In Pixar’s Coco, Miguel crosses over to the “other side” - the plane of spirits and ghosts - when he attempts to steal a guitar from the grave of a beloved local musician of Miguel’s hometown. We follow Miguel on a quest to find his way back to the land of the living by dawn on the Day of the Dead – a trek he must complete to see his Earthly family again and stay alive. Guided, provoked, mentored, and teased by his ancestors on the “other side,” Miguel makes his way through a number of social, spiritual, and material obstacles as he strives to reach his loved ones back on Earth, eventually learning to always keep family – the most important thing of all – close to his heart.

 Many cultures around the world celebrate festivals of ancestor worship around the month of October. In Mexico, Day of the Dead is traditionally celebrated on November 1 and 2, although different geographies/individual families may celebrate on dates around this time. In the lunar month of Bhadrapada (which often falls in the time between late September and mid October), Bengalis around the world celebrate Pitri Tarpon by offering water and sweets to familial ancestors. The ancient Gaelic festival of late October, Samhain, celebrates an opening of the portal between living and dead spirits and families will leave out foods to welcome friendly spirits into the home. Scholars suggest that American Halloween has been heavily influenced by pre-Christian ancestor worship festivals in Europe, such as Samhain. Astrologers claim that around the month of October, the veil between the heavenly and Earthly planes is especially thin, and that this is also why many cultures independently developed ancestor worship festivals around the same time.

 Scholars of cultural evolution such as Dean Shiels, William Lakos, and Bernard Crispi have tried to study and understand patterns of ancestor worship via sorting religious practices into categories based on the living descendant’s relationship with the ancestor (is the ancestor conscious of the descendant’s actions? How involved is the ancestor in the material and social life of the descendant? What are the kin obligations towards ancestors required of living descendants?). But while ancestor worship features heavily in anthropological scholarship - especially in attempts to develop taxonomies of metaphysical kin relationships - experts have spent little time thinking about and have been unable to determine why all these ancestor worship festivals occur around the same time of year. Perhaps this is because such a research question would require study of cosmological mysteries, not more traditional research objects such as cultural/moral values. Perhaps academic methods are always incomplete, and must be supplemented by *something else* - beyond the materiality of Earthly events - to understand the universality of ancestor worship throughout the world. 

 It was fitting, then, that it was October 4th of this year when we all gathered at McCarter to view Coco, with live to film musical accompaniment by the Orquesta Folclórica Nacional de México. As the movie’s storyline led us to cry, laugh, and sing together, we also experienced the shared sensorial magic of live music. We saw the musician’s hands move across their instruments, and marveled at the subtle dance of their fingers; we heard and *experienced* waves of sound, our bodies literally humming in vibration with musical crescendos. This October, we shared  a temporary, never-again-to-be-experienced musical rendition in a shared space, shoulder to shoulder with our fellow audience members. Live music is a full body experience, Coco is a full emotional experience, and theater-going is a fully shared experience. I’m not sure if I believe in astrology, and you might not either. But it is undeniable that this October, while watching Coco at McCarter, together we experienced a small taste of magic. Perhaps, in our shared reverie, we were somewhere between the Earthly and heavenly planes.  

The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University.