However, since dance is a transient art, it is inherently difficult for archeologists to find and evaluate evidence of its role.
Dance was a central component of social, religious, and political endeavors for the ancient Maya.
Dance served many functions such as creating sacred space, closing the gap between here and the otherworld, and releasing the dead from the grasp of the Xibalbans (see Xibalba).
Spirits of the super-natural world and their relationship with Maya culture played an important role in ritual dance.
The attire worn to some dances as depicted in murals show the links Maya dancers make to the natural world and to their worshipped gods who often took the form of animals.
For instance, the Tun-teleche¬ dance included victims whose hearts were removed before they died as a gift to underworld demons.
[1] In the book of creation, Popol Vuh, it is recounted that the dances of the Twin Brothers were part of a miracle ceremony.
In 1966, Michael D. Coe and Elizabeth P. Benson described a dancing scene showing several important lords standing with one heel raised.
The word was in a picture that depicts Bird Jaguar IV, a Yaxchilan ruler, in a pose that would be described as dancing holding a writhing snake.
Their human faces are shown in cutaway view inside the costumes of the fantastic creatures they have become through the transformation of the dance.
It induced visionary trances where either individuals or groups went into an altered state of mind that allowed them to communicate with the other world.
Warriors and battles also use this pose as a sign to capture enemies as well as to signal a spear being thrown.
This time the dance was done with a male who has an ax in one hand and a serpent in the other, and a woman who is grasping the lower body of the snake.
These dancers wore costumes of First father and First Mother, the deities whose actions enabled the final creation and the birth of all the gods.
After the Hero Twins are killed they come back to life as vagabonds and quickly enchant the people of Xibalba with their dancing and magic.
The Twins do, but this time they do not bring them back to life, limiting the Xibalbans power over humans forever.
One Spanish explorer describes a performance he watched as eight hundred heavy warriors danced in a giant stadium.
Diego Garcia de Palacio compared a courtyard enclosed by stairways in Copan to the Colosseum in Rome.
Dances were mostly public rituals showing community by people being different social classes on stage.
Some set of staircase contain pictures of captives walking down them giving the idea the rooms here were used to store prisoners.