Miguel Dobles

BY JOAQUIN A. SANTOS

Funny business is something we’re often told to cut out when things get serious, even more so when the stakes are high. Doctors, for example, are probably among the last people we’d want to engage in it. But for Miguel Dobles (4 BS LfSci), program awardee for the Life Sciences course, co-founder of Blue Bird Improv, and an aspiring doctor graduating summa cum laude, his special brand of funny business might just be worth an exception.

Duality

Dobs is a performer at heart. He first discovered theater in high school, and went on to become a member of Ateneo Blue Repertory throughout college. In his second year, he and his cousin Rafa Chua started a vibrant new comedy scene in Ateneo, which eventually turned into Blue Bird Improv. He also led the Talksand-Tours Core of the 2019 Freshman Orientation Seminar, and while this wasn’t a performance in the formal sense, welcoming thousands of nervous freshman must be an art in its own right.

Underpinning all of these adventures is a special sense for making connections—a skill he learned from his family from a young age. “It’s all about people, you know? It’s about the audience, about you, and the people with you on stage,” he says.

But this appreciation for the performing arts actually came later in life. Raised on dreams of becoming an astronaut and a zookeeper, Dobs’ first love was the sciences. It’s a fascination that has only grown throughout the years and become inseparable from his vision for the future. As he got older, he nourished this in concert with learning to treasure connections with people through the arts. 27 When the time came to set a course for his future, becoming a doctor was the path that allowed both sides of his identity to flourish. “When people hear the phrase ‘perform surgery,’ it’s usually just a verb. But then I thought ‘Hey, there’s [actually] an art to it.’ Medicine is also an art, not just a science,” says Dobs.

Scenes from a hat

Although he set his sights on a career in medicine, Dobs made it a point to continue doing things his way. The disciplines he would develop in class offered a tried-and-tested route to medical school, and with that in place, he had some room to, well, improvise. The beginnings of the Blue Bird Improv group trace back to Dobs’ high school days, when he and Rafa became big fans of the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway (1998). After trying their hand at slam poetry and improvised songwriting, they jumped into a workshop at the Manila Improv Festival in 2015. “We didn’t even know it was a thing” Dobs adds with a laugh. “We were just some kids but, well, what the heck? We stuck with it.” What began as an alien concept to the Ateneo community found roots in a moderator and a group of curious students and, by 2019, grew into a full-fledged org. On the surface, improv appears to be a foil to the technicalities of medicine, but the form offers a glimpse into the consonance of art and science. “People just think it’s unstructured, but it’s actually not,” he points out. “I like to compare it to dance. You can learn the skills even if you had two left feet at the start. If you practice, you can do it, no matter what kind of person you are.” Under his leadership, Blue Bird Improv has explored its potential to entertain and educate. In October 2019, the group staged Wet and Wildlife, a show dedicated to raising environmental awareness. Recently, they’ve also ventured into consultancy work for the school’s student organizations, using improv skills to drive organizational development. Because of its unique mix of creative performance and structure, Dobs embraces the form as a very personal expression of his own love for both art and science. “I just feel like I am myself, you know? I’m doing what I want to do and what I have to do,” he shares. Dobs’ experience in Ateneo has challenged him to excel on the fly. Despite being thrust in between two passions, both equally demanding and rewarding in their own right, he couldn’t feel more at home. “I can tell you that the past four years were truly my own and not because of the med school that is to follow...I enjoyed it for what it is and not what it’s supposed to become,” he says. Simply put, Dobs is studying life in books, labs, and experiences, and he’s having a lot of fun along the way, too. How much of it is by design and how much by good timing and a little luck? We’ll never know. The beauty of it is that Dobs has become so good at improvising that we can’t tell the difference. Miguel