LA DANZA DEL FUEGO
A participant from Mexico performed “the Dance of Fire,” which he described as a “dance of Aztec origins.”
The performance of an ancient ritual in a context in which indigenous people performed the vitality and contemporaneousness of their culture was a provocative gesture that called attention to the “roots” theme of the Encuentro. At the same time, it underscored performance’s role in preserving and transmitting a people’s memory and history, as well as the disjunctures between folkloric performance and the performance of ritual for internal consumption.
The presentation of this ritual in this context begs the questions of how a ritual changes meaning when performed in different historical contexts or for originally unintended audiences. The choice of ritual reinforced this theme. The Aztec New Fire ceremony restarted time and renewed the socio-political order, it exorcised “the march of time, against wearing down, instability, and the change that threatened the permanence of the primordial order” (Florescano 23-5) and naturalized the imposed political order, unifying a heterogeneous nation (Clennendin 240). Like Victor Turner, Clennendin stresses, the dynamic nature of ritual. Aztec ritual specialists incorporated symbols of conquered populations (241) into performances allowing the ritual to perpetuate itself in ever-changing contexts. The re-appropriation of this ancient ritual overtly signifies continuity with an ancient past; this folkloric performance also harmonizes with contemporary Mexican incorporative state-forming rituals that function as the ritual once did in the Aztec state.