Mexican Martial Art Based on Traditional Mayan Culture

A group of Mexican dancers and martial artists are reclaiming their history through a brand new style of martial arts that aims to both showcase and protect ancient Mayan world views and “endangered” human movements through a distinctly Mexican art form rooted in traditional Indigenous culture.

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The project, titled Wiinkilil Art of Defense, brings together the ancient and the modern as its founders and practitioners “transform traditional Mayan movements” into “movements of personal defense.”

“(The project) aims to highlight self-defense for what it represents artistically and symbolically in order to reflect on those elements of everyday life, which can be taken up again in the contemporary art context,” Gervasio Cetto, one of the masterminds behind the initiative, told the Mexican new agency Notimex in an interview published Monday.

According to a description published on the website of the National Institute of Issues of Movement of Mexico, the reinterpretation of historically important movements in a way that can still be relevant and beautiful today represents an “interdisciplinary work that imagines what the first Mexican art of defense would be like."

The idea for the initiative was born in 2013 within a larger project, called Human Movements in Danger of Extinction in Mexico, that aims to uncover, preserve, and showcase the everyday movements that have long been practiced in Mexico’s Indigenous communities, but are increasingly being lost under the social and economic impacts of neoliberal capitalism.

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Such movements could be very mundane yet simultaneously specialized, like the actions involved in making traditional foods, practising ancestral forms of medicine, or harvesting Indigenous plants—specific cultural knowledge that is increasingly being lost in modern Mexico.

Reimagining these movements as a form of martial arts, the creators of Wiinkilil Art of Defense forge an intriguing parallel between self-defense and the defense of Indigenous cultural practices and identities.

“From the beginning, the idea was to incorporate the public in the creative process of transforming traditional movements,” Cetto continued, adding that each performance of the self-defense dance is unique as a result of the dynamic between performers and the audience. “The idea is to prevent these movements from disappearing and for that it is definitively necessary that people identify with and take part in this process.”

The multi-disciplinary project brings together dancer, choreographers, visual artists, musicians, and other artists to create works that aim to transcend the performance space and touch on everyday themes of education, health, and cultural heritage in a direct way, according to Cetto.

Wiinkilil Art of Defense has been compared to Tai Chi due to its fluid and controlled movements. It also bears similarities to the Brazilian martial art Capoeira due to its unique fusion of self-defense and choreographed dance.