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Searching for El Dorado: Performance and Ritual in Early Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Adam Versényi
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Abstract

The quasi-theatrical kinds of performance-ritual which existed in pre-Columbian Latin America have been little investigated, and are almost entirely neglected by English-speaking theatre scholars. In NTQ 8, Robert Potter looked at ways in which the missionaries who followed in the wake of the Spanish conquistadores tried to adapt Aztec rituals to their own proselytizing purposes: and here, Adam Versényi, in the first of a series of articles on early Latin American performance, provides an overview of the ways in which the great pre-Columbian civilizations embraced performance into their often-unfamiliar world view – suggesting that in some cases the cosmogony expressed through the dramatic rituals made them particularly ill-equipped to confront the ‘otherness’ of the invading Spaniards. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 16 , November 1988 , pp. 330 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

Notes and References

1. Perez, José Cid, Teatro indio precolombiano (Avila: Aguilar, S.A., 1964), p. 15.Google Scholar

2. Moriary, James Robert, ‘Ritual Combat: a Comparison of the Aztec “War of Flowers” and the Medieval “Mêlée”’, in Museum of Anthropology Miscellaneous Series, No.9. (Greeley, Colorado), 11, 1969.Google Scholar

3. Cid Perez, p. 89.

4. Cid Perez, p. 91.

5. Markham, Clements, The Incas of Peru (London: Smith, Elder, 1910), p. 105.Google Scholar

6. Cid Perez, p. 93–4.

7. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Histórica indica, reproduced in Levillier, Roberto, Don Francisco de Toledo, supremo organizador de Perú (Buenos Aires, 1942), p. 80, 83Google Scholar; cited in Arrom, José Juan, Elteatro de Hispanoamérica en la época colonial (La Habana: Anuario Bibliográfico Cubano, 1956), p. 31.Google Scholar

8. Sarmiento de Gamboa, p. 80, 83.

9. Sarmiento de Gamboa, p. 105.

10. Sarmiento de Gamboa, p. 212.

11. Monterde, Francisco, Teatro indigena prehispánico: Rabinal Achi. (México: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1955) p. ix.Google Scholar

12. Monterde, p. xxvi.

13. Monterde, p. 129.