Maria de Baratta’s 'Nahualismo' Revisited: Quantum Identity Politics, Crises, and Reconfigurations

While attention to the provocative composer Maria de Baratta has increased in the past few years, mysteries about her past remain. Solutions inferred from available data remain uncertain. However, uncertainty itself, and the attendant multiple possibilities, are academically and scientifically supported by quantum theory, postcolonial and new materialist feminisms, ritual technologies like those depicted in de Baratta’s ballet Nahualismo, and known practices of some of the most vaunted artists of our time. Together, these disciplines bring understanding of Maria de Baratta and her ballet into a more multi-dimensional, thus more complete perspective. Paradoxes and quirks in her expressions of the indigenous culture of El Salvador (of which she was a descendant) emerge more as strategic preservation than appropriation.