The Dancing Inmates of Cebu

When I first heard about the dancing inmates of Cebu, I thought it was a joke. Supposedly the general public were invited into the city's maximum security prison to watch the inmates do a dance routine. To me, coming from Britain, the idea of hardened criminals doing a dance routine to a bunch of pop hits just didn't seem plausible. Oh and did I mention that you needed to donate a bar of soap to watch the show?

After a pletora of jokes centred around the theme of not dropping the soap in the shower, I was proven wrong, as in fact on the last Saturday of every month, the inmates do put on 2 hour long dance concert for the general public. The jail has become world famous for their rehabilition tactic, and videos on youtube which has received millions of hits, have popularised the prison as a key tourist destination when visiting the city.

For a maximum security prison, not so maximum security. To get in, all you needed was a pass, a stamp on your hand, and of course the fabled bar of soap. On the way in our bags were screened, not through an xray machine but by a man with a metal detector. My bag beeped but they didn't really look through it, if they had they would have found a contraband bottle of beer.

The great thing about the show is that the inmates genuienly looked like they were enjoying themselves. A large crowd was there, all cheering and supportive. A lot of the crowd were inmates family members and it seemed pretty easy for them to converse.

We were treated to routines to Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and of course the Philippines favourite, Justin Bieber. When I was working on cruise ships we would have a monthly crew talent show for the passangers, and there was always a Philippino dance crew of guys in their 30s dancing to Baby by Justin Bieber. I have to admit, I always found this ridiculous – in the UK, you'd be hard pressed to find a group of guys that would willingly get up on stage to dance to a song that has been manufactured for 13 year old girls, however, here are a thousand or so prison inmates, serving sentences for everything from drug trafficking to rape, doing a dance routine to the the Bieber – my mind still cant quite compute.

All the prisoners are dressed in orange uniforms apart from an elite crew of the jails best dancers who wore black Tshirts and lead most of the routines. At one point they donned clown wigs (which I think were home made out of recycled plastic bags), and 3 of them also wore large photos on their backs of Anne Frank, the Dalai Llama, and Princess Diana. Im not sure what the connection was.

There have been some reports of violence towards prisoners who refused to participate in the routines, but generally the majority of the prisoners did look like they were enjoying themselves. The strangest thing was that none of them looked like harden criminals at all. The mental images I had imagined of inmates dancing did not match up with reality.

Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, also known by its initials CPDRC, is a mixed prison, however male inmates far outweigh their female counterparts. There were only 2 or 3 routines featuring the female inmates, one using chairs, and the other an homage to Dirty Dancing, featuring one of my most hatest songs, Time of your Life.

At the end of the concert, the public are invited to join in with a routine and you can have your photos taken with the inmates. Not your average holiday snap, but then this isn't your average sightseeing trip. Al in all, I'd have to say it is one of the stranger experiences of my life. Video coming to a youtube/vimeo account near you, soon!