When most people, including scholars, picture the initial encounters and subsequent interactions between the colonizing Europeans and Native Americans, they most likely would not think of dance as a crucial part of such exchanges. Because of the devalued place that dance, and by the same token music and other expressive practices, have had in Euro-American societies and in the dominant scholarship, the importance of these practices has been overlooked. However, fields such as performance studies, dance studies, and ethnomusicology have demonstrated why these practices deserve serious attention. Situated at the core of both performance and dance studies, Paul Scolieri's Dancing the New World provides us with a new lens for scrutinizing not only the early interactions between Spaniards and Aztecs, but also the key role of dance in Aztec ritual pre- and post-conquest.
Images and notions about the so-called “encounter” between Europeans and Native Americans (Scolieri uses the term “Indians” as per the sources) are powerful arenas within which racial stereotypes and power relations have been sustained. According to Diana Taylor, Scolieri's professor and obvious influence, in the Americas, this encounter has become a crucial “scenario,” “a paradigmatic setup that relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended (though adaptable) end” (Taylor Reference Taylor2003, 13). In Dancing the New World, Scolieri problematizes the scenario of “discovery” by bringing dance back into the picture and thus showing the complexity of those early interactions. In fact, dance was in the images, descriptions, and documents all along; it was simply overlooked, deemed unimportant, or misunderstood.
As generations of scholars have highlighted, Scolieri shows that chroniclers' recordings of the encounters in Europe and in the Americas (even though some never set foot on the Americas) were plagued with their own prejudices, desires, and expectations. Nevertheless, Scolieri has been able to illuminate the rich material documenting dance in a new light to give us a strong sense of how this practice mediated and shaped the interactions and how it was essential in Aztec (Mexica) ritual and therefore society. Even though paying attention to dance in order to study early and later colonial interactions between evangelizers and indigenous peoples is not an entirely a new project (Ares Queija Reference Ares Queija1984; Poole Reference Poole1990) Scolieri's methodological and theoretical depth and detail are unique. On the other hand, scholars have paid more attention to the role of music in colonial society, as Scolieri recognizes for the case of Mexico. However, the author does not seem to be aware of even more recent and elaborate work of this kind for the Andes (e.g., Baker Reference Baker2008; Estenssoro Reference Estenssoro2003). Perhaps Scolieri's arguments would have been strengthened if he had used these studies in a comparative light to show the complexities and evolution of the interactions between some sectors of the native population and the colonizers as they forged a new society.
Dancing the New World is proof that the fields of performance and dance studies are pushing us effectively to revise canons and paradigms within which we understand historical events and social relations. Even further, it effectively invites the reader to adopt, in the words of Diana Taylor, a new “way of knowing” to apply a new “episteme” that privileges the fact that “we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency, and by making choices” (Taylor Reference Taylor2003, xvi). Scolieri does exactly this, as he takes the reader through a fascinating journey where we can witness how the embodied practice of dance is (and was during early contact and colonization) a crucial site of knowledge and memory and also of contention, accommodation, or just plain violence. One of the most fascinating parts of the book, and where we clearly appreciate Scolieri's contributions, is his examination of the “Massacre at the Festival of Toxcatl.” The massacre, as Scolieri points out, precipitated a fifteen-month physical conflict that was thoroughly documented with “visual and written descriptions of the [ensuing] violence that the Spanish enacted on the Mexica dancers, musicians, and spectators” (91). Arguing that sixteenth-century interlocutors “deployed Mexica dancers as a way of organizing, interpreting, and expressing their visions of the massacre and the conquest by extension” (94), Scolieri scrutinizes three positions among those interlocutors. These are the accounts found in the documents and letters produced by conquistadors who “invoke the ‘violent’ Aztec dancers in order to memorialize their heroic presence in the New World”; the writings of the Dominican missionaries Barolomé de Las Casas and Diego Durán, who wanted to sustain their views of the “greedy and torturous Spaniards and innocent and noble Indians” (94); and indigenous accounts “created by descendants of indigenous nobility or native scribes at the behest of Spanish missionaries” who “willfully blend myth and history to make order of a new political reality” (114), and who contributed to the fact that dancing became “an increasingly important vehicle for imagining the preconquest past” (123).
Dance-dramas, most often performed in the context of folk Catholic celebrations, have much importance throughout not only Hispanic America but also in the United States Southwest. The theme of the confrontations and conflicts generated by the encounter of conquerors and conquered, Spanish and Indians, good and evil, Whites and Indians, take on specific meanings and mediate local conflicts and processes that are engaged with national and transnational phenomena such as the formation of national identities, tourism, and mass media. We know, then, that these public expressive forms constitute a powerful arena for negotiation and contention. As Scolieri shows, dance was essential in the lives of Native Americans, and it was also important for Spaniards, as made clear by the many sources he presents. But what Scolieri illustrates with great depth is that dance took on even a more enhanced role in colonial, and I would add post-colonial, society precisely because dance became a privileged medium through which members of that society could embody, re-member, and re-imagine the violent encounter of the conquest, and the desires for an ideal or alternative order. Another, more recent phenomenon, mostly twentieth century and linked to transnational processes such as tourism, has re-energized the importance of these practices in the Americas by classifying them as “folklore” and making them once again a terrain for disputed or/and idealized recreations of identities.
But why is dance, in particular ritual dance, such a powerful embodied action that is often used, rejected, or negotiated in many social situations? This question may have various and lengthy answers beyond the scope of this review. However, based on the material provided by Scolieri about the role of dance in Aztec rituals, we are encouraged to look for answers in the relationship between human ritual movement and how the members of a society conceive the order of the world and the forces that control it. Chapter 3 of Dancing the New World, in fact, contributes to understanding the crucial role that human movement, in particular dance, has in ritual everywhere. Scolieri carefully examines Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentine Codex, the finest and most complete descriptions of human sacrifice rituals among the Mexica. We learn that human movement performed in ritual, particularly in the form of dance, ties directly to how the Aztecs conceived the relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial realms. Moreover, the movements that were part of human sacrifice ceremonies were closely tied to heavenly movements.
Scolieri's demonstration of the importance given by Aztecs to human ritualized movement should point us toward exploring the senses. While the senses have been left out of most social scientific and humanistic research, the study of kinesthesia, the sense of movement, has been marginalized even more so (Potter Reference Potter2008; Sklar Reference Sklar, Banes and Lepecki2007). Some studies in the fields of religion and ritual have pointed for a while in such a direction, arguing, for example, that in all societies, rituals are “always concerned with movement, directionality and spatial orientation” (Parkin Reference Parkin and de Coppet1992, 16).
Scolieri's book is a major contribution to the ethno-historical study of dance and of the early contact and colonization of the Americas, as well as the fields of dance and performance studies. If in paperback, it is strongly recommended for graduate courses and possibly high-level undergraduate ones in those fields. The high-quality reproduction of images certainly makes the book all the more instructive and attractive. It is also recommended for a general public interested in early contact in the Americas and on the importance of dance in history and society.
