Fine-Tuning the Authentic

OAXACA, Mexico —  In a hillside amphitheater packed with more than 10,000 people, eight men wearing huge, fan-shaped feather headdresses, velvet coats with embroidered capes and multicolored, fringed pantaloons are dancing a ritual of the Zapotec Indian culture with roots that stretch back to before the time of Christ.

In the blue-white glare of the afternoon sun, they bound across a raised circular platform in a series of unison jumping steps, forming a double line that serves as a corridor for a ninth dancer, their star soloist. This master of fast and intricate footwork specializes in spectacular asymmetrical leaps-in-place, ornamented with twists and flips of his airborne feet, but he also represents something greater than mere virtuosity: an evocation of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma engaged in a dialogue with the Spanish conquerors of Mexico. Their coats are rich browns and wines, his a gleaming gold; their steps are powerful and athletic, his a bravura cadenza heightening their style.

This is La Danza de la Pluma or the Feather Dance, the traditional climax to the Guelaguetza, an annual harvest celebration in which delegations from the state of Oaxaca’s seven regions share their indigenous music, dance, food, crafts and customs with one another. The word guelaguetza is itself a Zapotec term for sharing, more literally “give and take,” and to many Oaxaquen~os, the name and festival symbolize the triumphant survival of cultural identity and community generosity through centuries of radical change.

In Mexico City, however, some 366 miles to the northwest, the Guelaguetza Feather Dance has itself yielded to radical change. At a performance by Amalia Hernandez’s world renowned Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, in the ornate, 2,000-seat Palacio de Bellas Artes, the curtain rises to reveal a tableau of dancers wearing feathered headdresses and fringed pantaloons. But with a cast of 17--nearly twice the size of the Oaxaca group--the dancing has been expanded spatially, and the dancers’ technical arsenal emphasizes smoothly evolving geometric formations rather than all those jumping steps or displays of solo virtuosity. Call-and-response structure is nearly gone, and with it the last vestiges of Moctezuma and the conquistadors.

Instead, these classically trained professionals present a panoramic abstraction of the Feather Dance, more about conjuring up the splendor of an antique culture than preserving the values that make the Feather Dance compelling in its original form.

Less than four minutes after it begins, the Danza de la Pluma dissolves into a second Guelaguetza sequence, Hernandez’s adaptation of a women’s welcoming dance, a jarabe with Mixtec Indian origins.

Like this “Guelaguetza From Oaxaca” suite, most of the Ballet Folklorico repertory grows out of regional and village dances, along with reconstructions of ancient rituals and even examples of pervasive influences from abroad such as rock ‘n’ roll, which Hernandez incorporated in her depiction of a contemporary Mexican carnival. That repertory now includes more than 30 suites composed of nearly 60 different dances, with “Guelaguetza” a recent entry in the mix. It will reach Southland audiences for the first time this week on Ballet Folklorico programs in Escondido, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

In 1997, Ballet Folklorico is a 45-year-old institution that remains both vastly influential within Mexico and as well known internationally as the greatest folk ensembles from Asia and Eastern Europe. However, its success has always inspired folklorists and other specialists to criticize Hernandez’s creative process and her finished choreographies as wrongheaded--too obsessed with interpreting and theatricalizing Mexican dance to accurately preserve the complexities that make it unique.

It’s a controversy that gets at the heart of what “folklorico” means and what happens when that word is linked with “ballet.” For the Oaxaquen~os, who dance as their fathers taught them, what they do isn’t just a concept, a cultural resource to be adapted and re-imagined--it’s a concrete reality, a specific legacy-in-movement that ties them to their history and identity. For Hernandez, who concentrates on what she calls “the style, the personality, the essence” of a dance, it’s all a matter of art.

‘Mexico City is hell and Oaxaca paradise,” declares Sebastian Beltran, a young photographer who fled the crowding, sprawl, noise, crime, heat and pollution of Mexico’s capital, one of the most populous cities on Earth. Now Beltran makes his home in Oaxaca, a city of less than a quarter-million people celebrated for its temperate climate, glittering tinwork and elegant black pottery, its rich native costumes and even richer native sauces.

The state as a whole supports a more diverse ethnic population than anyplace else in Mexico: Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Popolocas, Chinantecs, Mixes and others, all preserving languages and traditions that existed before the Spanish conquest.

The most important annual festival in the state, the Guelaguetza dramatizes this diversity. Held on the last two Mondays in July, it dates only from the early 1930s in its current form, though its origins go back to ancient celebrations in honor of the Corn Goddess, Centeotl. Christianized by Carmelite missionaries in the 17th century, the celebration is ringed with three dozen satellite events, including concerts, academic conferences, art exhibits and a mezcal festival.

But nobody confuses such sideshows with the Guelaguetza itself, a.k.a Lunes del Cerro (Mondays on the Hill), which takes place just outside of town on a hillside sanctified by both Centeotl and the Carmelites. Here some 16 ethnic groups are represented during two day-long performances in which the sense of cultural pride and the spirit of sharing can assume a sacred significance.

“I feel wonderful things when people talk to me, smile at me and show their affection to me during the Guelaguetza,” says 85-year-old Domita Rojas, speaking in the ancient Mixe language. To return those feelings, she appears with her village group in the onstage ceremonies that precede the dances, “talking to the universe and asking the supreme being for health, well-being and peace. We also always pray for the visitors from outside, to help them preserve their affection for the universe, keep the good things about it and not to destroy them. To give and to receive: That’s what the Guelaguetza means.”

The dances and ceremonies may represent the ultimate gifts of the Guelaguetza, but they are supplemented by more tangible freebies: After each group stops performing, its members hurl village products to the screaming crowd: everything from small baked goods and plastic bags of green chiles to heavy pineapples, enormous coconuts and fragile terra cotta pottery.

At age 79, Dario Manuel Flores remembers the Guelaguetza before huge loudspeakers blasted the music to the top of the amphitheater--and before village choreographers imposed uniformity on most of the dances. “It used to be more like a [social] dance,” he recalls. “Any way they wanted to dance, they would, and now they have set steps. They also have to put more style into it. The only people that used to perform were the older people and now they have young and old together.”

Currently there’s also an authenticity committee that looks at dance groups in each town and village, inviting the best to perform in the Guelaguetza. And the groups don’t take the honor lightly. Zapotec dancer Alejandro Mendoza, for example, learned the Feather Dance when he was a child and has been practicing it three days a week all year long ever since he was 13. The hardest thing to master? “Going around backwards,” he answers, revealing that the whole dance is “very complicated” and hard on the knees--”You have to make your legs very soft in order to do it right.”

Now 21, Mendoza dances with the Grupo Teotzapotlan and also studies computers at the local university. If asked to choose, he’d immediately dump the 21st century in favor of the 16th, or 6th, he says: “I feel more pre-Hispanic because that part of my life is really me and the other part is necessity.”

Grupo Teotzapotlan leader Jose Guadalupe Uillareal explains that over time each Zapotec village has developed its own style of presenting the Feather Dance, so there is variation within the tradition. But he insists that each generation passes it intact to the next. “The only thing that has changed are some of the accessories we use--the mirrors, the fabric [for the costumes],” he says. “But the dance is still the same. The steps are the same.”

Uillareal is aware that Amalia Hernandez has staged her own version of the Feather Dance, and he has two major objections. First, there’s the matter of ownership: The dance is seen as Zapotec cultural property, not something up for grabs. “Historically, we have hieroglyphics in our ancient pyramids that show how this dance has always been part of our culture, going back to 500 years before Christ, when the Zapotec kingdom flourished,” Uillareal says.

He also has artistic objections: “She changed a lot of the steps and made it very stylized. You see her dancers mostly walking and this whole dance is about jumping. She also changed the story of the dance and changed the tradition, which is important to keep.”

‘There are definitely two camps about Amalia Hernandez,” says Gema Sandoval, founder-director of Danza Floricanto/USA, the Southland’s oldest and most distinctive folklorico company--one with a growing habit of organizing traditional music and dance thematically (as in its upcoming “Cuentos Mestizos/Mexican Folk Tales” program Friday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre).

“There are those who feel that Hernandez can do no wrong,” Sandoval continues, “that she is the first Mexican who has reached a world audience through the performing arts. Then there are those who feel she has misrepresented the culture, that she does not put folk dance on stage in its original form. You either feel one way or the other about her--I don’t think that there’s an in-between person.”

Except perhaps Sandoval herself, who sees the truth in both positions and credits Hernandez with opening doors for everyone in the field--including those with different artistic perspectives. She also believes that Hernandez has been misunderstood, “that she never pretended to do folk art. What she presents is beautiful, colorful, bigger than life, based on themes that she has taken from folklore and then given her own twist. She does folk-inspired work designed for opera-house stages. She’s putting on a spectacle.”

If so, it’s a spectacle based on an unusually wide-ranging background in theatrical dance. Hernandez began her dance training at age 8 with a former partner of the legendary ballet star Anna Pavlova. She later studied flamenco, tap, Asian and modern dance, along with indigenous Mexican art and dance, working in the late 1940s as a modern dance performer, teacher and choreographer at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City. In 1952, she left to form Ballet Moderno, an eight-performer ensemble specializing in folkloric choreography. One of her first creations for that group was “Sones de Michoacan,” still in repertory.

Within seven years, her company had become Ballet Folklorico, an institution that currently employs more than 400 people--with 110 dancers in the resident company at Bellas Artes and 65 more in a touring unit--plus an affiliated school. However, this dance empire still remains something of a family affair: One of Hernandez’s daughters, Norma Lopez Hernandez, now runs the two companies, while the other, Viviana Basanta, heads the school. A brother, Augustin Hernandez, has designed Ballet Folklorico sets as well as the building that houses the school. A sister, Delfina Vargas, has created costumes for a number of major suites. A grandson, Salvador Lopez, is the company administrative director--and somewhere waiting for a biographer’s discreet inquiries are the untold stories of Amalia Hernandez’s four husbands and their involvement with her career.

As she approaches what she insists is her 80th birthday--playfully saying that she intends to sue those sources claiming she is 83--Hernandez is a supremely successful arts executive and public figure: a feminist role model if Mexico ever had one.

This gracious, soft-spoken woman with silver hair recalls early in her career, when folklorists first arrived to pick apart her choreography step by step, charging that she had dared impose her own artistic vision on Mexican traditions. At the time she rebelled, threatening to sink Bellas Artes into the mud, put a lake over it and make them go fish. Today when that theater really is sinking without her help, she is more sanguine and prefers to think back on what she calls “the fun of investigation and study” before she begins to choreograph each suite.

With a gleam in her eye, she remembers spending nine months in Zacatecas researching one piece for her company and almost three years in the jungles of Central America and the rehearsal studio evolving a sense of the lost ritual dances of the Maya. “In Tikal [in Guatemala], I climbed through the trees to the pyramids because I believed that the spirits were still there and they were going to give me ideas,” she reveals. “I brought a dancer along and had him copy the positions on the [carved tablets]. I took hundreds of photographs and, from one pose to the other, created movement.”

That suite represented a conjectural, stylized impression of the Maya--a personal statement based on her extensive research but essentially creative rather than folkloric in approach. Even when adapting existing dances, Hernandez insists on the artist’s right to put her stamp on the material, comparing her reshaping of folk resources to the way Bartok, Mozart, Brahms and other composers transcribed, preserved and inevitably changed folk music.

The very idea of professionalism imposes change, she declares.

“The most different thing from the authentic folklore [in a Ballet Folklorico performance] is that villagers dance because they want to enjoy,” she says. “They are so happy to dance they don’t mind if the leg is crooked. But in the theater you have to have technique--you cannot be falling down or dancing crooked. The public won’t accept it.”

In a basement rehearsal theater in Mexico City, Hernandez watches a run-through of her Jarabe del Valle, the effervescent minisuite that closes “Guelaguetza From Oaxaca” on the Ballet Folklorico program. In front of her, 15 women sashay flirtatiously from small group dances to formal full-cast formations. In performance, they will be wearing simple white dresses, long braids and waving plum-colored shawls; today they are in black practice clothes but you can bet that nobody is falling down or dancing crooked.

Once again, this is an adaptation, an abstraction, and the process that brought it to the stage took about a year, Hernandez recalls. It began with her visiting an Indian school where the jarabe was being performed and finding the dancing “fantastic--the vitality, the happiness. They were not all doing the same steps, it was just jumping and dancing and joy--big joy. But the steps were very repetitive, they didn’t have a definite style. So I started working on that. First I analyzed what is the main power of that dance, of all the Guelaguetza jarabes, and I found it is the joy when they dance. So I started looking for movement to develop that mood, to put the personality of that happy people on the stage.”

“Sometimes it is very difficult to find the details--the small emphases in the choreography that give the style,” she reveals. “But I am a perfectionist. I have worked harder than you can imagine to keep the authentic style, the essence, in everything. When I find an idea, I really take it and analyze its origins and choose what is best for the theater and work it until I like it. So even if there are many dances that are based on heel work, the steps have their own style--they are danced jumping into the floor or jumping at the air.”

Early in her choreographic career, “about a hundred years ago,” she says with a laugh, Hernandez tried to adapt the Guelaguetza Feather Dance for her repertory. She remembers looking at the dance in its original Oaxacan version and being excited by the combination of Indian and Spanish influences in both the movement and costumes. “What I admired is how the two elements matched,” she says. “When you find both together, in synchronization, you can say you have the history of Mexico.”

However, her initial attempt disappointed her--perhaps because she has always felt more confident staging women’s dances than men’s. “I know the problems [with male dancing] only after I see them, and then I go on working until I solve them,” she says. When she began anew decades later, she brought one of her Ballet Folklorico men to a research session with some Zapotec dancers and later used him as the dance captain for the piece.

Back in Mexico City, she made a selection from the original steps and arranged for the costumes to be adapted from those she’d bought at the market in Oaxaca as well as from films and photographs.

Because she believes that the authentic decorations on folk costumes can either look too small to make any effect or seem impossibly fussy when presented on a large stage, Hernandez often enlarges the patterns for greater accessibility and theatrical splash.

“In the same way, I try to put more movement on the stage,” she says. “In the original [Feather Dance] they always jump in the same position. But I present more choreography than just the jumping steps, creating new steps to give a choreographic impact--new steps based on the style, mood and personality of the original. Nobody can tell me that this is not from the Guelaguetza.”

Her biggest change came with the decision to jettison the European-style band music heard at the Guelaguetza in favor of older flute-and-drum accompaniment associated with the Feather Dance in some village performances. The mood-change is startling: from raucous and celebratory in Oaxaca to delicate and ritualistic in Mexico City. But more changes may be in the offing. Hernandez says she still considers her Feather Dance unfinished business:

“Give me another year,” she comments. “I’m going to take all my male dancers to Oaxaca to a beautiful old convent and stay there for two months, dancing and dancing with the [Zapotec] farmers who belong to that place. Oaxaca is one of our richest states, so the ballet has to be rich too.”

Inevitably, Hernandez’s version of the Guelaguetza will be seen by audiences around the globe who might never be able to find the city or state of Oaxaca on a map, much less sample its dances in situ. Moreover, her success has spawned a legion of imitators in Mexico and the American Southwest who have managed to make some of her most controversial innovations more familiar to the dance public than the original folk dances she adapted long ago. You can even say that two parallel traditions now exist: the documentary reality of folklore and the grand theatrical illusions popularized by Hernandez and her followers.

Indeed, sometimes the two have merged.

With only a small trace of irony, Hernandez describes being invited to judge a contest of traditional dancing in culturally conservative Veracruz. Watching the competition, Hernandez discovered that the participants were openly incorporating steps she had invented for her classic Ballet Folklorico Veracruz suite.

“I didn’t say a thing,” she recalls with a big smile. “The tradition is like a river of style that goes on.”

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* Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido. Today, 2 and 7 p.m. $10-$41. (1-800-98-TICKETS). Also, Arlington Center for the Performing Arts, 1317 State St., Santa Barbara. Tuesday, 8 p.m. $22-$37. (805) 963-4408. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Wednesday to Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. $15-$55. (213) 972-7211.

* Danza Floricanto/USA, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Friday, 8 p.m. $20; children, $10. (213) 658-4077.