Anyone who reads Dances of Anahuac will never look at the Aztec codices again without seeing dance positions. The authors of this book turn a startlingly clear light on the dance and musical forms of the preconquest peoples of Meso-America.
Gertrude Prokosch Kurath looks with fresh eyes at stone sculptures and clay figurines, Bonampak murals, preconquest and postconquest calendar codices, and, for the Aztecs, at Sahagún, Durán, and other chroniclers who described festival dances around the ceremonial year. She lays stress on the dualistic organization of Aztec thought which found expression in dance groups balanced according to social, age, and sex differences, god-impersonators and priests, light and dark, life and death, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. This duality, perhaps inevitable in all art and thought with the counterpoise of the yea and the nay, is central to the pattern of Aztec social organization, and its relation to Aztec art forms is convincingly handled here. Indeed, it seems to be a reciprocal relation, and in spite of the statement here that “the dichotomies of religion and politics, of war and peace, were submerged in the ceremonies,” one conversant with the material is bound to think of the Aztecs’ dance-like approach to public events. The authors limit themselves in Sahagún, for instance, to Book II with its ritual detail. They could well have added from Book VI the stylized, prescribed positions used when a Tlatoani, or Speaker, was notified of his election, and they could have added from Durán, Tezozómoc, and Ixtlilxóchitl the dances which accompanied declarations of war.
Samuel Martí also draws upon codices and chronicles, but for his part of the study he provides still more exact information from the preconquest musical instruments still available for examination and playing, and can speak of “the advanced six-tone scale we hear in a millenary Preclassic flute; the seven-tone scale similar to the European diatonic scale produced by a Maya flute from the Island of Jaina; the whole-tone scale produced by Tarascan flutes, and extraordinary triple and quadruple flutes from the Gulf of Mexico which play three-and four-part chords.” He feels that the flutes show a knowledge of acoustics and of the harmonic series; and in the rasping sticks with four different series of notches, the trumpet ensembles and the multiple-tone wooden slit drums, the groups of flutes and whistles of the same type but different sizes, he finds evidence of “an embryonic harmony.”
Both collaborators find “clues” to the past in modern indigenous music and dance. They point out disarmingly the dangers here. But going in either time direction, as long as they stick to the Meso-American area and its peripheries, their careful documentation from paper, stone, and clay, gives solidity to their conclusions—far beyond, one may point out, the European attempts to connect combat dances with pre-Christian sacrificial rites. The Totonac, Maya, Aztec, and Colima evidence is still with us.
The drawings and photographs and the dramatic and beautiful format make the book a treasure to hold in the hand. “Labanotation” scores of the reconstructed choreography, difficult for the untrained, are clearer because of their juxtaposition with the drawings and photographs. The appendices include lists of Maya and Nahuatl dance terms, an extensive bibliography, and a short list of films of modern fiestas.
