Sandurot Festival as Mugna: Exploring Modernity and Belonging through the Civic Festival

Focusing on the Sandurot Festival organized by the City of Dumaguete in the Philippines, my study explores how and why local identity is created and embodied through the civic festival. I argue that these questions are implicated in the struggle over modernity since social actors (such as artists, festival organizers, choreographers, and dancers) engage with notions of authenticity, progress, and development—which are embedded in nation-building and city-making processes—to articulate nodes of belonging to city space. As Cultural Studies stresses the significance of radical contextuality, I examine in this project the problem-spaces of modernity and belonging to investigate how they
constitute the conjuncture wherein the Sandurot Festival emerges as a performance practice. For this conference, I aim to discuss the interpretive framework that I assembled based on Diana Taylor’s performance paradigm to put forward the concept of mugna (a Cebuano word which means to create), referring to a collaborative and creative process where social actors deliberate how to embody local identity through festival performance. I further expound how the pandemic restrictions, which have drastically affected live events such as festivals, have shaped my research direction and study scope, and how I responded to these challenges by refining my central questions and adjusting the methods that I used. With this presentation, I hope to further expand our notions of modernity through the study of the festival as mugna and reflect about the ways to approach the study of performance in times of the pandemic as well as its implications for postgraduate scholarship.