MY FRIENDS HAD LOOKED forward to the beach’s spell, but like most Aklan tenderfeet, they had been naïve to the spell being evoked by the bodies of Akeanons and tourists alike adorned with face paint, smeared in soot, bedecked in colorful costumes, swirling, prancing, and bouncing to the beat of drums, whistles, trumpets, and bell lyres. This spell brews far from the white sands and down Aklan’s coast on the asphalt streets of Kalibo. This spell is the Ati-Atihan Festival. Boracay epitomizes life’s pleasures; the Ati-Atihan, on the other hand, is the outpouring of life itself.

And so after pouring it all in the three days and three nights of street dancing and parades, my blissfully exhausted friends already felt that their travel was worth it. Boracay was going to be a mere rest, an afterthought. They passed their judgment—they had just experienced the best.

I smiled. I had already befriended their enlightenment when I was a child.

A child’s 800-year long celebration

I am Akeanon by blood—all my forebears hail from this most northwestern part of Panay Island—but I was born and raised in the metropolis. My ears have a satisfactory handle of the Akeanon language, but my tongue fails miserably to grasp its syllables. I am practically a Tagalog city boy.

Aside from the occasional homecomings—weddings, funerals, family reunions—the Ati-Atihan strengthens my otherwise tenuous bond with my motherland. When my normally shy self suddenly dances uninhibited in the streets, surrounded by people whose chatter I can understand and whose jubilant roars resonate in my chest, surrounded by natives who know my father or my uncle or my surname, surrounded by friends whom I initiated myself into the ritualistic feast, I feel that I belong. As the most homebody of children back then, the festival also gave me the rare chance to travel.

Since being freed up from the demands of school life, I have made it a point to join the yearly merrymaking. Join is the operative word here. While other similar Philippine festivals confine tourists to being mere camera-wielding spectators, the Ati-Atihan draws you to participate and flow with the rivers of color and clamor snaking their way through Kalibo’s canyon-like streets, which are narrow and lined with two- and three-story houses. Homeowners and revelers taking a breather watch from the windows and balconies, cheering and egging on the competing bands below. The heaving mass of humanity erupts with raised palms and fists and spontaneous cries of “Viva! Kay Señor Santo Niño, Viva!”; the onlooking crowd responds with a united, euphoric “Viva!” of its own.

My two left feet have made Kalibo’s town-wide party their stomping ground for around seven years. The Ati-Atihan, on the other hand, has been around for almost a staggering 800 years, making it arguably the oldest festival in the country. This year, 2010 marks the 798th edition.

Aklan brandishes an array of Ati-Atihan festivals, such as those found in the towns of Ibajay, Makato, Batan, and Altavas, among others. The Kalibo Ati-Atihan is the most prominent. Held every third week of January, the Mardi Gras of the Philippines began as a pagan festival. During the course of hundreds of years, Christianity wove its way into the celebration, ultimately becoming the centerpiece in the person of the Christ Child, the Santo Niño, whose figure is carried atop the parade floats and sometimes on devotees’ heads. The festival lasts for a whole week and culminates in a crazy weekend when thousands upon thousands of people release a year’s worth of anticipation.

Their first taste of Ati-atihan

Before my first-timer friends and I threw ourselves into this mad throng last year, they had a limited inkling of what was Ati-Atihan. My friends knew it as a byword, a generic term even. Mass media had exposed them more to the more-publicized Sinulog of Cebu and Dinagyang of Iloilo.

We arrived Friday afternoon in Kalibo. From my family’s ancestral home right smack in the middle of the town, my pack of writer-poets—Ynna Abuan, Debbie Nieto, Carla Payongayong, Rom Peña, and Rey Santillan—took a short walk to the Museo it Akean near the plaza. Gracing us with his presence was our mentor, the National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario (alias Rio Alma) and his affable wife, Emelina.

The brief stroll to the museum allowed my companions time to take in the first rumblings of the coming storm. It happened that the roving “tribes” or bands were away in distant streets, and our ears caught the drifting drumbeats. Souvenir vendors dotted the road. People walked to and from the throbbing heart of the celebration.

Inside the museum, we were reminded that the town was just picking herself up from the devastation of a recent typhoon. Typhoon Frank had ravaged Western Visayas in July 2008, engulfing Kalibo and parts of Aklan in deadly mudslides. The museum lost priceless relics of Akeanon culture; the people lost dozens of their loved ones.

What the Akeanons lost in lives and treasure, they readily made up for in spirit. Our group went up the museum’s balcony and the view opened up before us: the crossroads and plaza full of people, framed by towering trees and crisscrossed power lines. Some people watched from the sidewalks. Many more gyrated and strutted on the street. Banners of green, orange, pink, and purple fluttered in the cool breeze. And here and there, fast approaching: the bands were arriving. To the north was a splotch of red; beneath us emerged a group in yellow. The drums pounded, the trumpets blared, the lyres tinkled, the whistles shrieked.

We watched enthralled. Our nerves tingled, our skin goosebumped. From time to time, a camera clicked, a wow let loose, an astig escaped one’s lips. After letting my friends blow bubbles above the revelers, I took them down to the plaza. They had witnessed the show; now, they were going to be part of it.

Below, the drums pummeled our senses from all directions. We could feel our bodies reverberate with each thud, and every second was pregnant with those thuds coming from a seemingly endless stream of bands. Our heads started to bob up and down to the beat. Our body swayed from left to right and back, matched by the shuffling of feet.

One by one, we got hold of cans of beer sold in the open. After a few gulps, my friends became more intrepid, venturing ever closer to the middle of the street. Their motions became faster, wilder, rawer, and more…genuine. Soon we were dancing to the music of every band that passed in front of us, unmindful of the equally carefree crowd. When there was a lull in the action, we even roamed the road looking to get closer to where the drums were. (Thank heavens for beer.)

One might expect that revelers under the influence would prove unruly, but this is hardly the case in the Ati-Atihan. The spirit of joy in the air is sincere, without nary a taint of malice. As the book Viva! Kay Señor Santo Niño, Viva! quotes Dr. Federico Oreta Icamina, Kalibo’s longest-serving mayor:

“The Ati-Atihan draws out the ‘child’ that is in everyone of us to assert itself even for only a day…the ill-conceived notions that bind age to meanness and artifice are exorcised, as one lets himself go in the merry-making.”

It also helps that the police are pretty visible. Should a pocket of scuffling youth erupt somewhere, it remains just that—a pocket. Still, in last year’s festivities, there was a Caucasian guy who, heavily intoxicated, proved indiscriminate in spitting mouthfuls of beer on the road. He might have thought he was a fountain of booze. Rest assured, the beast was the exception rather than the rule. People steered clear of him. It’s a wonder the passing bands didn’t percuss his head with their hardy instruments. Credit that to Akeanon hospitality.

No matter, beer isn’t really a necessity—the concoction of the music energetic and the air electric is in itself a heady mix to wash down one’s inhibitions.

As my friends partied the night away, they had their first encounters with some of the Ati-Atihan’s motley crew of characters: a native dressed as the Grim Reaper with the scythe; tribes sponsored by local businesses, in one case a hair salon; a Fil-Canadian contingent from Vancouver; “Manny Pacquiao” hustling on the asphalt and giving his bondying foe clad in underwear a smackdown. The soot-smeared atis in colorful costumes, made famous in photos, had yet to make an appearance, but I assured my friends that they would be present tomorrow to make their acquaintance.

Saturday’s street-searing Sadsad

The drums roused our group the next morning. It was 7 am and we hadn’t gotten enough sleep. We were quite quick to get up from bed, though; the frenzied thumps from just outside our house pumped adrenalin into our veins. There was no need for coffee.

Saturday marks the friendly competition among various Ati-Atihan “tribes” as they make their rounds of Kalibo’s streets. As we peered from our windows, the festival’s full spectacle lay from one end of the road to the other, as far as the eye can see—trains of ati performers in their choreographed march-dance with their drum and percussion bands. Every inch of their skin was covered with charcoal dust. Their shiny ebony bodies were festooned in abaca hemp costumes dyed in vivid tints. They impressed me as black lions whose manes had gone to the salon, or the art shop. 

From the east approached a tribe decked out in red, black, and yellow costumes. From the west rolled in a tribe adorned with white, black, and green outfits. As they met on the road, just beneath our windows, the bands’ percussions intensified. The drummers’ pounding hands became a blur. It was a showdown between the two tribes, and it was as if their music proxied as their charging knights.

As the two bands passed by each other, their tempos calmed down to their steady beats. I dragged my friends outside before the next clash could begin.

Soon we were in the midst of more tribes, as well as Caucasian, Asian, and Filipino tourists who scurried in and out of the formations just to fire shots with their rifle-long cameras. As I promised, my friends rubbed elbows with the ati performers, holding back the parade while posing for a shot for their personal photographer, yours truly.

The Ati-Atihan claims differing origins, although eminent among them is the story of the ten Bornean datus. Legend has it that the Malay nobles purchased the lowlands of Panay from King Marikudo of the Aeta natives. The price: a golden salakot and a long pearl necklace for Queen Maniwangtiwang. After the barter was consummated, feasting and merrymaking ensued wherein the Malay settlers painted their bodies black with powdered charcoal, in homage to their new brethren. Thus the first “Ati-Ati”—to pretend to be an Ati—was born.

After lunch at our house, we drew animals, swirls, stars, and suns on our faces with poster paint, then dived back into the sea of people. The afternoon proved similar to the previous day, except that the costumes were more colorful. There were more people out to celebrate, and they were more animated in their dancing. At any second, it seemed possible that the heat of their stomping feet would set ablaze the streets.

Aside from the ati performers, we encountered several Aetas partaking in the festivities named after them. Some simply watched the parade with wide smiles, while some took to begging for alms from passers-by. 

Joining the mock atis and the true Aetas in the menagerie of characters were drag queens, men painted as Dalmatian dogs, a “pregnant” male stetoscophing his own round pillow-tummy, an old woman clad in gold and red medieval attire with matching pink hat and blonde wig, and a crossdressing man carrying a sign that read “Where R U Now / Wanted/Part Time Husband.”

As we moved from one tribe to another—many revelers search for the ‘right’ band to trail, the one with the ‘right sounds’ to match their taste—my friends mastered the rhythm of the Ati-Atihan drums. The beats would start slow and steady and remain that way for quite some time; the people would sway their bodies to the music and stomp and shuffle their feet as the procession moves forward. Then, without warning, the beats would rapidly rise to a crescendo that induces the people to frantic and tantric parasoxyms of their bodies.

Each band played their own distinct music but there were some unanimous choices. The limbo rock simply won’t go away, being a staple since my childhood. The drums and lyres interpreted songs that had recently topped the charts and novelty tunes.

The celebration continued well after the dusk set in. The night was capped off by a fireworks display that soared above the town’s modest buildings.

Before party town shuts down

Sunday is Kaadlawan, the Feast Day wherein Santo Niño figures become more prominent and mingle with dancing merrymakers in an odd mix of religious procession and unadulterated partying. In these last hours, everyone gives it their all, their last surge of energy, their final hurrah, no matter the fatigue or illness—Hala Bira, Puera Pasma!

After the traditional early morning Mass at the plaza fronting the Kalibo Cathedral, the doors of our ancestral home opened to friends and relatives for a fiesta. As usual, lechon was the centerpiece of the long table.

A brief onslaught of rain failed to wash away the colors and dampen the people’s spirits. It reminded me of 2008’s festival, wherein a fiercer downpour, almost a little storm drenched our sweaty bodies in the midst of our dance-procession. We continued to jig to the music that rose above the din of the rain. Neither of us turned in sick the next day, which we attributed as a mini-miracle of the Santo Niño.

The Child Christ was the king of the day. His ivory figurines stood above the sea of flesh, gliding on his regal caros suffused in flowers as the parade inched forward. Several of the Santo Niños had their heads wrapped in transparent plastic bags to protect them from the intermittent drizzles.

Nightfall came, and the last hours proved anticlimactic for our group. We opted to detach from the procession and join our mentor, sir Rio (as we fondly call him) in a drinking session. He and his wife were already flying back to Manila the next day, while we young ‘uns would be going to the beach.

While we did enjoy our little booze-fest, we missed out on the climax, like popping off fireworks from 11 to 11:50 pm, New Year’s Eve, and getting to bed just before the clock struck twelve. Still, it didn’t matter. We felt that we had enough fun already. In the vernacular, solb na kami.

The next morning, no drums stirred us from our sleep.

Outside the window, the streets lay naked of marching bands, spectators, and vendors. Only the litter remained. 

As we went around the town shopping for pasalubong before our van ride to Boracay, a friend remarked, “Kalibo’s like a ghost town.”

I nodded, but deep inside I wrestled with the idea. Ghost town? The people still moved around, going to work and school, back to their humdrum lives. The palengke was still bustling, overflowing with vegetables, fruits, and crafts, reeking of fish and meat. The tricycles still plied their routes, roaring in joy, for they had the streets back to their wheels.

But my friend might have been right. Compared to the past days’ party town, after-festival Kalibo might as well have been a memorial park.

Or so the façade read. On that dull Monday, I was sure that every Akeanon was already planning, waiting, and enacting within their minds and hearts the next year’s Ati-Atihan. The drum rolls could already be heard in the distance. Three hundred and sixty five days to go to the next celebration of life!