Unity Dance Puts Iloilo Devotion First

There’s something quietly radical about ending a cutthroat street-dance showdown with a noncompetitive “unity dance.”

Right after tribes spend months chasing precision, points, and bragging rights, about 700 dancers are expected to move as one at the Iloilo Sports Complex in a single offering to Señor Santo Niño.

That order matters.

It tells the crowd, and maybe the organizers themselves, that Dinagyang is still a panata first and a spectacle second, even when the drums are loud and the grandstands are packed.

This is not a sentimental point, because the festival has grown into a real economic machine with real money and real pressure around it.

The Iloilo Festivals Foundation Inc. has raised the financial subsidy for each of the seven competing tribes to PHP 2.3 million, up from PHP 1.7 million in 2025, precisely because competing at this level costs a lot.

Hotels feel the pull, too, with reports ahead of Dinagyang 2025 showing at least 2,400 bookings about 10 days before the event, roughly 80 percent of the city’s hotel accommodations, even before counting some short-stay platforms.

When you mix cash, crowds, and pride, festivals can drift toward pure performance, so a “cultural circuit breaker” like the unity dance is a smart correction.

But it should not stay symbolic.

If fierce artistic rivals from different districts can synchronize to one beat, the rest of Iloilo City’s institutions can stop pretending coordination is impossible.

We already have a practical model in the festival’s 2026 overhaul, which cuts judging areas to two venues to ease congestion and expand viewing space.

Media reports also say seating is expected to rise by about 3,000, and the Sports Complex can accommodate roughly 7,000 people, which is the kind of planning discipline we keep begging for in everyday governance.

The unity dance should be the image that haunts every agency meeting: one rhythm, one plan, no excuses.

There’s also a long-game cultural move here that deserves more attention than the usual “grand finale” hype.

The push to institutionalize a Dinagyang “lexicon” of steps is essentially an attempt to protect cultural intellectual property before it gets diluted into generic festival choreography.

Codification, done well, keeps Dinagyang recognizably Ilonggo 50 years from now, when trends change and tastes move on.

Done poorly, it becomes gatekeeping, or worse, an aesthetic that borrows Indigenous imagery without real accountability to the people it claims to represent.

So here’s the fair ask: if we are formalizing a lexicon, formalize the ethics with it, through documentation, proper attribution, community consultation, and partnerships that go beyond costume and soot.

And then there’s the most democratic part of this year’s pitch: the festival is spreading out.

The calendar runs from Jan. 10 to 25, with novena masses from Jan. 16 to 25, and major public moments like the fluvial and foot processions.

Kasadyahan is set for Jan. 24, 2026, and Dinagyang proper is on Jan. 25, 2026, which matters for planning and crowd control, not just for hype.

Decentralizing is good, but only if the city matches it with basics: transport plans, clean toilets, medical readiness, trash collection, and clear, public information.

Festivals can lift a local economy, but they can also expose how fragile systems are when stress-tested, and the tourism sector learned that the hard way during the pandemic, when one study cited an estimated PHP 170.5 billion in earnings loss for Philippine tourism.

Dinagyang’s unity dance is a beautiful ending, but the more important question is what kind of unity we practice when the music stops.