Monday, November 17, 2008 Town holds new festival on Pinatubo's eruption By Ian Ocampo Flora
BACOLOR -- Sporting only their bare feet, young people of this town have gathered for the first ever festival commemorating the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 and the subsequent destruction it wrought on their beloved town.
The new festival christened as "Makatapak Festival" (Barefoot Festival), a street dancing and dance interpretative event highlighting the adaptability of Bacoloreno spirit, brought together seven competing teams in a night of festive frenzy last Saturday night.
According to Councilor Voltaire San Pedro, overall chair of the town's tourism committee, the festival embodies the "strife and subsequent rising from the ashes" of Bacolor.
"This Makatapak Festival comes also as a highlight of the La Naval Fiesta that we celebrate in this town. The Makatapak festival is something new, an informative way of educating our youth of the courageous spirit of the people of this town who managed to bounce back after the devastation," San Pedro said.
San Pedro said more and more young Bacolorenos are forgetting the values learned from the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. The Town Fiesta Committee has seen the festival as a fitting event to educate the young generation.
"The dancing on the street barefooted is symbolic of Kapampangan virtue loving our land. Despite whatever disaster that befell it we would surely come back to the land as if it is already an integral part of our personality," San Pedro explained.
Dubbed as Villa de Bacolor, the town has been the birthplace of many of Pampanga's patriots, poets and writers. Due to its strategic location, it became capital of the exiled government of Governor General Simón de Anda y Salazar from 1762 to 1764 during the British occupation of the Philippines. It was the former capital town of Pampanga until the provincial seat of government wass transferred to neighboring City of San Fernando in 1904.
The town was completely buried under several feet of lahar from Mount Pinatubo, with the most devastating flow covering the town center in 1995.
Bacolor had served as the center of Kapampangan culture and its people as prime movers in many sectors of Filipino life.
Nenita Santos, who came back to Bacolor from her resettlement house in Bulaon, City of San Fernando, said the festival brings about fun, painful and life changing memories of the Bacolor that was before 1991.
"It is good to look back on the past to be able to move forward," Santos said.
For others, the festival served as a new form of entertainment. The participants paraded along major roads here at 4:00 p.m. last Saturday. The climax of the Makatapak Festival is the interpretative dance competition wherein the contestants, numbering around fifty people in each team, would depict major events in Bacolor.
Cabetican Elementary School emerged as this year's first ever champion in the interpretative dance competition. This was followed by Don Honorio Ventura College of Arts and Trades Dance Troupe at second place and Mary the Queen Academy of Bacolor at third place.
Other participants include Bacolor Elementary School, Madapdap High School, Parish Youth Ministry of Bacolor, and the Don Honorio Ventura College of Arts and Trades Laboratory Training Department.
"This is the start of a unique festival that would embody the spirit of the Bacolorenos for years to come," San Pedro said. (IOF)
