Obando Festival
Also known as: Obando Fertility Rites · Sayaw sa Obando · Kasilonawan Festival
Definition
The Obando Festival, formally the Obando Fertility Rites, is a three-day religious festival held May 17 to 19 in Obando, Bulacan, in which childless couples, singles seeking partners, and pilgrims dance in the streets to petition for fertility and blessings. It honors San Pascual Baylon on May 17, Santa Clara on May 18, and Nuestra Señora de Salambáo on May 19. The public street dance is locally called the sayaw sa Obando.
Identities
| Database | Identifier |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Obando Fertility Rites |
| Wikidata | Q7074628 |
| DBpedia | N/A |
Also Known As
- Obando Fertility Rites
- Sayaw sa Obando
- Kasilonawan Festival
Examples and Analogies
The festival is analogous to a novena expressed through dance: petitioners sway to the Santa Clara hymn in street processions rather than sit in pews. Like the fiesta of Panagbenga in Baguio or Sinulog in Cebu, it fuses Catholic procession with older local ritual, in this case a pre-colonial fertility dance called kasilonawan that missionaries re-channeled toward saints.
Usage Scenarios
Couples hoping to conceive travel from across the Philippines and overseas to join the dance, sometimes for three consecutive years in fulfillment of a panata. The municipality runs the fiesta with Masses, processions, and cultural presentations, and it anchors Bulacan’s tourism calendar every May. Vendors of fertility trinkets, food, and dance ribbons depend on the pilgrimage economy.
Strategies
The parish and local government choreograph the rites to keep the traditional Santa Clara dance steps intact, registering dance groups and assigning procession routes. Heritage strategies document the hymns and steps through the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, while tourism offices schedule events to manage crowds.
Security and Safety Measures
Crowd control includes barricaded procession lanes, marshals, and first-aid stations along the route. The municipality coordinates with the police for the influx of pilgrims, regulates vendors to keep walkways clear, and issues advisories against leaving children unattended during dense street dancing.
Historical Context
The rites trace to a pre-colonial kasilonawan fertility dance led by a catalonan around a keddohan. Franciscan missionaries in the Spanish era reoriented the dance toward San Pascual Baylon and Santa Clara, and the image of Nuestra Señora de Salambáo, found in a fisherman’s net in the 1700s, joined the devotion. The American-era custom was suppressed at times but revived, and the festival continues as one of the few fertility dances in the Catholic world.
Challenges and Controversies
Criticism has periodically come from Church figures uneasy with dancing inside the church and with petitioners treating the rite as magic. Debate over commercialization, with souvenir vendors and pageants, concerns residents who want the penitential character preserved. Demographic and clerical changes also pressure the transmission of the original dance steps.