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[Page 3: Siete momentos
en la vida maya:
Performance, Tourism, and Mayan Identity on the Yucatán Peninsula
by Tamara Underiner]
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According to the event's creators and sponsors,
there were several motives for establishing this new touristic foothold.
One, of course, was economic, in the hopes that it would provide
a new source of revenue for participating communities and for state
coffers. Another important one was the recapture and revalidation
of local performance traditions for the communities, at the same
time presenting for non-locals a glimpse of local life (even if
it was a "life in parentheses"), especially those aspects
that spoke to indigenous ritual and dance. As such, the event functioned
as a performance ethnography as well as a piece of theatre proper.
This latter is also part of Martínez Medrano's life work,
which can be characterized as an effort to compel recognition on
the part of Mexico's culture brokers of the significant artistic
contributions made in the remotest corners of the republic. Although
the result is sometimes folkloric in its execution (with "difference"
being staged more than the more complex interactions of local communities
with the global markets and technologies with which they also interact),
she views these performances as an example of "bellas artes,"
under-recognized as such by the artistic elite of Mexico's urban
centers. Siete momentos is an effort to make an intervention
in this prevalent perception. By calling it "teatro,"
featuring "actors" (significantly, not "dancers,"
which is where Mayan performers must too often find and define themselves
in the horizon of expectations encompassed by anthropological, touristic,
and commercial performance scenarios (12)
); by framing the event with the music of Mozart; by turning a bullfight
into a modern ballet that uses ancient footwork, Martínez
Medrano appeals not so much to an "arts of everyday life"
definition of local culture but compels recognition of the performers'
aesthetic contributions as such. The illusion of authenticity is
offered as just that—an illusion, a glimpse, more importantly
a theatricalized, aestheticized glimpse—but not an unmediated
encounter with local life (which itself is a problem for some Mayans
who would actually prefer that visitors be given a more "accurate"
look). Although I do not minimize the importance of proper promotion
to the long-term success of a performance endeavor like Siete
momentos, I think the seeds of its unsustainability can also
be found in this tension between competing agendas of representational
politics, and perhaps more importantly, among its mix of aesthetic
codes. Aesthetic seamlessness and its seductions were refused, raising
questions about the pressure of artistic and cultural expectation,
and showing how very imbricated in culture aesthetics always are.
To the extent that Siete momentos partakes in the history
and form of ethnic tourism, some foreign tourists arrive with a
limited set of expectations about what they'll see; they are potentially
more apt to see the performers as "signs of themselves"
—or signs, more accurately, of what they wish them to be—than
as professional performing artists (13).
For some locals, on the other hand, the performance is too professional,
too polished; there is too much artistry involved.
At the same time, there was something authentic
in this performance event, in the staging of the rituals, the blessings,
and the dances. It could not have sustained itself for 18 months
if it pandered only to foreigners' fantasies (although that might
have made it financially more viable), because the majority of its
audiences were Mayans themselves, and it is doubtful they would
have continued to patronize it, not to mention perform in it for
so long without pay, if it was not also important to them. Siete
momentos can be seen as at once an example of ethnographic exhibition
and as local civic theatre, in which a vision of the community is
offered up for contemplation, celebration, and continuation.
Although the show has been suspended indefinitely, Martínez
Medrano and her team have hopes of resurrecting it once the new
sexenio is ushered in and the change of political and cultural administrations
take place. She views it as important to one key outcome of her
work in the region: that young people continue to value the dance
steps, if not for their own sake, then for the sake of the income
they can generate in the format of this cultural performance, which
ultimately serves the aim of artistic preservation. Commodifying
culture, as Wood points out, is not always and not necessarily the
same thing as denigrating it; in fact, quite the opposite is often
true. Citing A. Fuat Firat, he reminds us that:
[T]raditional cultures . . . find that
the way to keep their members interested in maintaining their
culture is to involve the young people in the marketization of
the culture, especially as touristic spectacle, through their
music, dances, food, clothing, and ornamental items. This allows
the youths to have incomes and, thereby, the ability to participate
in the larger global market. (14)
In the case of the work that culminates
in Siete momentos , Martínez Medrano speaks with great
pride about the ways young people in the communities with whom her
maestros have worked now favor traditional clothing over the homogenized
urban styles many had favored, and to the dances as becoming a new
marker of "cool" for them at home. Thus, the very pressures
of globalization that produce tourist interest from afar and a taste
for imported music and urban gang-style clothing from within also
produce the opportunity for the reassertion and recirculation of
"tradition" as a contemporary and not necessarily oppositional
lifeway. In turn, had the event been more financially successful,
it would have allowed them greater access to the global market context
that the event itself works hard to elide in representation, but
cannot be ignored in the performative moment itself. In this turning,
another turn: if the relationship between ethnographic display and
cultural disappearance is reciprocal, the example of Siete momentos
shows that such reciprocity can actually manifest itself in the
other direction. In other words, if in the nineteenth century the
exhibition of cultures bore an inverse relationship to their vitality
offstage, here, the public exhibition of some aspects of Mayan performance
culture caused them to be newly revitalized in the lived reality
for the participating youth.
At the end of the show, the women passed out the tortillas and ended
the theatre event in a ritual consummation that collapsed the realms
of performer and spectator, while the director's voice proclaimed,
"Los maya: aquí estamos, y ésto somos."
Here we are; yes, we are not dead and gone, we share history with
you, and you, and you. And this is who we are—or at least
the rosy parts we want to celebrate—with you, and you, and
you. "You" might take our performance as reflective of
the simple, tradition-steeped life of the rural other, and think
nostalgically about us when you return to your overly scheduled,
urban life. "You," on the other hand, might see some of
your own experiences reflected back at you with respect, for once,
and think differently about what you had been conditioned to denigrate
before. "You" might find these same experiences too abstracted
and removed from context for comfort, while "you" might
find pleasure in this very abstraction, in the knowledge that artistic
license was taken in the representation of Mayan daily life. And
"you" might find something in our contradictions to write
home to your scholarly peers about . . .
What, besides tortillas, was being consumed?
When is consumption destruction, and when is it preservation? Is
it possible to advocate for the latter, without thereby justifying
the whole sorry history of imperialist exhibition and display that
contemporary performances like Siete momentos inherit? When
is tourism something people "do," and when is it something
that is done to them? As I hope I've shown here, the touristic context
alone is not sufficient grounds for dismissal of a particular performance
event. The figures on the billboard and the attendance patterns
at this particular event remind us of the increasingly uneasy distinctions
between "self" and "other" as categories of
critical analysis within this particular area of performance studies.
As tourism has come increasingly to arrange relations of visibility
and identity that are, ultimately, as political as they are cultural,
that very slippage becomes a productive site for new critical work.
Tamara Underiner, Ph.D., is Associate
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Theatre at Arizona State University, where she directs the Ph.D.
concentration in Theatre and Performance of the Americas, and ASU's
affiliation with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.
She also teaches in the general areas of theatre history and culture
studies. Her most recent work is Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico:
Death-Defying Acts (University of Texas Press, 2004), and she has
also published on indigenous and Latina/o theatre and critical pedagogy
in Theatre Journal, Signs, and critical anthologies from the University
of Arizona and Routledge Presses.
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