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Getting under the Aztec Skin: Evangelical Theatre in the New World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Adam Versényi
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Extract

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 19 , August 1989 , pp. 217 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

Notes and References

All translations are my own.

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5. Ibid.

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19. Motolinía, , Tratado I, Cap. XV, in Colección de documentos para la Historia de México (México: Joaqin García Icazbalceta, edición facsimilar, 1971)Google Scholar.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.