DOTOC: PERFORMING BICOL’S CATHOLICISM

Looking back at Dotoc, I remembered a Novena Procession conducted outside the chapel where the elders performed and sang accompanied by guitar player, Titinggit, leading to the altar made up of anahaw, coconut leaves, flowers and banana trunks which surrounds the Holy Cross sits on top of the altar. We called the performers Paradotoc. The older women prepares the food and the Ginalapong, a pentagon-shaped local delicacy made of rice flour, young coconut meat, and sugar wrapped in young coconut leaves, which the people will feast upon after the novena. We called the eaters Paragotoc. 

In the Baao, Camarines Sur Dotoc practice “the “pilgrims’ who journey to the Holy Land meet another group of pilgrims who say the cross has been stolen by the Persians. In response the first group tells the story of how the Emperor Heraclius waged war against the Persian King Cosrohas (Chosroes) and recovered the Holy Cross, which Cosrohas had stolen from Jerusalem. This is the corocobacho dotoc, so named because of the use of a cobacho, a shed or small shelter by the roadside, where the pilgrims meet and the Heraclius story is told.”

The Drama of Dotoc is based from the ancient Christian stories of St Helena and Emperor Heraclius journey to the Holy Cross.

The Theatre of Dotoc is founded in the literary stories but had a vision of making it live and form community of performers and audience that interact with each other. There was even a sharing of food. As Dr. Sir Anril Tiatco taught, “theatre is live, immediate and intimate.” Even though a performance is guided by a script, every theatre experience is unique. Remember the saying: no two performances of the same show are the same. In Performing Catholicism, Dr Tiatco wrote, “The iterability concept is a reference of scripting. Butler suggests that we cannot speak (or act) without a script and by not conforming to it. Nonetheless, we can also never conform exactly to the script…a ritual as a cultural phenomenon also follows a script.Most of the time, the script is based on the scripture and the dogma, although performers do not just passively conform to this script. There are shifts and turns making the ritual seemingly unorthodox. But the performers (in Catholic rituals, the devotees) know very well that what they are doing is a reiteration of the script. However, looking closely at their performative devotion, the script is no longer the same script as what they used to perform a year earlier or years before that.” The paradotoc performers is in a state of perpetual uncertainty, ‘betwixt and between,’ always in a journey between one point and another. The repetition of Dotoc as performance exhibits a permanent liminality.

Dotoc is a cultural performance, not an actual pilgrimage but an organized performance of pilgrimage relating it to the way of life of the bikolanos. The dotoc was a work of Spanish colonization for Christianization. Professor Llana argues “that the dotoc appropriates the colonial project of conversion, translating it into strategies of survival, individual agency, communal renewal, and the construction of identity, through the performance of pilgrimage.” Bicolanos embraced its good aspirations but mixed it with bicolanos aspirations through Komedya. Komedya were ‘translated into prosodic forms, visual types, and character traits that spoke to the local concerns common to actors and audiences’ (Rafael 1999, 1195) and use as ‘opportunities to incorporate, and thereby preserve, their own traditions’ (1998, 7).

Dotoc is not just a cultural performance or merely community formation. For Bicolanos, it is a victory over sin and hardships. Professor Llana reiterated, “The dotoc is a narrative of triumph—triumph of the Cross over sin… of the community in producing and staging the dotoc every night of the novenario and each year for at least the last hundred years. It is a narrative of hope that feeds the community’s resolve to go on despite hard times, because there are and have been many such hard times…”

References:

1. Llana, Jazmin Badong. 2010. “The Bicol DotocPerformance, Postcoloniality, and Pilgrimage.” The Bicol Dotoc – Aberystwyth Research Portal. March 16, 2010. https://pure.aber.ac.uk/…/the-bicol-dotoc(9a471a1e-3d71….
2. Llana, Jazmin Badong (2011) Pilgrimage as Utopian Performative for a Post-Colonial Counterpublic, Performance Research, 16:2, 91-96, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2011.578839
3. “Dotoc.” 2011. Philippine Performance Repository. blogspot.com. January 12, 2011. http://philippineperformance-repository.upd.edu.ph/2191/.
4. Tiatco, Sir Anril Pineda. 2016. Performing Catholicism: Faith and Theatre in a Philippine Province. Quezon City, Ph: University of the Philippines Press.
5. Llana, and Jazmin Badong. 1970. “The Komedya in the Bicol Dotoc: Prelude or Main Event?” Philippine Performance Repository. January 1, 1970. http://philippineperformance-repository.upd.edu.ph/227/. 

Photo Courtesy of the Archdioces of Caceres