Ritual Dance: Jiggalo
Context: “Jiggalo is a dance I did with my high school volleyball team before every single match we played. It’s to kind of get the team hyped up and energetic for the game at the end of our warm-up. It also brings the team together as a sort of bonding thing. It starts with everyone separating off into grade levels, so the freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all go off with their grade and get a few minutes to coordinate a dance. Once everyone is ready, we come back in a circle and sing ‘Our hands are high, our feet are low, and this is how we jiggalo,’ and then one at a time, each group does their little dance.
I first learned it in my freshman year at our first home game of the year, when the team captain said ‘Alright let’s go do jiggalo’ after we warmed up. The girls who had been there the year before taught me how to do it, but because I was the only freshman on the team, I had to do the actual dance alone which was kinda fun. They’re also the ones who told me that if we don’t do it, it’s basically an automatic loss, so the tradition was very important.”
Analysis: Not many people think about sports teams as folk groups, but they can definitely be considered as such. The main focus of sports is the athletic competition, and it’s clear why, but the communal aspect of it is often overlooked as a result. The entire world of sports is home to countless rituals that are only understood by the participants and/or fans of a select sport, and my informant’s description of jiggalo illustrates this perfectly. When she first said the word, my knee-jerk reaction was “what the hell is a jiggalo?” but that just proves my point. To me, it’s just a silly sounding word that could mean anything. To my informant and her team, it’s a sacred pre-game ritual that is important enough to where if they don’t do it, it immediately condemns the entire game. A common thread in folklore is the lack of understanding by outsiders, and while this pre-game ritual may not fit the traditional ideas of folklore, I believe it absolutely fits under the umbrella.