Teatralidades y carnaval: danzantes y color en Puebla de los Angeles (review)

The main goal of Ileana Azor's Teatralidades y carnaval is to develop a methodology for theatre studies, and a theory to approach the rich corpus of contemporary Mexican festivities and rituals. The case study presented by Azor concerns carnival as celebrated in both rural and urban spaces in the state and city of Puebla (Huejotzingo, San Nicolás de los Ranchos and Santiago Xalitzintla). The study of carnival festivities in Mexico presents substantial challenges, as the author points out, that prevent it from being conceptualized using theoretical models developed for European theatre since the eighteenth century. These challenges include the relationship of the festivities to Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions—both, in turn, closely related to agricultural cycles and rituals—the multilayered aggregates of national and local history that contribute to what is represented, and the borderline status of carnival between rite and theatrical representation.

At times, this book reads like a dutiful collection of data, not always analyzed or conceptually organized, relative to the carnival in general (as in the Introduction) or to all Mexican carnivals as they have been documented (as in Chapter 2, "El Carnaval en México"). Other chapters, however, contain more important contributions. Chapter 1, "Para una presentación conceptual de nuestro universo" surveys several theoretical approaches to carnivals, feasts, rituals and games advanced by literary critics, anthropologists, philosophers and semiologists such as Mikhail Bakhtin or Umberto Eco. Azor briefly explores the diverse approaches suggested by these scholars to the understanding of carnival: as a site of temporal transgression; as an inversion of social roles; as excess and overflow; or as upheaval of the quotidian. But she finds more useful Eustaquio Arturo Velázquez Mejía's conception of the feast as a metaphoric way of living—not of upsetting—everyday life, whose purpose is to redirect and reenergize the very same components of which the quotidian is made. In this sense, social and labor structures are not subverted, but represented within a time and space frame that is nonetheless different from that of everyday life.

Azor is therefore less interested in exploring the social function and meaning of the carnivals that she studies, than in the structural functions of their formal components, and in their alternative utilization of space and time. She sees the festivity as structured according to what Alexis Juárez Cao Romero, following Arnold Van Gennep, has called the rites of passage: vespers (preparation), reverence (inauguration), margin (central and climatic moments and activities), farewell, closure and separation. Within this temporal framework, she proposes, following Patrice Parvis, to conceptualize the festivities by understanding that they privilege parallel and simultaneous processes over linear ones, energy, tension and direction over meaning, the concrete over the abstract, autonomy over hierarchy, diverse spatial perspectives over a central one, heterogeneity over homogeneity, and syncretism over purity.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Azor provides geopolitical and historical information on each of the carnivals studied. She also makes a description of their participants (comparsas, soldados, main characters), and of events and activities such as processions, battles, and reenactments of passages of local and national history, either real or symbolic. Her approach is not ethnographic, and the inclusion of information provided by participants in the carnival festivities is random. In the course of her description, Azor points out the coincidence of the different sections of most carnivals with the rites of passage described earlier. Her account certainly allows us to perceive the parallelism, heterogeneity and autonomy of the activities and events, their concreteness and syncretic aspects, and the existence of diverse spatial perspectives. The claim, however, that the quotidian is redirected and reenergized by these means is not supported.

Azor views teatralidad as a multidisciplinary strategy—a system of codes to communicate and construct a certain reality—in which the visual is privileged. It is perhaps this a priori perspective that accounts for her lack of...