EDITORIAL - The Sinulog is what we are

A Sinulog dance contest judge says expensive costumes and elaborate steps do not guarantee victory and is urging future participants to go back to the basics. Whether he meant less expensive costumes and more traditional steps, we do not know.

What we do know is that the Sinulog is truly a difficult thing to judge and it is a testament to the skill and expertise of the judges that they are still able to come up with a credible decision on who should win year after year.

The Sinulog is a specific dance. It has specific steps -- two steps forward and one step backward -- or so it is supposed to be. And the costumes naturally have to conform to a specific time in our history as the Sinulog is a historical event as it is cultural or religious.

This specificity is what makes the Sinulog dance contest very difficult to judge because here you have contestants dancing practically the same steps to basically the same tune or drum beat and wearing essentially similar costumes and using typically similar props.

How in heaven can you differentiate one from the other? How do you distinguish a winning presentation from one that is merely just going through the motions. Hence, it is always a necessity to doff our hats to the judges for doing what would have been nearly impossible for us.

And just as it is with the Sinulog festival, so it is with the many other festivals held all over the Philippines. Many of these hardly depart from one another in form and in substance. The main difference that distinguishes them apart is the locality where they are held and also the name with which they are called.

But even that must eventually come together in the end because we are all one people and one country. There is only one single and solitary root from where springs the explosion of pomp and pageantry depicting the different aspects of our being.

The Sinulog has been around for several decades. Nothing much has changed except the faces of those who dance them, and the number of people who gather to watch and revel. Yet each year, winners must emerge because they must. How only the judges know. Yet we trust them because we know they know.

Nobody questions the choices because while winning may seem everything it really is not everything. If winning is everything, past winners would not keep coming back to tempt fate and risk losing. Winning is not everything. But the Sinulog is. Otherwise we would have stopped dancing.