Liloan bags top dance award in Pasigarbo

After five years, Liloan town finally bagged the Ritual Dance Showdown award and its P1 million cash prize in the Pasigarbo sa Sugbo street dance competition held last Saturday.

Liloan town’s Rosquillos festival presentation carried a Broadway show concept performed by dancers clad in gold and red costumes that wowed the crowd and the judges.

A wide curtain unveiled a big kitchen and a chef followed by huge eggs, a box of flour and ingredients for “rosquillos”, a cookie with a round whole in the middle.

Kitchen helpers came in with trays and danced to the Rosquillos Festival jingle.

Famed dance choreographer Douglas Nierras, one of the judges, said he was looking after the “discipline and the refinement of the performances”.

“I am a choreographer and I look at the dance in the performance itself,” he said.

Nierras also commended the “very, very high” production level and fantastic costumes of the Liloan town performers. “They are really up for the contest,” he added.

Liloan Mayor Duke Frasco said he was overjoyed with the win.

“The dancers really deserve this win. I really look forward to Sinulog. I am very excited for that,” he said.

Frasco said he hopes his mother-in-law Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia would  perform the Rosquillos festival song in next year’s Sinulog, her last as governor.

Even with 31 contenders this year, Governor Garcia said she still wanted to declare 12 winners due to the level of competition among them.

“They all truly deserved to be declared as winners,” she said.

For this year’s judging, Garcia said they employed SGV and Company to tabulate the results. Awarding ceremonies for the Pasigarbo Festival will be done at the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) this afternoon.

Be it their patron saint or a native product, the 31 contingents who joined the Pasigarbo sa Sugbo street dance competition had something to flaunt about to onlookers and passersby alike.

Rains and traffic didn’t dampen the spirits of the contingents in the parade that ended up at the Cebu International Convention Center in Mandaue City late in the afternoon.

Passengers and motorists experienced  heavier traffic in Mandaue  City during the Pasigarbo sa Sugbo parade compared with road conditions during the Ironman 70.3 races the previous weekend.

Vehicle congestion started past 11 a.m. when several roads in the heart of Mandaue city were closed for the parade until 5 p.m.

This was worsened by five vehicle collisions, three of them on M.C. Briones Highway and two in the reclamation area, said Traffic enforcement Agency of Mandaue (TEAM) head Edwin Ermac said.

Aggravating it was the ongoing repair of a drainage system along Hernan Cortes Street  and road concreting work in M. Logarta Street  in barangay Subangdaku.

Saturday typically has heavy traffic than a Sunday, when the Ironman 70.3 was held, said Ermac. On Saturday, many people go out to the malls and other destinations, Ermac explained.

Local dailies ran notices of the road closures in Mandaue City on the day of the parade itself compared with repeated traffic advisories before the staging of the Ironman 70.3 to alert the public about closures of both Mandaue-Mactan bridges and the race route of the bike and running races.

Ermac said traffic yesterday normalized about 4:30 p.m. when S.B. Cabahug Street was reopened after dance contingents had left the road. Some congestion remained in Subangdaku due to road and drainage projects.

Ouano Avenue was congested but not as bad as MC Briones Highway, he added.

Jeepney driver Jun Arnaiz was stuck on the MC Briones Highway at 2 p.m.

His passengers bound for Liloan town in the north loudly complained, he said.

“Ang gasolina nako nahurot og dali  (My gasoline ran out quickly.).”

But Arnaiz said he knew beforehand that the usual passenger jeepney route in S.B. Cabahug St. was closed for the parade.

It was 5:30 p.m. before traffic flow returned to normal. Carmel Loise Matus and Norman V. Mendoza, Correspondents with Sheila Marie B. Bilbao, Palompon Instiute of Technology Intern