Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest by Paul Scolieri (review)

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 2003, 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 1984; Poole 1990) 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 2008; Estenssoro 2003). 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 2003, 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...