Oral Presentation. 65th International Federation for Theatre Research Conference Annual Conference 2023.

ABSTRACT. The Ati-Atihan, held in the town of Kalibo on Panay Island, is often described in popular literature as the Philippine Mardi Gras, blended with the veneration of the Santo Niño (the Child Jesus). The festival features a series of impassioned dances called sad-sad (loosely, to jump to the beat of the drum). The weeklong dancing culminates on a weekend with a cultural dance competition among the people of Panay Island. The groups competing for the grand prize apply soot to their faces and extremities to appear like the ati, the so-called first inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. The devotion is believed to date back to the 17th century and to have been introduced by the Spanish colonizers. Nonetheless, the dance competition was only introduced in 1972. The history of the weeklong festival is obscure. To the people of Kalibo, both the dance competition and the devotion not only honor the Santo Niño but also respectfully acknowledge their ancestors, the ati. To historians, the modern festival is attributed to the epic Maragtas, which literally means the History of the Great People. Written by the local poet Pedro Alcantara Monteclaro, Maragtas draws on written and oral sources available to him, making it debatable whether it is purely fictional. Fiction or not, the presentation argues that mythmaking through performance is an act of decolonization. It is an act of strategic essentialism that reroutes cultural memory outside the narrative of the colonizers or the mainstream historical discourse. In the end, the Ati-Atihan is presented as a counter-narrative to the archived descriptions written by the Hispanic chroniclers and annotators about the colonized people as savages.