Performance as Evidentiary Rupture

The 1521 rupture did not merely cease the physical act of performance; it initiated a metamorphic resistance. When the Borgia tradition of painted scripts was scorched, the knowledge contained within did not vanish — it migrated into the rhythmic pulses of the Voladores, the masked Tecuanes, and the syncretic Concheros.

The colonial archive is a sieve. What remains are the fragments the colonizer deemed interesting enough to document, or harmless enough to ignore. The Florentine Codex — Bernardino de Sahagún’s twelve books of General History of the Things of New Spain — is simultaneously the richest record of Mexica performance and an instrument of its surveillance. To read it is to read a mirror held by the executioner.

I. The Silence as Source

Historians of performance work in a discipline of presence: a score, a recording, a witness. Mesoamerican ritual offers almost none of these for the period under study. Of the thousands of pre-contact codices, fewer than twenty survive. Of the song cycles described by colonial chroniclers, the majority exist only as titles in Spanish-language summaries. We must learn to read the silence — not as the absence of evidence, but as evidence of absence.

To perform is to remember with the body what the archive has tried to forget.

II. Performance as Counter-Archive

Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive of enduring materials and the repertoire of embodied practice becomes acute here. The repertoire — gesture, breath, footfall — survived the fire precisely because it could not be locked in a cabinet. The dancing body became its own forbidden manuscript.

The Rabinal Achí, performed continuously in highland Guatemala since at least the fifteenth century, is the longest-surviving pre-contact dance-drama in the Americas. Its persistence is not incidental. It is the consequence of communities choosing, generation after generation, to refuse the inquisitor’s ledger.

III. The Ethics of Reconstruction

The temptation, faced with a gap, is to fill it. To imagine the burned codex. To choreograph the lost dance. This paper argues against the reflex. The void is not a deficiency in our knowledge to be repaired with speculation — it is the historical evidence of an act. The empty page is the document.

To honor the burned codices we must keep their pages visibly empty in our own scholarship. We must build catalogs whose entries are numbered, dated, and blank.