The month of January is considered the Sinulog season across the Visayas. Once in a while, thunderous beats wake you from the stupor of the holidays, as somewhere nearby, communities are in the thick 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 Visayas, has become a religious dance to seek the Holy Child’s intercession and thank God for blessings and favors granted.

Sangpit sa Señor (Call on the Lord), shortened to Pit Señor, reverberates after every end of the music bar, while the choreographed waving of hands is the trademark gesture of the festival spectators. 

Lavishly-costumed dancers parade through the streets, dancing while hoisting the image of the Santo Niño, while percussion musicians improvise and introduce the unmistakable and yet borrowed mardi gras beat into the native dance.

However, did you know that in several areas in Bohol, a different kind of pagan dance rests dormant in the memory of the old folks? This dance is called Gi-ok, which roughly translates to “feet-threshing” to separate the harvested rice grains.  

In pre-Hispanic rice-producing communities like Camayaan in the town of Cortes, after a good harvest, communities gather and step up on elevated wooden platforms for the feet-threshing. 

As workers lay the harvested bunch heavy with grains on the platform, people climb up and 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 on the platform continue to trample on the un-separated grains. 

To keep their balance on the platform, those who tread on the grains hold on to a handrail, 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: Gi-ok. 

Gi-ok has become a dance of thanksgiving for the bountiful harvest. Offered to a pagan child god called ‘Ay Sanu,’ Gi-ok dancers mimic the processes of planting and harvesting, with the twisting of the feet as the main movement, shared Monico Ligan, a septuagenarian Gi-ok dancer in an interview.

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

According to the old people from nearby Tupas and Viga in Antequera town, the usual harvest thanksgiving to the child god is done in January and it coincides with the feast of the Santo Niño. 

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

Gi-ok is 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 would spill into the stone church’s puerta mayor lorded over by the Santo Niño Principe. 

Unlike in Cebu, the people in Cortes do not dance before a red-vested Santo Niño. Instead, Gi-ok thanksgiving dancers perform before the Santo Niño clad in the Principe Legazpi costume featuring 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 feast day of the Santo Niño de Cortes, the Gi-ok beats only stop when the dancers run out. 

The Gi-ok dance of thanksgiving in Cortes town will be performed on January 16 from 10 a.m. onwards. (RAHC/PIA7 Bohol)