Gi-ok sa pasalamat: Cortes’ native dance to Santo Niño

It is Sinulog season across the Visayan islands.

If every once in a while, thunderous beats wake you from the stupor of the holidays, it is because somewhere nearby, communities are in the boil of preparations for the most festive time of year, in the region.

Sinulog, a pagan dance ritual patterned after the forward and backward swirling of the tides passing through the Visayan islands, has become an adopted religious dance performed to seek the Holy Child’s intercession, to thank the child God for blessings and favors granted.

Sangpit sa Señor (Call on the Lord) shortened to “Pit Señor,” reverberate after every end of the music bar, and the choreographed waving of hands is a trademark for non-dancers joining the festival.

Here, lavishly-costumed dancers, parade through the streets, dancing and hoisting the image of the Santo Nino, while percussion musicians improvise and introduce the un-mistakeable and yet borrowed mardigras beat into the native dance.

But, did you know that in several areas in Bohol, a different kind of pagan dance rests dormant in the memory of the old, and could still stir and wake to the right beat?

Gi-ok, roughly translates to feet-threshing to separate the harvested rice grain from the bunch.

In pre-Hispanic rice producing communities like Camayaan in old Cortes, after a good harvest, communities gather, step into elevated wooden platforms for the job.

As workers lay the harvested bunch heavy with grains on the platform, people climb up and literally tread on the grains to force them off the bunch. Slits in the platform’s floor allow the grains to drop and be collected below, while people continue to trample on the un-separated grains.

To keep their balance in the platform, those who tread on the grains hold on to a hand rail, while one hand works as a sail to keep their balance

To get the most grains off, they grind and twist their soles on the bunch, creating a unique dance step: giok.

Made then as a dance of thanksgiving for the bountiful harvest and offered to a pagan child god called ‘Ay Sanu,’ gi-ok dancers mimic the processes of planting and harvesting, with the twisting as the main feet movement, recalls Monico Ligan, a septuagenarian gi-ok dancer in an interview decades ago.

But how did the pagan dance get to be brought to the church?

According to old people from nearby Tupas and Viga in Antequera, the usual harvest thanksgiving to the child god is in January, and it coincides with the feast of the Santo Nino, which incidentally is also the Holy Child.

As most of the villagers would rather stay in their fields for the gi-ok thanks giving, missionary priests urged the people to bring the community and the thanksgiving to the new town center in Cortes, so they can dance in front of the Holy Child.

Danced to the beat of the gimbaw; a native wooden drum topped with a stretched goat skin, brass gong and bamboo tingko (kuratong-baleleng), the unmistakeable bom-bo-lo-om-bo-om-bom fills the entire festival grounds as dancers spill into the stone church’s puerta mayor lorded over by the Santo Nino Principe.

And here, people do not dance before the red vested Santo Niño unlike the ones in Cebu.

Giok thanksgiving dancers perform before the Santo Niño, but the one in a Principe Legazpi costume: while breeches, black boots, black overcoat, and a tricorn hat: a strong statement of power and dominion over the natives.

A dance marathon that happens after the pontifical mass of the feastday of the Santo Niño de Cortes, gi-ok beats only stop when dancers run out.

Catch the possibly only surviving gi-ok dance of annual thanksgiving in Cortes, this Tuesday from 10 AM onwards. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)