Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City

7: Why Dance?

129 “[T]hese dances that some people call entertainment . . . are not amusements, we dance because it lightens the heart, because we are conquered by God Our Father.” —Capitan General in San Miguel de Allende1 “You close yourself. You don’t look around you because you shut yourself into what you are doing. You are concentrating and dancing. You are making turns and taking steps but you don’t know what or where you are.” —Jefa Teresa Mejia “Dance . . . is an ek-static movement which opens us to the wholeness and expansiveness of Being, and a movement which intensifies our grounding and our contact with the powers of the earth.” —D. M. Levin2 Only by dancing, by gaining know-how, can the enactor know the dance. In this chapter, I attend to the experience of the dancing itself. I look at why it is that people are drawn to and enter the dance and what it is about the enacting of it that catches them and keeps them coming. In Chapter 4, I looked at the process of ritualization that each enactor must perforce undergo as she enters into the spirit of the dance, focusing her attention on re-attaining its forms and on reproducing the steps and gestures in accord with their well-established patterns . I was concerned there with the relation between the inner self and the dancer’s body. Here I begin by looking at the enactor’s relation to the music s e v e n Why Dance? W h y D a n c e ? 130 played, the songs sung, and the incense burned. As the dance obligation builds over time, a state of intersubjectivity is created between dancers, achieved in part by the physical work put into the dancing by each dancer, by the media used, and more particularly by the surrender of the everyday self and the contact achieved with the animas (spirits)—or to put it in the Concheros own terms, 7.1. Dancer at Los Remedios in 1960. (Photograph by Ruth Lechuga) W h y D a n c e ? 131 the attainment of union and conformity that leads to conquest. Transcendence can and does sometimes occur and is a state in which the celebrant is once again on her own and gains insight into her own life. As a number of dancers indicated , the dance can teach a new way of being-in-the-world that can give added meaning to everyday life. The dances are never performed alone or, in the case of an accomplished dancer, in her spare time; it is what is achieved together that is important, for there is not only the discipline of the dance—its ritualization —but also the need to respond to others as a shared somatic state develops. “Transcendence” is a term best left to resonate, and when dancers did speak to me about it, I mostly have let them speak for themselves in this chapter. DANCE IN THE ORY There is no doubt that dance is a significantly different activity from other forms of movement, but anthropologists have often found it hard to define as something apart from other structured systems.3 I have so far used the term “dance” as though as a form it is unproblematic. However, not all dancing has music, and not everything that appears to be dance is called dance.4 On the other hand, in some cultures, forms that appear to Western eyes to be undance -like actually are or have been so classified.5 But does a distinction need to be drawn? Increasingly, analysts have been challenging such genre definitions. Ness uses the designation “choreographic phenomena” to analyze a range of patterned body movements that include those used in ritual practices, whereas Lowell Lewis has argued for the use of the term “movement” in place of “dance.”6 Although I sympathize with these approaches, I will not be following either suggestion. This is in part because the dancing of the Concheros is so much more clearly dance in Western terms than either the Brazilian capoeira or the Philippine sinalog.7 Furthermore, the Concheros themselves use the term “dance” to describe some of their activities, and what is attained by means of this sacred activity clearly differs from the effects of everyday action or other specialized movement forms. What I explore in this chapter is precisely what this difference is by trying to understand...