Ibalong Z Drew 12,500 People to a Bikol Epic in a Region Where 42,000 Learners Struggle to Read

Ibalong Z: A New Bikol Musical drew at least 12,500 people across six show schedules in Albay, most of them students, according to playwright and Bicol University theatre instructor Jobert Gray Landeza. The production ran on a budget its production manager calls too small for the demands of the show, with some rehearsals held in a venue with the air conditioning switched off.

Sixty surviving stanzas, three heroes, one kadunung

The Ibalong epic survives in 60 stanzas. It follows three hero-warriors of Bicol, Baltog, Handyong and Bantong, against creatures set on destroying the land and its people, and it carries influences from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

It was traditionally carried by a poet called a kadunung. The root word dunong means wisdom, so the title describes the job: a bard whose memory is the only place the epic exists. That’s the part worth holding onto. An oral epic doesn’t survive because it was written down. It survives because somebody kept saying it out loud.

Landeza’s stated aim isn’t the play itself. He wants people to go and read the original.

The literacy number sitting underneath Ibalong

In August 2026 the Second Congressional Commission on Education reported that at least 42,000 learners in the region struggle with reading, based on a rapid literacy assessment. Bicol ranks fourth among the country’s regions on that measure.

That reframes what a musical is doing here. Landeza’s argument is that a generation that won’t read ancient literature will still watch it performed in a language it already speaks, and that the play is a door rather than a substitute.

Whether it works is a separate question from whether it filled seats. 12,500 attendances is a real number. How many of those people went on to read the epic is not something anybody has counted.

The budget problem behind Bicol theatre

Production manager Julie DM Vega put the constraint plainly. The allocation was too small for what the production needed, rehearsal venues were hard to find, and the team sometimes worked without air conditioning.

Earlier Ibalong runs drew poorly, and the reasons given are the same ones: little public funding, thin support for local theatre, and few modern kadunungs able to retell the story at all. A regional epic with its own festival has been running on goodwill.

So the 12,500 figure cuts two ways. It’s evidence the audience exists. It’s also evidence of what the audience was nearly denied over a budget line.

What the account does not settle

• The actual budget. Too small is a judgement, not a figure. No peso amount appears, and no source for it.
• Who funded it. Whether the money came from the university, an LGU, the NCCA or ticket sales is unstated.
• How the 12,500 was counted. Attendances across six shows is not the same as 12,500 different people.
• Whether reading actually followed. The claim that the play sent people to the epic is a hope, and no measurement is offered.
• What EDCOM 2 measured. A rapid literacy assessment covering 42,000 learners needs its methodology and its denominator before the number means much.

What would answer it

The EDCOM 2 report itself, which is a public document and carries the assessment’s method. A line item for Ibalong Z in whichever budget carried it. And whether there’s a seventh run, because a production that filled six shows and still can’t fund rehearsal space is a policy question rather than an arts one.

The epic has outlasted worse than a funding gap. It survived on memory alone for centuries before anyone thought to write down the 60 stanzas we still have.

Source RAPPLER, reported 29 August 2026. Written from the original report.