CHAPTER 1

PROBLEM AND ITS SCOPE

Rationale

“Festival is an expressive way to celebrate famous

heritage, culture and traditions.” (Hattours, 2018)

“The greatness of a culture can be found in its festival.”

(Katragadda, 2016). They play a vital role to add edifice to

our social lives, and connect us with our families and

backgrounds. They give us a diversion from our day to day,

exhausting routine of life, and give us some motivation to

remember the important things and moments in life.

Festivals were started to pass the legends, knowledge and

traditions onto the next generation. (Hattours, 2018)

All festivals are cultural in one way or another. There

are many types of cultural festivals such as National,

Religious and Seasonal. They all serve the purpose of

bringing happiness to our lives, and strengthen our sense of

community.
 When discussing the growth of festivals over time, we

should stress that already primal peoples had rituals similar

to today’s festivals (e.g. religious ones) and related to the

most significant moments in the life of a given tribe and its

individual members.

Festivals in the Philippines are lavished with color,

paved with history, and celebrated in communal bliss.

Whether it is a celebration of thanksgiving to a patron saint

for the community’s bountiful harvest or a commemorative of

what a region is most known for, Philippine festivals are

unquestionably one for the books (Sanigan, 2018). Through

good times and bad times, the fiesta must go on. Each city

and barrio has at least one local festival of its own, usually

on the feast of its patron saint, so that there is always a

fiesta going on somewhere in the country. The Philippines

has one of the richest cultures in the world especially in

terms of practices related to the predominant Catholic faith.

One practice which Filipinos inherited from Spain and

continue to celebrate up to the present time is that of

celebrating fiestas to commemorate the feast days of patron

saints. The fiesta, while not a uniquely Filipino tradition, is

one of the main cultural and religious events all over the

Philippines. The celebration of fiesta, which means feast, is

due to different influences that a specific place has adopted.

Fiesta’s are of the influences of Spain that has taken root in

the Philippines. (Living in the Philippines, 2018)

The province of Cebu is known to practice the tradition

of holding Sinulog Festival, a festival dance/street theatre

performed in a lively and strong percussion, trumpets, and

the native gongs, as their city celebration. Dancing has

always been a part of every festival in the country. There’s

one town, however, where the festival itself is rooted in it’s

patron saint Señor Santo Ñiño. Scattering Sinulog Festival

importance and history in the youth throughout Cebu can

make one selves aware that we have a culture that must be

preserved.

The purpose of this study is to know what Sinulog

Festival is. Sinulog Festival’s beauty and rich culture is the

main root for this research. The need of proper and accurate

description and information as the basis and standard in

considering the information provided by the researcher. This

includes different aspects of Sinulog Festival.