MEDIATHEK

This is the first modern “opera” written in Nahuatl, the Aztec’s language, nowadays spoken by about three million people in Mexico. It is also the first large-format piece in Latin-American repertoire, where native percussion and percussive dance (written in the score) is a main feature for an operatic performance.

Pareyon’s musical score is as well a novelty, since it is fully noted using native Mexican symbols and original sound representation. Pareyon’s libretto is based on one of the Cantares Mexicanos, which is a collection of songs in Nahuatl, written in the 16th century after an older oral tradition. The text is considered by most Nahuatl specialists to be among the most intriguing texts written in colonial Nahuatl, and among the most challenging. The particular songtype is what in Nahuatl is called a Cuecuechcuicatl, which John Bierhorst translates into English as “Ribald Flowersong” and philosopher and Nahuatl scholar Patrick Johansson translates as “Canto florido de travesuras” (flowery song of naughtiness). Based on descriptions of the songtype in ethnohistorical sources which describe it as being sexually inappropriate for a good Christian audience, Johansson reinterprets the flower and nature images of the song as sexual metaphors. This interpretation forms the basis of Pareyón’s work which is built around an erotic theme.

The plot of the work, created by Pareyon based on the song, evolves around an erotic relation between a Huastec by the name Tohuenyo (performed by Ricardo Diaz Mendoza, known from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto), three ahuianimeh “pleasure girls”(performed by Silvia Moreno, Abril Mondragon and Priscella Uvalle) and a cuicamatini “knower of songs” (performed by César Juarez-Joyner) who at the end of the work turns into the Aztec god of music and sexual debauchery, Xochipilli.