Plaza de la Danza

The slope here has been turned into a broad staircase descending to a level performance platform: during performances, the stone serves as an auditorium. Before the redevelopment, this was the open Plazuela de la Soledad beside the former Monastery of San José; the neighboring building had served as a shelter, poorhouse, and barracks. Later, it housed the School of Fine Arts, and the space outside was paved with local cantera for classes and urban recreation. Between concerts, families sit on these steps and skateboarders skate here.

In the summer of nineteen sixty-nine, sixty-five members of a university folklore troupe gathered on this stone venue. They did not have enough money for the production, but they had an idea that required precisely an open-air amphitheater: to show Oaxaca's residents where Guelaguetza came from—the festival now more often called Guelaguetza.

A year earlier, Governor Víctor Bravo Ahuja had proposed supplementing the festival with new performances. He hoped to attract more visitors to Oaxaca and provide income for the city. The basis for the script was a work by the city chronicler Javier Castro Mantecón, written in nineteen fifty-four. They assembled three parts from it: the precolonial period, the colonial period, and the era of independent Mexico. University poet Francisco Hernández Domínguez added a fourth with his poem “I Am Oaxaca.”

The production was called “Bani Stui Gulal,” Zapotec for “Repetition of the Ancient.” It was a free stage version of the festival's history, created in the twentieth century, rather than a record of an uninterrupted ritual passed down from deep antiquity. In sequence, the dancers portrayed the veneration of Centeotl, the goddess of corn; a colonial procession and carnival; the festivities of the residents of independent Mexico; and the appearance of delegations from different regions of the state. Here, dance served as a way of telling the history of Guelaguetza itself.

For the first performance, they chose a venue that was only nineteen years old at the time. Until nineteen fifty, this was Plazuela de la Soledad, an open space beside the former Monastery of San José. The neighboring building had served as a shelter, poorhouse, and barracks before falling into decline. Governor Eduardo Vasconcelos secured its transfer to the new School of Fine Arts. On July fourteenth, legislators approved the creation of the school, and on September first, classes began in music, painting, sculpture, theater, and dance.

At the same time, the old venue was paved with cantera. The slope was used for broad steps facing the level space below. On the wall, they carved the purpose of the new Plaza de la Danza: “for the aesthetic education and recreation of the people of Oaxaca.”

After the first “Bani Stui Gulal,” participants of different ages began coming here every summer to join the cast. The production was repeated for about forty years. In two thousand nine, the production's cofounder Arturo Ochoa Canales and the troupe's director Teresa García Pinacho stopped rehearsals when another group announced that it would perform the production: the dispute concerned the rights to the show and even to the troupe's name. The proceedings deprived the participants of their annual appearance at this venue. The pause stretched to fourteen years, and the revived production was moved to another amphitheater on Cerro del Fortín.

A separate plaque remains on the wall of Plaza de la Danza in memory of the fifteenth performance of “Bani Stui Gulal.” Rehearsals and concerts still take place on the level venue; on free days, families and skateboarders come here, and the stone steps again become audience seating when a performance begins.