Memory of the Suns: dance of the Fifth Sun

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

By Julia Pérez Bustamante, in Tres Mancias Consultoría

The danceplay

Contempodanza is a Mexican company founded in 1986, and in 2010 celebrated its 25 th years aniversary by performing Memory of the Suns in the Cervantino International Festival. The piece represented Mexican people's worldview nowadays, from the particular perspective of the company director, Cecilia Lugo.

The play was inspired by 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 on 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 evokes ancestral memories, reviews social echoes that defined the face of Mexico, and emphazises a cyclic perspective on 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", a phrase meaning that after a Sun ends, another one begins.

At the end of the play, rain falls upon the dancers, symbolising renewal, birth and hope. However, water (floods) was the element that destroyed the Fourth Sun or cycle of time according to 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 today by oral traditions providing 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 11th and September 8th of 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 by a catastrophe. Each cycle began when one of the gods jumped into the flames and created a new world from it. The 1st, 2nd and 4th ones lasted 676 years (or 13 cycles of 52 years), whereas the 3rd one lasted 364 years (or 7 cycles of 52 years). The 1st world was destroyed by jaguars, the 2nd one by winds, the 3rd one by fire, and the 4th one by water.

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

Two calendars

The priests of those times used to look at the Pleiades, Orion, eclipses and comets, synchronising calendars with the stars, for defining the architecture of buildings, and setting the time for 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.

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