THEATRE REVIEW: “XIBALBÁ”, A SPINE-CHILLING ANCIENT RITUAL

Through the theatre butoh technique, the actress Natalia Cuéllar creates a play full of images that wander around the limits of life, bringing the audience closer to the Mayan mythology. Friday July 27th, 2012| by Leopoldo Pulgar Ibarra “Xibalbá” (in the picture) invites to come closer to the complex world of the Mayan mythology, a staging created by Natalia Cuéllar, performer and director of the Ruta de la Memoria company (“Cuerpo quebrado”), who specializes on plays based on concepts like Gender, Memory and Human Rights. A very difficult convening, if someone wants to understand, only rationally, the complex mythological-religious Mayan universe, with a lot of Gods, stories and symbols. But very close, vital, attractive, suggestive and deep if the member of the audience connects by sensorial means. Seeing and feeling the expressive language of the acting group, through the interior of a sweeping environment that the lightning, the wardrobe, the sound and the colors create, the member of the audience becomes the protagonist of a ritual where a girl expresses the multiple and contradictory emotions that her life has to go through. Xibalbá is the name of the Underworld, according to the Popol Vuh, the sacred Mayan book which narrates the origin of mankind. The mythology says that only the contact with this subterranean reality makes the knowledge of life possible. In a wider sense, the pilgrimage to the Underworld, to Xibalbá, the Reign of the Dead, is the same as entering an inner dimension of the human being which will make possible to live multiple states of conscience. The play is based on this definition. A virgin maiden is thrown to a big subterranean cave to marry the God of the Dead as an act of sacrifice to deity. Natalia Cuéllar plays that girl who, as a human being, lives a severe contradiction: she feels honored to be the chosen to enter the Underworld but, at the same time, suffers since she has to give her everyday life up. Within this trance, and guided at the beginnning by a character, played by Aníbal Sandoval, the girl is unwilling to keep on descending, although she continues. This behavior is expressed through the butoh dance which creates an intense body language, and is essential to take her to different emotional states of conscience. This way, the stage fiction transforms the sacred journey reference in a very special show, in a proximity to a culture of an almost completely unknown nature, whose symbols offer a more natural relation between life and death, the environement and the inner life. In this artistic journey, the spiritual silence and the look towards the depth of individual soul turn into flesh. Something unusual is showed on stage. As members of the audience linked to a culture which has put the ancient values aside, the artistic “Xibalbá” refers to the Mayan Underworld, without showing it, in a material way, on stage, but suggesting it through the stage resources it uses: the partial shade, the thorough selection of perfectly defined acting spaces, a meticulous journey of milimetrical advance in a short territory. And especially, with Natalia Cuéllar’s expresiveness of the butoh dance, whose half-naked body develops a series of gestures full of sense, rhythm and cadence, where something spiritual and sensual refers to the contradictory situation the maiden she plays is living. In this sense, the ritual rises in all its simple peak, independently of the rational understanding of the anecdote, since the sensorial and spiritual stimuli prevail in this play. Undoubtedly, a top-level artistic production and a very special stage experience.