Monkey Business

The performance is not exactly Cirque du Soleil, and the videography is a far cry from Ken Burns. But the documentary film of the Dance of the Monkeys, a Mayan religious ceremony and high-wire act, created by two Baylor anthropology professors is certainly mesmerizing in its own way.

Dr. Garrett Cook and Dr. Tom Offit didn’t set out to create a polished production. Their goal was to document and preserve a cultural and religious event in the Guatemalan Highlands, and they were able to do it through a research grant from Baylor. The hour-long film provides behind-the-scenes footage of the religious rites and practice sessions associated with the dance and two-week festival in Momostenango, Guatemala, a town with a population of more than fifty thousand. The film has no narration, but relies on the natural background noises for ambience—from the early-morning chats of participants in the back of a van traveling to religious shrines to the lively music that accompanies the dance performances that are the film’s highlight (pictured, left).

Cook, an expert in Mayan culture, said the dance represents the survival of old Mayan traditions, and he wanted to document it before it was too late. “To think all of that would be lost is sad to me as an anthropologist,” he said, “but at the same time, I know how culture works, and cultures change in every generation.”

Cook first heard about Dance of the Monkeys in the 1970s when he was doing graduate research in Momostenango. The religious practices there, he said, are a combination of indigenous Mayan beliefs and the Catholic faith brought by the Spanish conquest. The performance of the Monkey Dance combines a belief that supernatural powers are transmitted from the spirits of the monkey, jaguar, and cougar depicted in the dance with a celebration of the city’s Catholic patron saint.

Because the dance is expensive to stage for the dancers—who must finance their own costumes, pay for incense to burn at shrines, and take time off from work—it is performed only every other year. Cook had never seen the dance until the filming in 2006. The dance includes the erection of a tall pole in the town square. Dancers climb up through the church and descend along a rope connected from the top of the pole to the ground, performing spinning and balancing acrobatics as they go.

Cook had stopped visiting Guatemala in the 1980s when civil war broke out. When Tom Offit, who researches child labor in Guatemala City, joined Baylor’s faculty in 2002, the two professors discovered their common interest. Offit had met numerous teenagers working in the city who were from Momostenango, and they had urged him to visit. In fact, one vendor he knew turned out to be a major merchant in Momostenango. The professors rented out part of his house, located on the town’s main square, and some of the most exciting documentary footage was shot from the third-floor windows.

When Cook and Offit arrived to study the Monkey Dance, Cook found that the main local sponsor of the dance was someone he had interviewed three decades ago. When the professors offered to provide DVDs of the movie and photographs to the dancers, plus provide some limited funding (about $600), the dance organizer said that would make them sponsors of the dance. According to him, being a “sponsor” meant that the Baylor men would have to visit the Highland shrines and make offerings along with the dancers and other participants.

“That was just what we wanted,” Cook said, “so it was the best news I could have had.”

Offit said the arrangement allowed them to be both participants and observers of the ritual. “The essence of cultural anthropology is what we call participant observation,” he said. “It’s essentially doing as much as one can to approximate how they live and what they are doing in order to get the insider account, all the while being the outside objective observer.” But they didn’t take participation too far. “Neither Garrett not I had any interest in climbing the pole,” Offit noted.

The film was shown on the Baylor campus this spring, and Cook and Offit use it in their classes. But one of its biggest audiences has been the Mayan people themselves. “There are pirated DVDs being sold all over Guatemala,” Cook said. He assumes they were copied by the dancers. “I bought one just to have for archival purpoes,” he said.