Creating festivals like Sinulog

A Paulita Roa

 FESTIVALS are designed mostly to create cultural pride and can be powerful enough to control social settings. It is also aimed to build a lucrative tourist market around it. For over three decades, we saw the rise of festivals around the country that promote and showcase the cultural heritage of the town, city and province. It is usually the local government in partnership with the regional tourism office, cultural stakeholders,civic leaders and the educational sector that are responsible for organizing the town festival.

The concept and theme of the festival are culled from local narratives, historical sources, customs, religious traditions, natural heritage and other forms of cultural practices. After the research is done, the name and theme of the festival are chosen in a way that it can stir public memory, create a sense of cultural pride and garner approval and full support from the community.

Festival presentations like street dancing, reenactment of an important historical event and rituals are open to the public and usually performed in open spaces like streets, parks and sports centers. Hundreds and even thousands of participants are clad in colorful and exotic  costumes are considered an important ingredient for its success as well as its biggest tourist attraction.

A prime example of a successful festival that is taken frame a local religious tradition is the Sinulog Festival of Cebu City. This event will take place this year on the 17th of January. As the story goes, this was started in the early 1980s by three young travel guides who conceived the idea of organizing a street dance presentation cum religious procession that they called the “Sinulog” as a way of honoring the country’s oldest Catholic icon, the Santo Nino de Cebu on his feast day every third Sunday of January.

The street dance is a loose interpretation of the traditional one that old Cebuanas performed for decades where they hold a replica of the statue and took turns in putting it on top of their heads, while dancing and chanting “Pit Senyor!” The festival became a huge success for it appealed to the devotees who came mostly from the Visayas and Mindanao every January to pray or fullfil a vow at the Basilica de Santo Nino in Cebu City.

Eventually, the Sinulog Foundation was formed and it successfully transformed the festival to a grand extravaganza with thousands of dancers and musicians clad in lavish costumes as they compete for the multi million peso cash prizes. Many observed that the festival has morphed to be more like a Mardi Gras meets Bollywood affair with religious undertones as images of the Sto. Nino in varying sizes are carried by dancers or decorated in floats. Movie stars and political luminaries now join the Sinulog. Chants of “Pit Senyor” still reverberate throughout the major streets of Cebu city on that special day. After more than 30 years, the Sinulog Festival has consistently maintain its popularity and is one of the major festivals of the country.