I-wanna-stay-here-forever. Special shout-out to Bong & Madel!

We would also like to thank our inspiring and happiness-inducing performers: DJ Only Revolutions, Tarsius, Gentle Universe, Slow Hello, Love Never Dies, Ang Bandang Shirley, The Strangeness, Techy Romantics & DJ Joey Santos, for pursuing their musical inclinations and sharing that with us last Saturday. We hope that Anteroom Sessions 2 helped more people discover your talent and realize how awesome our local indie music scene is. :D

Many thanks to our fellow pop-up shops: Agos, Artwork, Electromagnetic Tentacle, Junk Studio, KLoi’s N KLay’s, MaPapel, Moonleaf Tea Shop, Sophie’s Mom, Ukay Alalay, Vesti, Vnaltik, Yuki who also decided to come on board with us and showcase their wares. You are proof of Pinoy ingenuity, wit and resourcefulness. :)

Thank you also to Red House Productions’ Patrick Vinalay & Nailen Garalde, and to Chyna Lo for creating the webisodes for our skimmer design teams, whose skimmer designs we launched that night. You can check out all the webisodes at Punchdrunk Panda’s YouTube.

Thank you to PdP artists OJ Desuasido, Joseph Velasquez, Rob Cham, Tof Zapanta & Ge Mapa for creating Anteroom Sessions 2 gig posters, which were also exhibited during the event. So happy to have such passionate and talented people like you in our pool of our artists!

Of course, I would like to thank my PdP team, Nica Kim, Pauline Santillan, and Steph Yu for putting up with my abuse. Haha! I commend you guys for being at the venue since morning, helping me setup and prep (long before the event proper), and perhaps silently praying with me as I asked the heavens to let the rain keep pouring down in the morning so it would stop by afternoon. (It was literally flooding in the street in front of Heima that morning. Thankfully, we were only inconvenienced by a little rain in the late afternoon.) These ladies were standing up pretty much the whole time too and were hungry, thirsty, and undoubtedly tired at the end of the night, but I still saw the smiles on their faces. I love you, guys! You have no idea.

Thank you also to Jonver David & Joseph Velasquez, former members of my PdP team but always part of the bigger PdP family, for helping around with various things: moving the PdP booth, keeping things dry, setting up the projector, looking for my co-host Thysz, who also did a smashing job, while I ran around like a headless chicken, bouncing around from the stage, to the Punchdrunk Panda booth, to the other pop-up shops, to the Cubao X gate when (horror of horrors!) they prevented people from coming in during Earth Hour.

By George was it a tiring day/night, but oh so worth all the beads of sweat and severe leg cramps and muscle pain that I am still experiencing right now due to fatigue. When I get thanks from the event performers and pop-up shops for the opportunity to be a part of the Anteroom Sessions project my heart swells, and I just feel that we are as indebted to YOU guys as well. So, THANK YOU SO MUCH.

We created Anteroom Sessions for people to discover and celebrate Filipino talent and creativity in design/art (through our own products, our gig poster exhibit, and all other pop-up shops), music (through our performers), and film (through our webisodes), and if we were able to achieve a bit of that through our efforts, then we are happy pandas. Our product launch was just a good excuse to throw a party for you all.

I also have to thank EVERYONE who joined us at Anteroom Sessions 2. Even if you are not among the people that I singled out above, thank you so much for coming to support the event, for giving local indie music the recognition it deserves, buying proudly Pinoy-made products, and helping bring life back to Cubao X!

It’s weird that I’m feeling tears welling up in my eyes (Agh! Sorry for being such a girl. Oh wait, I AM one), but I can’t help but feel that we did good with Anteroom Sessions 2. Aaaand…goose bumps again. Agh! I’m just so happy!! I cannot even begin to express in words the high I am still on from all the good vibes from Anteroom Sessions 2. I guess some might say that we’ve come a long way from the first Anteroom Sessions at Moonleaf Tea Shop in September 3, 2011, but this sustained, ineffable happiness is not much different from what I felt after that.

I will be forever grateful to everyone who’s just been so game to humor our little ideas, collaborating with us and making these crazy seeds grow into something bigger and better than we initially imagine.

We hope you all had a blast, and that you will be with us if (or when) we put together another Anteroom Sessions some day.

Your happy headless chicken,
Jen a.k.a. Nomad Manager