Seven years since her last Palanca award in 2015, Associate Professor Dr. Layeta Bucoy is back in the winners’ circle in the 2022 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. This time she bags not one but two prizes in two categories and in two languages: First Prize in Full-length Play (English) for ‘Orgullo Compound’ and Second Prize in One-act Play (Filipino) for ‘Dance of the Foolies.’ These two awards bring to eight Dr. Bucoy’s total Palanca wins.
Both plays were inspired by scientific researches, specifically in nanoscience, as part of Dr. Bucoy’s continuing effort to dramatize scientific researches and develop what she has since termed as nanopoetics of drama. The plays were first developed for her dissertation entitled “Nanopoetics of Drama: The Rise of Three Full-length Plays from Research on Arsenic and Nanosilica from Rice Hull Ash of the University of the Philippines Los Baños Nanoscience and Technology Facility and Analytical and Instrumentation Science Laboratory”.
Dr. Bucoy began work on this pioneering poetics for her MFA thesis which focuses on dramatizing research breakthroughs in biotechnology. This new poetics, she explains, dramatizes a given scientific paper by locating its scientific principles in Aristotelian complex and complete human action through contextualization and metaphorization.
For the one-act play ‘Dance of the Foolies,’ Dr. Bucoy got inspiration from the researches on nanosilica by now retired CAS professor Dr. Milagros M. Peralta and her research team, particularly the papers “Effects of Nanosilica Powder from Rice Hull Ash on Seed Germination of Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum)” and “Growth and Yield of Tomato Applied with Silicon Supplements with Varying Material Structures.”
Intrigued by how small particles such as nanosilica powder can penetrate target materials such as tomato in this case, Dr. Bucoy applied the principle in the play where she dramatizes how the incompetent can penetrate the halls of power surreptitiously.
Similarly, the First Prize winner Orgullo Compound was inspired by two papers on nanotechnology by a team that also includes Dr. Peralta along with CAS faculty Dr. Alvin Karlo Tapia. These are “Effect of nano-SiO2 from rice hull ash on the conductivity of cement paste" and “Investigation on Performance of Epoxy Coated Steels with Nano-SiO2 and Polyaniline Composite Using Complex Impedance Spectroscopy.” In both papers, the addition of nanosilica from RHA in epoxy coating and cement paste pellet increased the material’s durability in terms of resistance to corrosion and in terms of electrical conductivity. The play picked up on these findings and goes on to dramatize how the system benefits from welcoming and nurturing small endeavors.
Dr. Bucoy teaches Playwriting, ARTS 1, and other writing courses at the Department of Humanities. She was UP Artist from 2013 through 2019, and was UPLB Outstanding Alumna in Culture and the Arts in 2019.