Memory of the Suns: dance of the Fifth Sun

A play from 2010 based on ancient Mesoamerican myths, astronomy and astrology.

Contempodanza is a Mexican company founded in 1986, and in 2010 celebrated 25 years by performing Memory of the suns in the Cervantino International Festival. Co-produced with the System of Theatres in the city of Mexico and the National Found for Culture and Arts, during the Bicentenary of Mexico's Independence and the Centenary of the Mexican Revolution, the piece represented Mexican people's worldview nowadays, from the particular perspective of the director, Cecilia Lugo.

The play refers to the Mesoamerican myth of the Fifth Sun, which measures time by the existence of different suns. Cecilia wondered: "…talking about our independence and our revolution made me think of my place as a citizen: what did I receive from this current Mexico?, what do I have?, what does it give to me? and what is also what I've received and what is what I give?".

The play calls to ancestral memories, reviews social echoes that defined the face of Mexico, and emphasises cycles throughout history: wounds, social movements and struggles repeated after times of calmness, vitality and quietness, over and over again. Eight dancers played the historical memory of the nation and unfolded their corporal lines to represent historic values, roots and myths: "We're the sum of suns", suggesting that every time a Sun ends, another one begins.

At the end of the play, rain falls upon the dancers, symbolizing renewal, birth and hope. However, water (floods) was the element that destroyed the Fourth Sun or cycle of time in Mesoamerican mythology, whereas motion (earthquakes) was the forecast of destruction for the Fifth one.

The Suns: cycles of time

Each Sun refers to the Mesoamerican myth of creation of the world, a myth we only know by oral traditions that provide different versions about it. One of them says that Ometéotl (a hermaphrodite god, or the couple Tonacacihuatl - Tonacateuctli considered as a single creator) had four sons, each one of them assigned to a geographic orientation. After 600 years Ometéotl created the universe and the cosmic time called "suns".

Different cultures referred to the same myth and started to count time at some moment between August 11^th and September 8^th in the year 3114 B.C. (there's no agreement about the date). Time was measured in cycles, each one ruled by a god and ending with a catastrophe. Each cycle began when one of the gods jumped into the flames and created a new world from it. The 1^st, 2^nd and 4^th ones lasted 676 years (or 13 cycles of 52 years), whereas the 3^rd one lasted 364 years (or 7 cycles of 52 years). The 1^st world was destroyed by jaguars, the 2^nd one by winds, the 3^rd one by fire, and the 4^th one by water.

In the Fifth Sun, the last one, two gods jumped into the flames although later one of them became the Moon. Ancient people also forecasted that the cycle would come to an end on December 21^st in 2012, with earthquakes and people being devoured by monsters from the sky.

Priests from those times used to look at the Pleiades, Orion, eclipses and comets, synchronizing calendars with the stars, for defining the architecture in constructions, and setting the time of agricultural activities, rituals and fortune-telling performances.

They also considered two calendars: the Solar Round (of 365 days) and the Sacred Round (or Ritual Calendar, of 260 days). Both of them were based on the number 20 as the basic unit of numeration, and functioned like rotating gears whose starting points were aligned every 52 years, the time period they multiplied by 13 or 7 to calculate the duration of each Sun. During each alignment, they celebrated the Ceremony of the New Fire or "the union of years": firstly, they turned off all fires, and then started a seeming fire in the heart of a sacrificed victim. The myth said that if the fire didn't turn on, the Sun would be destroyed forever.

the Mesoamerican calendar is a combination of the Solar Round and the Sacred Round calendars

The classical representation alluding to calendars and gods of each cycle is the Sun stone sculpture, built between 1427 and 1497. Originally with jade, turquoise and black colours, it's a low-relief carved on basalt, weighing more than 24 tons (53760 lbs), of more than 3.82 yds of diameter, and 1.11 yds thick. It's not the calendar that ancient Mesoamericans used but a kind of altar and ritual container in which they seemingly placed sacrificed hearts. After the Spanish conquest, an archbishop ordered it to be buried until it was rediscovered at the major park in Mexico City, in 1790.

photo taken by William Henry Jackson. Detroit Publishing Co. (1887)

As a symbol, it represents space, and the creation and destruction of time itself. In the central disc is the god Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun. Around him, in other bands, the rest of the symbols are turning.

From the centre to periphery:

1. Tonatiuh (yellow) with a knife instead of a tongue (since he feeds on blood to stay alive) and two eagle's paws extended towards both sides
2. the previous eras, the four Suns to be read counterclockwise (terracotta)
3. 20 ideograms for the days of a month (violet)
4. Venus' motion (red) is represented in 40 quadrilaterals, called quincunxes, with 5 points and 8 triangles or rays pointing to different directions
5. arc-shaped figures, feathers and other details (blue) that may represent the union of Heaven and Earth, and planets Mars, Mercury and Saturn, or the Milky Way
6. two fire snakes confronted and descending (green); they enclose the monolith and may represent duality; in the upper area, between their tales, there is the glyph assigned to day 13-ácatl of each month (a rod symbolizing the body of arrows, warrior qualities and triumph)

Artists and production: dancers Guadalupe Acosta, Irvin Guerrero, Gabriela Gullco, Saúl Gurrola, Lino Perea, Marely Romero, Ugo Ruiz and Itzel Zavaleta; lighting and scenery: Xóchitl González; sound design: Joaquín López Chapman (playing popular Mexican songs by Eduardo Soto Millán, Eugenio Toussaint, Alejandro Cardona and Eleni Karaindrou), image design: Pablo Labastida, musicians: Tambuco, Cuarteto Latinoaméricano, Camerata de las Américas, Camerata String Orchestra, custom: Alita Wilburn, lecture: voice of Damián Alcázar, texts: from the novel “Pathway to Baján” by the historian Jean Meyer.

Since December 2023, Contempodanza has announced on Facebook that the company's activities are indefinitely suspended.

Sources: El Siglo de Torreón, Chilanga, Blog de Benjamín Galván Gómez, El Universal, El mito de la creación de los aztecas, ¿Predijo el calendario maya el fin de los tiempos?, viajaBonito, Significados, Matador Network.