Ondinnok's Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi: Re-Membering Fragmented Lineages

PERSONNE NE PEUT VIVRE EN PORTANT LES MORTS SUR SON DOS. METTONS LES MORTS A LA BONNE PLACE ET NOUS POURRONS NOUS LIBERER DE LEUR SOUFFRANCE. DANS LEURS BLESSURES SE TROUVE AUSSI UN REMEDE. ONE CANNOT LIVE CARRYING THE DEAD ON ONE'S BACK. IF WE LAY THEM TO REST, WE CAN LIBERATE OURSELVES FROM THEIR SUFFERING. IN THEIR WOUNDS. ONE ALSO FINDS A REMEDY. -YVES SIOUI DURAND, PERSONAL INTERVIEW, 25 JUNE 2010 Montreal in June is a theatre of great sensuous effervescence. The city comes back to life, triumphant after another frigid winter. Every unpaved surface, every tiny balcony becomes an ode to life, overflowing with flowers and fragrant herb gardens. Montrealers invade en masse the city's streets and numerous terraces, shedding their faded hibernation layers and basking in the warm sun. Not a minute of this precious summer is lost, and June marks the beginning of the city's nonstop festival season. Until September, Montreal will not sleep, its senses awake, absorbing life to better prepare for next winter's inevitable dormancy. This seasonal cycle of death and rebirth was palpable when I arrived in Montreal last summer to see Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi, an adaptation of the eponymous Mayan dance-drama mounted by Ondinnok, a Montreal-based Native American theatre company, to celebrate its twenty-fifth year of existence. This unique theatrical event-the play has only been produced once outside of Guatemala-was coproduced by Presence Autochtone/Montreal First Peoples' Festival, an annual multidisciplinary event that showcases the work of indigenous artists. As I walked in the blooming streets of Montreal towards the eXcentris, the performing arts center where the play was scheduled to take place, I was struck by the rare synchronicity between the city's jubilant survival and the journey of the production I was about to see. One of the major works of Mesoamerican literature, Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi has gone through many life cycles since its development around the fifteenth century. The text, a libretto for a dance drama, survived, at times clandestinely, only the Conquest and centuries of censorship but also Guatemala's bloody history of armed conflicts. Today, according to the UNESCO experts who inscribed Rabinal Achi on the organization's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the dance drama faces the added threats of folklorization and trivialization brought on by cultural globalization (The Rabinal Achi Dance Drama Tradition). Despite all this, throughout the last five centuries, Rabinal Achi has stubbornly risen from underground practices (the play was performed clandestinely for a period of time), defying odds and surviving in the harshest of climates. Rabinal Achi is still performed regularly on Saint Paul's Day on 25 January, in San Pablo Rabinal in Guatemala. The Grupo Danza Drama Rabinal Achi, led by Jose Leon Coloch Garniga, has been the official holder and preserver of the ritual since 1940, when the Coloch patriarch secured one of the few existing written copies of the text. The manuscript, the origin of which is the subject of disagreement among scholars, has served as a guide for rehearsals and for the transmission of the dance drama ever since. Despite the presence of this written text, however, the tradition of Rabinal Achi is still transmitted orally from one generation of performers to the next. Following the example of his father, Garniga learned, and can still recite, the 3000 verses of the libretto by heart, absorbing in the process the history and subtlety of some of the text's archaic words. Rabinal Achi has not only managed to endure through these exceptionally hard circumstances, but it has done so relatively unaltered, bearing no traces of European influence. In this respect, the text is unique in Mesoamerican literature, according to French scholar Alain Breton, who published a new translation of Rabinal Achi in 1994. Very little is known about the origins of the text, leaving scholars to speculate about many aspects of its development. …

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