High in the south-central Andes, two dancers face each other holding a pair of iron rods that ring like scissors, and dance against one another in feats so extreme the contest can run as long as ten hours. The danzaq is not performing. He is showing the power of the spirit he carries.
Where does it come from?
The dance belongs to the Chanka people of Huancavelica, Ayacucho, and Apurímac. The danzaq are understood as descendants of the tusuq laykas, the priests and healers of the world before the Spanish. When that world was conquered, the Church named them sons of the devil and drove them into the high mountains, and let them return only to dance at the Catholic saints' festivals. So the living form is a meeting of two worlds: an Andean shamanic art performed inside a Catholic calendar. The writer José María Arguedas spent much of his life recording this world.
What does it mean?
Its sacredness is Andean, not Catholic. Each dancer is a child of the Wamani, the spirit of a particular mountain, and takes a spirit name. The story that the danzaq makes a pact with the devil is the colonial Church's reading of a power it did not understand, not the dancers' own belief. To this day a danzaq may not enter a church in his costume. The dance carries Pachamama, the earth, and the worlds above and within.
What do you see?
Teams of a dancer, a violinist, and a harpist face off in a contest called atipanakuy. The scissors are two loose iron rods, not blades, struck together in time to the music. The feats are the proof of the spirit: dancing on one foot, leaping, walking on fire, swallowing glass, passing needles through the skin. The costume weighs some thirty pounds, heavy with mirrors and gold thread, and the dancer makes his own. To drop the scissors is a deep disgrace. UNESCO inscribed the dance on its heritage list in 2010.