Introduction: Doing Ethnomusicology "Texas-Style": A Musical (Re)Turn to Performance

This chapter estimates the urban mestizo and rural indigenous renditions of the ritual based on an analysis of performance aesthetics and ritual experience. It explores the different conceptions of performance, memory, experience and participation in the two distinct renditions of the living portraits of Christ. The chapter considers how they affect feelings of community and collective action. In 2001, however, the director of the troupe of actors was sick and unable to assume the responsibility. This opened a window of opportunity for indigenous catechists to propose a performance of the cuadros vivos, the 'living portraits' of the Via Dolorosa, for the general public with a script in Quichua, the language spoken by Otavalan indigenous people in the highlands of northern Ecuador. Semiotics, the study of sign systems, provides one such theory that scratches at the surface of affective human capacities and focuses an understanding of cultural performances not reflections about or representations of, but as actual processes of lived experience.