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PERSONNE NE PEUT VIVRE EN PORTANT LES MORTS SUR SON DOS. METTONS LES MORTS À LA BONNE PLACE ET NOUS POURRONS NOUS LIBÉRER DE LEUR SOUFFRANCE. DANS LEURS BLESSURES SE TROUVE AUSSI UN REMÈDE.
ONE CANNOT LIVE CARRYING THE DEAD ON ONE'S BACK. IF WE LAY THEM TO REST, WE CAN LIBERATE OURSELVES FROM THEIR SUFFERING. IN THEIR WOUNDS. ONE ALSO FINDS A REMEDY.
-YVES SIOUI DURAND, PERSONAL INTERVIEW, 25 JUNE 2010
Montreal in June is a theatre of great sensuous effervescence. The city comes back to life, triumphant after another frigid winter. Every unpaved surface, every tiny balcony becomes an ode to life, overflowing with flowers and fragrant herb gardens. Montrealers invade en masse the city's streets and numerous terraces, shedding their faded hibernation layers and basking in the warm sun. Not a minute of this precious summer is lost, and June marks the beginning of the city's nonstop festival season. Until September, Montreal will not sleep, its senses awake, absorbing life to better prepare for next winter's inevitable dormancy. This seasonal cycle of death and rebirth was palpable when I arrived in Montreal last summer to see Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi, an adaptation of the eponymous Mayan dance-drama mounted by Ondinnok, a Montreal-based Native American theatre company, to celebrate its twenty-fifth year of existence. This unique theatrical event-the play has only been produced once outside of Guatemala-was coproduced by Présence Autochtone/Montreal First Peoples' Festival, an annual multidisciplinary event that showcases the work of indigenous artists.
As I walked in the blooming streets of Montreal towards the eXcentris, the performing arts center where the play was scheduled to take place, I was struck by the rare synchronicity between the city's jubilant survival and the journey of the production I was about to see. One of the major works of Mesoamerican literature, Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi has gone through many life cycles since its development around the fifteenth century. The text, a libretto for a dance drama, survived, at times clandestinely,
only the Conquest and centuries of censorship but also Guatemala's bloody history of armed conflicts. Today, according to the UNESCO experts who inscribed Rabinal Achi on the organization's "Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity," the dance drama faces the added threats...