|
[Page 2: Siete momentos
en la vida maya:
Performance, Tourism, and Mayan Identity on the Yucatán Peninsula
by Tamara Underiner]
Printer-friendly
version 
Siete momentos en la vida maya: "Life
in Parentheses"
Let's assume for the moment the traveler's
perspective. Having taken the exit off the main highway and followed
the signs to the performance site, you travel down a dusty road
to the outskirts of Ticopó, past some grass-roofed ramadas,
one of which serves as a ticket booth. (Others are meant to serve
as vendor stations, but they are mostly empty for now—more
on that later.) If you are a Mexican national or foreign visitor,
you pay 120 pesos for your ticket (about $12 U.S.). If you are from
a local Mayan community, you get in for free. Boulders line the
road, the pedestrian walks, the parking area, and the performance
area. The buildings are all constructed of rough-hewn wood, housing
dressing quarters and outhouses, a technical booth (where the sound
is run), and tiered seating for the spectators (another wooden,
grass-roofed structure). The whole complex is situated on communal
land, leased to the producers for a 12-year term. In the distance
are low trees which surround the large space on all sides. The performances
take place in late Saturday afternoons; as twilight approaches,
fireflies will start to appear, and bats, attracted to the insects
attracted by the lights, will also begin to flit about.
You take your seat in the wooden structure
and wait as the three llamadas announce the show's start. For the
next hour and ten minutes, you will watch a spectacle that condenses,
abstracts, synthesizes and aestheticizes a week's worth of festivities
associated with the vaquería, a yearly festival held in ranching
areas across the peninsula (8).
Some elements are common to all the festivals; others persist in
different forms from town to town. This tourist version starts with
a prologue set to music by Mozart (neither typical of the vaquería
nor entirely impossible for it; but in this case it was added by
the work's director). During this prologue, several things occur:
first, the performance space is blessed with incense and prayers
by a h'men (local priest) and two assistants (an action the creators
of the piece told me was actual, not representational); then, scenes
from pueblo life are staged: children play together and run throughout
the space; some men go off to farm; one man, drunk, is chased and
berated by his woman as he staggers across the scene; women gather
around a water well and cooking fire (where some will remain for
the entire performance, making tortillas which they distribute to
the audience at the end of the show); there is a funeral procession
for which the whole pueblo turns out. In the prologue and throughout,
the actors are dressed in traditional, if not formal, attire—the
huipiles and guyaberas—eliding the wider array of choices
many contemporary Mayans make, in village and city alike. With the
planting of the sacred ceiba tree, an ancient symbol of life on
the peninsula, the action proper begins, and it is a story told
in dance: specifically, the jarana, a quick-stepping dance local
to the region whose steps are difficult to trace, both in the present,
and to an origin. Some claim they are prehispanic in arrangement;
others that they mix ancient footwork and songs with Spanish rhythms
and musical instruments. Today, they are danced to a changing repertoire
of songs composed specifically for the purpose, performed by a jarana
ensemble of two clarinets (or sometimes saxophones), two trombones,
two trumpets, kettle drums and guiro (a grooved rhythm instrument
whose sounds are achieved by scraping or rasping motion). They are
featured at festivities and public performances throughout the peninsula;
a version of the jarana animates the famous bottle dances, a virtuosic
entertainment popular among tourists and, increasingly, at urban
middle class social events (9).
They constitute the highlight of the vaquería, where they
are often danced in competitions. In Siete momentos, groups
of children, women, and couples by turn perform a succession of
jaranas, all for the most part facing the audience as though there
were a proscenium frame. But in broad daylight, the performers look
back at us looking at them; the panoptic gaze is denied us, if the
panoramic one remains. The dancing is followed by a conceptual bullfight,
in which a black-clad performer, clasping horns in both hands in
front of his head, dances a complicated and highly dramatic contest
with his toreadors, until he is at last killed and carried off.
The show closes with a communal feast, represented by the sharing
of tortillas made by the women throughout its course.
Siete momentos is the brainchild
of María Alicia Martínez Medrano, a non-Mayan Mexican
with substantial professional directing credits, who founded a still-growing
network of theatre troupes under the umbrella name "Laboratorio
de Teatro Campesino e Indígena," which has been active
throughout Mexico since 1986 (10).
The Laboratorios function as sites for both training and performance;
many first-and second-generation graduates of their three-year training
programs have gone on to become permanent maestros in the Laboratorio
system, or to found new labs of their own, in urban neighborhoods
and rural communities alike. The permanent maestros play a key role
in the larger projects, like this one, envisioned by Martínez
Medrano, who serves as artistic director. In this case, they served
as researchers, traveling throughout the peninsula to recover dance
steps known only to the oldest members of remote communities, steps
which they then taught to younger members of towns situated closer
to Mérida, where proximity to the urban center had caused
some of the dances and steps to attenuate. Their students comprised
the 472 actors of Siete momentos, performing the dances and
scenes of local color, while the maestros (all Mexican, but not
all Mayan) held the central positions in the dances and the bullfight.
Audiences for the show included international
and Mexican tourists, and friends and families of the performers.
On the day in March 2003 that I saw the show, the audience included
three buses full of visiting dignitaries from a meeting of indigenous
tribes from throughout the hemisphere. Dressed in elaborate ceremonial
regalia, they were the single largest group in attendance, and their
presence challenged easy dichotomies of tourist-spectator social
relations. According to Martínez Medrano, usually friends
and family members of the performers constituted the largest audience
segment on any given Saturday. That day, a few visitors from Mérida
were there, as were some visitors from Mexico City, former students
of Martínez Medrano. (Interestingly, the event has also been
of interest to a group of immigrants from Mexico now resident in
the United States, who made a professional video of the event for
their own purposes of promotion and ethnic identification (11).)
By way of explaining the low Mexican turnout, a friend of mine,
a middle-class German who has retired to Mérida, told me
she felt the ticket price was too steep for most Mexican wallets.
But twice that is well within the bounds of what international tourists
expect to pay to visit the pyramid sites and their light and sound
shows. Two other friends—both of whom are Mérida working
professionals with family ties to villages further out, and both
of whom are also dedicated to Mayan-language community theatre —criticized
the production for being too synthetic, too theatrical, not authentic
enough.
Siete momentos was meant to be a
more-or-less permanent installment on the tourist scene en route
between Mérida and tourist sites on the peninsula, or at
least for the 12 years of the land lease arrangement, offering performances
every Saturday afternoon. The State Department of Tourism financed
its opening, with the expectation that it would become self-sustaining
via ticket sales and the sales of refreshments and souvenirs in
the vendor booths lining the path to the performance space (reminiscent
of those along the way to the entrance of Chichén Itzá).
All participants were to be paid a regular salary after the first
three months, once the show found its feet. However, after 18 months
the show closed in the summer of 2004 because paying attendance
never grew sufficiently to provide enough incentive for vendors
and performers to participate, a situation that was compounded by
a lack of promotional support and transportation arrangements on
the part of the tourism board. (The event did feature prominently
in Yucatán Today, the official promotional publication of
the Department of Tourism, and on its website. In the summer of
2004 an article appeared in a Mérida arts newsletter, but
only after the show had closed.)
|
