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LHP: ALZATE

RHP: CULTURAL INTERWEAVING IN MEXICAN POLITICAL CABARET

2

Cultural Interweaving in Mexican Political Cabaret

By Gastón A. Alzate

I understand the concept of interweaving performance cultures as a flexible perspective to probe

and/or question the cultural adjustments, ambiguities, and misalignments performative events

produce and manifest. As I see it, a study on interweaving performance cultures refers to the

manifold possibilities that reveal themselves when we think about the performative events in our

contemporary world marked by globalization with a critical mind and an open eye for cultural

subtlety, beyond—and sometimes in direct confrontation with—the ultimately similarly

homogenizing perspectives of Eurocentrism and political correctness. In this respect, this

practice ought to always be related to Victor Turner’s observation on theory, which he

considered relevant only if it shed light on social reality. Turner even wrote that it is often not a

theoretician’s total system that illuminates reality but “his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight

taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own

and may generate new hypotheses.”1

I aim to here explore the possibilities that emerge when we think about interweaving

performance cultures in contemporary Mexican political cabaret, a type of theatre derived from a

specific cultural context and explicitly open to interweaving with multiple traditions. With this

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purpose in mind, I must also take into account the intended readers of this chapter, many of

whom most likely will be located outside of the Latin American cultural map. I will attempt to

clarify—within the limits of both my background and the scope of my topic—the possible

misalignments and ambiguities produced when doing cultural analysis across scholarly and

cultural contexts. I consider this to be an integral part of any practice of interweaving

performance cultures.

Regarding Mexico, the divisions between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of national culture

as related to influences originating in other geographical areas are extremely heterogeneous and

complex. While it could, of course, be argued that even in Western Europe or the U.S. it is not

possible to clearly separate the distinctive elements of the cultural processes that take place there,

this awareness has come rather recently in the academy as compared to inquiries dating from

several centuries ago in Latin America, as intellectuals there were forced to question their place

vis-à-vis Europe and their own traditions due to their peripheral situation. In addition, let us not

forget that neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese Crown conceived of colonization in America

as the domination of a foreign cultural territory but rather as an extension of Catholic Europe.

The beginning of Spanish colonization almost instantly led to many interweaving

processes, which did not result in a singular form of syncretism or uniform cultural merging. Yet,

it also did not produce an obvious ethnic or racial stratification, with exceptions such as the

10 percent of the Mexican population that self-identifies as belonging directly to an indigenous

tribe. This is also related to the fact that after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) there was an

ideological process of ‘de-Indianization’ fostered by the state in favor of a national harmonious

mestizo culture in order to eliminate social conflict.2

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Another reason why separating the indigenous from the urban cannot be easily

understood has to do with the long history in Mexico of shared causes between indigenous or

peasant communities and visible sectors of the urban population, including intellectuals, workers,

students, progressive politicians, and certain artists (including several contemporary cabaret

performers). This solidarity has been based on the idea of a common origin and a common

nation.3

My main focus in this chapter is to analyze three interconnected aspects of cultural

interweaving within Mexican cabaret. The first one is albur, a Mexican form of popular humor

based on wordplay, which cuts across social classes. This dynamic from contemporary daily life

but dating back to the pre-Hispanic period is intertwined in cabaret with various theatre

practices. A related instance of cultural interweaving deals with Mexican political cabaret as a

kind of theatre practiced by artists with a formal theatre education, who have turned their gaze

back to Mexican popular theatrical traditions, mainly carpa (tent theatre), and to other forms,

such as commedia dell’arte, opera, and postwar German cabaret, among others.4

The third instance of cultural interweaving to be explored here has to do with political

critique and the emphasis on sexual diversity in Mexican cabaret. Many cabaret performers are

openly homosexual and/or supportive of sexual diversity and gender equality in their shows,

thereby breaking with the conservative and dogmatic model of being Mexican.5

In this chapter I will only discuss the Mexican artists who initiated the political cabaret

genre and are nowadays considered forerunners by more recent performers.6

<A>A Brief Outline of Mexican Cabaret

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In the 1980s, cabaret started as an outlet for performers to freely express their concern for the

situation of the country, outside of, and sometimes in direct opposition to, Mexican academic

theatre. This decade marked the era in which full-fledged neoliberalism entered the scene during

the government of Miguel de la Madrid, who privatized state-run industries and started the

process of eliminating trade barriers for foreign investors. De la Madrid had studied in the

U.S.—indeed without exception, all of his successors as president had done postgraduate studies

in administration or finance at Harvard or Yale. The political cabaret genre was initiated by a

few artists within the context of cultural night bars in Mexico’s capital city, in which alternative

singers and performers offered shows for a politically engaged audience of students,

intellectuals, artists, and middle-class professionals. The artists who first established themselves

as political cabaret theatre performers were Jesusa Rodríguez and her partner, the musician

Liliana Felipe, as well as Tito Vasconcelos, Astrid Hadad, and Regina Orozco. Vasconcelos and

the couple Rodriguez/Felipe opened their own cabaret theatres in Mexico City (the latter left

theirs in the hands of the cabaret company Las Reinas Chulas in 2005).

In their effort to involve a larger audience and make a type of theatre that entered into a

dialectic relationship with their time, these performers looked back to Mexican carpa (tent

theatre) from the beginning of the twentieth century. This was a popular itinerant entertainment

form circulating in downtown Mexico City and working-class neighborhoods. Carpa comedians

relied on the language and experiences of the urban underclass, and as Carlos Monsiváis has

analyzed extensively, they helped to consolidate the modern imaginary of Mexican popular

culture.7 Due to its popularity and its roots in the country’s daily life, carpa (and also revista—

similar to revue theatre) has been seen as a picturesque genre quite distant from formal theatre.

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Yet, precisely due to its character as a popular cultural expression in constant dialogue with its

present, carpa theatre became a critical, self-reflexive mirror of Mexican reality. The

aforementioned cabaret artists aimed at recuperating such traits, as do more recent followers.8

In short, in the 1980s Mexican cabaret performers were searching for a theatre that would

open up spaces for reflecting on the injustices in their country, starting from a performative

imaginary shared by most Mexicans. Yet, focusing on political issues always carries the risk of

falling into dogmatism. The politics of representation, which aims at giving visibility to

experiences of the real through the exploration of gender-related, sexual, or ethnic differences

against the grain of hegemonic ideologies, oftentimes either surreptitiously or openly possess a

subtext of literalism or turn into an “aesthetics of truth coinciding with a pre-semiotic conception

of representation,”9 as Simón Marchán has stated. However, it is also important to consider

political cabaret as part of what Mexican theatre scholar Antonio Prieto has defined as “counter-

representation,” that is, decentering representation through irony. While Prieto refers mainly to

‘non-objectual art’ according to the term coined by Latin American art critic Juan Acha, his goal

is demonstrating that performance art and theatre (in the sense of semiotic strategies) are not

necessarily opposed:

Some performers, rather than rejecting representation, play with it in an ironic vein, turn it upside down to reveal its ideological mechanisms. The most politicized performance puts into play . . . a conceptual work that aims to deconstruct the politics of representation.10 In cabaret, within the frame of the satire against those in power, this corresponds to a focus on

the dialectic and ironic potential of the genre. Otherwise it may resemble indoctrination and thus

result in passivity and boredom for the audience. Cabaret is not a closed system or purely a tool

for political questioning but a performative theatre form based to a great extent on what Federico

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Fellini called the ‘disponibility’ of actors, because he was in disagreement with the subtext of

spontaneity pervading the idea of improvisation.11 Vasconcelos and Rodríguez in the

independent workshops they occasionally offer for actors have thus placed great emphasis on the

need to strengthen the intellectual background of cabaret performers by doing sound historical

research on the topic of the shows and always being aware of the latest news, along with a

continuous development of acting techniques. In cabaret, the exploration of metatheatricality

through improvisation must contribute to the deconstruction of representation by opening up the

show to unexpected directions, taking into consideration current events and specific audiences.

In Mexico City the majority of these shows take place in bar theatres that mostly cater to

open-minded, progressive, liberal audiences who may disagree somewhat with the perspective

offered in the performances but nonetheless share a similar standpoint. This is no different from

what happens with theatre critical of the political system in most capitalist countries. However,

the aforementioned cabaret artists—especially Rodríguez and Vasconcelos—have also taken

cabaret to other social and physical spaces. As an example, they both created a cabaret group

with marginal youth in Mexico City (La Chinga), which presented shows in neighborhood

theatres. Parallel to her own cabaret and experimental theatre work, Rodriguez, along with

psychologists paid by the Mexican Social Security Institute, offered cabaret workshops to

indigenous women in various Mexican states over the course of several years. The idea was not

to teach but to collaborate with them, so that they would strengthen their own expressive forms

through humor, music, painting, and theatre. The main goal was to foster self-esteem and

community ties.

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The possibility of exploring a wide array of theatre aesthetics to create a form of theatre

that would be intertwined with the plural reality of their country as well as the chance to develop

the actors’ dramaturgy in shows that would constantly change with political events are the two

main reasons cabaret has many followers among theatre actors in Mexico—in spite of the lack of

the financial self-sufficiency of most shows. It must also be mentioned that, as in formal theatre,

Mexican cabaret is not exempt from aesthetic failure; it depends on the artists’ abilities to go

beyond literal political discourse.

<A>Beyond Marginality and Mainstream Dichotomy

The first contemporary Mexican political cabaret artists are not marginal figures in theatre. Tito

Vasconcelos is well recognized as a theatre instructor, film actor, and scholar on colonial theatre;

Regina Orozco is an accomplished mezzo-soprano and movie actress; Astrid Hadad is a well-

known alternative singer; Jesusa Rodríguez has won the Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed

her to establish the independent bar theatre El Hábito (meaning both ‘habit’ and ‘robe’), as well

as the Obie Award for her collaboration with the New York–based group Mabou Mines. She also

directed a version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni renamed Donna Giovanni (which included the

participation of Hadad and Orozco), among other experimental works in opera and theatre.

The particular moment in time at which political cabaret emerged is highly relevant from

the perspective of the interweaving of performance cultures because the 1980s have been studied

as part of a globalizing wave beginning in the 1970s, which produced a series of exchanges of

cultural events around the world.12 As the Cuban scholar Ileana Diéguez states, from the 1950s

onward it is possible to relate the questioning of traditional understandings of theatre to changes

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in cultural paradigms.13 In the 1980s, Victor Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre beautifully stated

that theatre was not a closed semiotic system, and there were also other scholars who talked

about a form of theatricality that would question the privileging of texts.14

While there are notable exceptions, to a large extent modern Mexican theatre has been

based on a textual understanding of drama. This approach often constrains the actors’

dramaturgical participation. The first cabaret performers who questioned the privileged position

of texts within theatre shared the idea of it as a live art form deeply intertwined with its context.15

Thus, they also looked back to cabaret comedians, such as the German Karl Valentin, who

explored defamiliarization and metatheatrical strategies and would greatly influence Brecht’s

views on theatre. In Mexico this performative turn is related to an official culture resulting from

a political system in which most of the intellectual and artistic elites have been co-opted through

generous political posts and government fellowships. Thus a form of theatre as openly critical of

the system as cabaret necessarily emerged outside of the official cultural apparatus. It also relied

on a form of humor that is considered quintessentially Mexican.

<A>Albur, Gender, and Humor

In contemporary Mexico albur consists of commonly used words and expressions already

codified with a second meaning of a sexual nature, such as ‘chile.’ The verb alburear means to

actively use this subtextual meaning in normal conversation, sometimes without the addressee

noticing that he or she is being laughed at. Albur may be quite direct, but it also may involve

extremely sophisticated wordplay as its undertones frequently derive from metonymy or

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metaphor and often build up progressively over the course of a conversation. Even if one knows

the code, the meaning is not always apparent.

Contemporary albur, like its pre-Hispanic manifestation, contains an element of

aggressive (warlike) ridicule, because it is about defeating an opponent by mocking him.

Originally, indigenous wordplay was part of a dance performance in which gestures were

essential. In contemporary albur the picaresque undertones of its pre-Hispanic predecessor

appear through verbal and occasionally gestural discourse; its disappearance from traditional

dance is related to the colonial church’s censorship of the form as obscene. In nonverbal culture

only dances of African origin today still maintain an erotic and picaresque nuance. According to

Johansson, who has studied albur through ancient Nahuatl poetry, women “had license to mock

the ruling class lords with impunity,” as they were invested with “a destructive erotic power over

the potential enemy.”16 Johansson also elaborates on how the elderly had the moral authority

required to reprimand the lords. In addition, the utmost expression of pre-Hispanic albur seems

to have been homosexual references. This is similar to contemporary albur, but a significant

difference is that currently it consists of a verbal combat exclusively between two men, in which

pointing out feminine attributes in the opponent is used as weapon. In this sense, while albur

may be highly creative, it may also be used to reinforce prejudices against women and

homosexuals due to a subtextual masculinist cultural ideal.

Nonetheless, albur may also be used against the grain of the social hegemony, which was

the case with carpa theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Carpa recreated albur with

a social critique. Both this type of theatre and also contemporary cabaret make use of the

performative character of albur, because there is always the need for a third party, an audience,

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which through laughter acknowledges the mastery of the performer. By recuperating a tradition

employed by performers without formal theatre training, political cabaret artists explicitly rely

on this daily life dynamic. Thus, unlike carpa, contemporary cabaret is not an underground

phenomenon rooted in working-class neighborhoods but a conscious effort by theatre artists to

recreate and redefine a near-extinct genre. In this respect, I think it is important to break the

common tendency in progressive intellectual sectors (especially in the U.S. and Europe) to place

great importance on the class origins of cultural producers, particularly those from the periphery,

as if those belonging to underprivileged sectors were invested with some kind of ethical purity.

This is not to deny that in some cases a particular social background can be relevant to better

comprehend a given cultural phenomenon and that such productions can tell us a lot about our

own condition and that of other human beings. However, very frequently these approaches

ignore the need to go deeper into a reality distant from our conception of the world: experiencing

performances would never be a substitute for learning about other cultures. It can nevertheless

provide a point of departure to inquire about cultural mechanisms beyond the fixity of texts,

stereotypes and dominant perceptions of such cultures in order to break the binary frame of mind

characterizing most approaches to productions emerging from so-called developing countries.

This, in my view, must be one of the main concerns of contemporary theatre studies (and of

institutions such as the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Center in Berlin).

By resuscitating carpa, Mexican cabaret artists are clearly working against the

widespread Latin American phenomenon of uncritical internationalization (or homogenization)

of theatrical and cultural productions, akin to the idea of a single developmental model based on

that of industrialized Western countries.

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<A>Cabaret: An Open Genre

Since the 1980s, the open nature of cabaret has given artists the possibility to experiment with

various theatrical strategies, either emerging out of their university studies or their own particular

interests (i.e., Rodriguez left her theatre studies in order to work independently as a scenographer

with the avant-garde director Julio Castillo). As stated above, among the first traditions they

explicitly looked at was postwar German cabaret. Similarly to German cabaret, Mexican revista

and carpa encompassed comedy, song, and dance, all performed in relation to current social

issues and political satire. They also have similar theatrical structures based on the subdivision of

the show into sketches, nonfictional topics, and improvisations according to interactions with the

audience. Contemporary Mexican performers such as Astrid Hadad emphasize parallels between

Berlin and Mexico City arising from the urban culture in both capital cities in the 1920s. Jesusa

Rodríguez, in particular, has referred to the relaxation of censorship at the end of the Wilhelmine

Empire and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic (1919), which resulted in a redefinition of

culture related to a sudden popularity of cabaret. She compares this state of things with the end

of the Mexican Revolution and the proclamation of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. This was a

time of theatrical effervescence in Mexico City through genres such as the aforementioned

carpa, revista, and others. Rodríguez has often expressed her admiration for Karl Valentin. In

spite of obvious cultural and historical differences, there is a connection between the origins of

contemporary Mexican cabaret and Valentin’s use of language. Valentin took his portrayals of

the most quotidian situations to the point of absurdity, thus speaking volumes about the futility of

human relationships under capitalism.

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A representative example of Rodríguez’s cabaret sketches based upon playing with

language deals with La Malinche.17 In this sketch, as in many others (she has presented over tree

hundred throughout the fifteen years at her theatre bar alone), the actress relies on hilarious

linguistic misunderstandings based on both Mexican albur and the distrust of language in

connection to absurd situations characteristic of comedians such as Valentin. In what may be

called a stand-up comedy act, Rodríguez transforms Malitzin into a witty interpreter for the far

from witty Emperor Zedillitzin—former president Ernesto Zedillo—and the U.S. Marines.

Rodríguez’s Malitzin purposely gets all messages between them mistranslated. Calling language

into question is a characteristic shared by Valentin’s approach to language and albur: both make

apparent the gap between master discourses and daily life, each within a different cultural

history.18

Rodríguez and Vasconcelos in their workshops share another perspective connecting

them to Valentin: cabaret understood as ‘painful laughter’ that allows for analyzing and

confronting one’s own reality through a razor-sharp form of humor. Both Mexican performers

adhere to the unofficial law of Mexican carpa artists: to make people laugh every fourteen

seconds. This aspect reminds me of Hermann Hesse’s description in The Nuremberg Trip of a

Valentin show: “The more horrifying and helpless the comic expression of our idiocy and of our

stupid human destiny became, the more he made us laugh.”19

Mexican cabaret artists are indebted to the tradition established by Valentin and Brecht,

which constantly breaks with theatrical illusion. What cabaret artists look for is a spectator

positioned as a critical observer so that s/he can discover the facts conditioning social reality

behind the appearances of daily life.

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Precisely due to the lack of a predetermined fictional world it is vital in cabaret for the

performer to win over the audience. One example of the theatrical strategies informing Mexican

cabaret is the approach of Astrid Hadad: It includes an exploration of visual aesthetics dating

back to German cabaret in order to reconfigure folk Mexican symbols as well as a performative

critique of the current and past situation of her country. Here I will briefly comment on her show

Pasión sin puñales (Passion without knives). When it took place in Bilbao, Spain, in August

2010, she opened with a costume change on stage, common in her shows. Due to the highly

ornate dresses she wears, which incorporate moving parts and props such as blinking lights plus

various layers, she is always helped by an assistant or two. Simultaneously, she addressed the

audience about it: “What you are seeing are special effects, Mexican style: Madonna would be

jealous,” thus mocking both the American singer and the idea of Mexico as an undeveloped

country. Through these actions, Hadad drew attention to the presentational over the fictional,

making use of the metatheatrical commentaries so common in cabaret. She went on with a

formulaic phrase of courtesy from her country, “My home is your home,” and linked it to a satire

of both the Spanish colonization of Mexico—which in Spain is usually portrayed as much more

benign than in Northern Europe—and also to those Mexicans who, against historical evidence,

pretend that theirs is a country heading toward progress:

The Spaniards arrived and penetrated us from the front and behind, and we said thank you, thank you, come in, make yourself at home. Then the U.S. took half of our territory and we were like thank you, thank you, just come in, make yourself at home. Then the drug dealers came and took charge, and the same, thank you, thank you, please come in, make yourself at home. So tonight, not to give you the wrong impression, I will also give thanks.20 In cabaret the normal (in the sense of quotidian as well as conventional) is presented in an

unexpected manner, which is why the visual and musical aspects are essential. According to

Klaus Pemsel, “[t]he alienation effect does not consist of making the public aware that they are

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watching theatre but of making them more aware of what is being expressed.”21 Also, as was the

case with postwar German cabaret within its context, many contemporary Mexican cabaret

shows bring to the forefront and play with the collective personas of Latin American and

Mexican vernacular music, as can be seen in the case of Hadad, whose shows involve the

popular character of the female ranchera singer. Her shows intersperse satirical comments about

sexuality, politics, and daily life with new versions of songs taken from the folk and popular

Latin American repertoire.22

Similarly to German cabaret, Mexican cabaret blossomed in connection with

sociopolitical movements, particularly demands for social rights for gay citizens. Rodríguez,

Vasconcelos, and Orozco are strong advocates of this cause and often participate in related

political rallies by addressing the crowds, singing and impersonating politicians and historical

icons. In the 1990s cabaret also became closely related to the Zapatista uprising through Jesusa

Rodríguez, who openly supported this guerrilla movement in her bar theatre and actively

participated in the negotiations between the government and the insurgents.

After Rodríguez and her wife, the musician Liliana Felipe, left their cabaret in the hands

of Las Reinas Chulas, the couple focused on street performance actions, which they call ‘massive

cabaret.’ Rodriguez and Felipe opted for this type of cabaret due to the fact that in the 2006

Mexican presidential elections they supported the campaign of the PRD (Democratic

Revolutionary Party). In the aftermath of this highly contested election, Jesusa Rodríguez led

three thousand cultural activities for the five hundred thousand to two million people who

gathered in the downtown streets and the central square of the Mexican capital in support of PRD

candidate Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador and demanding elected president Felipe Calderón’s

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resignation due to suspected fraud.23

Rodríguez describes mass cabaret as stage directions for large crowds of people, guiding

these gatherings, writing resistance songs, and “using creativity, originality, humor, poetry,

harmony, aesthetics and everything art can offer in the path towards an active, non-violent

resistance.”24

<A>Albur and Cross-Dressing in Cabaret

Subverting cultural stereotypes was a common practice in carpa theatre. In contemporary

cabaret, a central focus of this practice lies on questioning homophobia and misogyny in albur

from within the practice itself of this popular form of humor. Significant examples are the shows

of the actress and professional opera singer Regina Orozco. These generally consist of a series of

songs around a facet of history or social mores, such as gender roles in music or the dependency

on foreign powers in Mexican history, interspersed with questions for the audience or short

sketches by characters played by her. The songs belong to diverse traditions, such as Mexican

popular music, Hispanic rock songs, and opera. In 2009 Orozco participated in a show with other

women singers entitled Las corregidoras (i.e., the female version of corregidor, a colonial

bureaucratic position). She and singer Susana Zabaleta gave a passionate performance of an

opera aria during which their gestures progressively became those of women making corn

tortillas. This immediately caused laughter among the audience. The scene in itself was already

albur, because in Mexico the derogative term for lesbian is tortillera (tortilla maker). Orozco

then addressed the audience: “Greetings to all my feminist friends, and long live las jotas” (jotas

is the made-up feminine form of jotos, a Mexican derogatory term for gay males). Here the

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visual pun with the double meaning of tortillera has the strength of traditional albur, however it

does not scorn lesbianism. It reappropriates the word and mocks its derogative use.

Another key feature of this type of humor also explored by other artists, such as Jesusa

Rodríguez or Tito Vasconcelos, is that here a woman (or a gay male in Vasconcelos’s case) and

not a heterosexual man is making use of this dynamic, which transforms its meaning. Mexican

cabaret purposely accentuates the value of difference and as such, at least in principle, offers

resistance to cultural homogenization with regard to gender values.

<A>Mexican Cabaret and Commedia dell’arte

Another important theatrical strand nurturing cabaret is commedia dell’arte. This is particularly

significant in the case of Tito Vasconcelos, whose plays may be largely considered a

contemporary remake of commedia dell’arte, which was, as is well known, opposed to the

erudite commedia form based entirely on written texts.25 Vasconcelos explicitly uses the

canovaccio in many of his stagings, as he doesn’t write down his dialogues. Instead, he provides

very general indications about the plot and the staging process, which forces actors to create the

dialogues and alter them according to interactions with the audience. Cross-dressing is also very

common in his performances and in most political cabaret productions.

The strategic use of visibility through the performers’ bodies in the highly mediated

Mexican society is significant as a way to intensify the theatrical defamiliarization effect. In fact,

Tito Vasconcelos refers to cross-dressing—not only in theatre shows but also in daily life—as

‘visual terrorism.’

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A good example of his work is a popular cabaret show from the late 1990s called La

pasión según Cabare-tito (Passion according to Cabaret-Tito; an adaptation in drag of Mistero

Buffo by Dario Fo). For Vasconcelos and his troupe, part of the mystery surrounding Jesus was

the possibility of him being gay as he had no girlfriend, no plans for marriage, and so on. The

show is still performed during Holy Week at Vasconcelos’s own cabaret (called Cabaretito) in la

zona rosa sector, which is a cultural space and nightclub catering to a gay and lesbian audience

that has attracted a wider public mainly of intellectuals, actors, artists, and students, not

necessarily all homosexual.

Many cabaret productions utilize a dynamic of carnivalization to question, through

farcical strategies, the ideological and representational mechanisms that demonize sexual

diversity. While carnivalization does at times end up reifying the very same prejudices it aims to

mock—a critique prevalent in various reviews of Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais and the Middle

Ages—there remains a fundamental difference between carnival and the cabaret dynamic, which

is that there is no return to accepting the dominant social order either during or after the show.26

As noted above, most cabaret artists are political and gay rights activists; they also have a voice

in the alternative Mexican media, even if they are censored to the point that they are almost

nonexistent in the mainstream media.

Yet another issue is the extent to which cabaret audiences may or may not entertain

notions such as religion as a concocted narrative, making possible a gay Christ as seen in

Vasconcelos’s show. Theatre per se does not change society, and I am highly skeptical of the

‘aesthetics of truth’ that ends up replicating the base/superstructure model akin to dogmatic

Marxist approaches to art concerning subordinate subjectivities. However, due to its ever-

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changing and live nature, theatre is particularly suitable to analyze the constant negotiations

within cultural identity; this open nature of cabaret further highlights this connection.

<A>Interweaving History within Cabaret

Since 2000 the Mexican government has been in the hands of the right-wing PAN (National

Action Party), which has strong ties to the most conservative wing of the Catholic Church. The

ideology of previous PRI governments (Institutional Revolution Party) regarding social

conventions was also very conservative. It is therefore no coincidence that all cabaret artists

mentioned here have conducted ample research on Mexico’s colonial past and the role of the

church. Vasconcelos coedited a scholarly volume on colonial theatre and the Inquisition in

Mexico and often makes reference to the history of the church in his cabaret plays.27 On a similar

note Rodríguez has conceived various shows on the colonial writer and nun Sor Juana Inés de la

Cruz (among them, a cabaret sketch in which Sor Juana has a lesbian lover and a camera opera

on Sor Juana’s major work, the 975-line poem First Dream). Sor Juana identified herself not as a

woman but as “neutral,” in accordance with the Neoplatonic view prevalent during her times, but

her love poetry dedicated to prominent female figures, such as the Vicerreine of New Spain, has

been read by some within the framework of female homoeroticism. Another example is Astrid

Hadad’s show dedicated to Crowned Nuns (colonial nuns who were richly dressed to ‘marry’

Christ).

The interweaving between past and present and between ideological and spectacular

discourses throughout history is one of the main axes of Mexican cabaret. Within this context it

is significant to tackle political satire through indigenous icons also considered national symbols.

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In this respect it is necessary to go beyond political correction, which often implies eliminating

all references to a marginalized condition as if ignoring power structures would automatically

make them disappear. In Mexico and abroad, both in the history classroom as well as in

commercialized arenas such as tourism, there are tropes and icons that have become both

hallmarks of ‘mexicanidad’ and also its stereotypes. Some examples are Aztec and Mayan

sacrifice, the figure of Malinche mentioned above, or pre-Hispanic art such as the Coatlicue

statue. In 1990 Jesusa Rodríguez developed a sketch called La gira mamal de la Coatlicue (The

mammary tour of Coatlicue), a parody of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Mexico, in which the

performer (wearing a structure made of flexible plastic foam) mimics the sculpture placed in the

Mexica (Aztec) Room of Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum and transforms it into an

animated being (the real mother of Mexicans), running for Mexico’s presidency.28 Through the

use of one of the best-known indigenous icons displayed in the most important national museum,

the artist questions the attitude of the Mexican people and politicians towards their own cultural

heritage. Rodríguez’s Coatlicue dances and moves across the stage and addresses the audience as

her children. She complains about being confined to a window case and about not having a

special car (a ‘mama mobile’) like the pope’s and compares what she has to offer to the horrors

committed by Mexican politicians.

I consider it well worthwhile to consider this sketch from the perspective of the use of

irony defined by Antonio Prieto as a mechanism for counterrepresentation:

The art of counter-representation is essentially anti-establishment, and it has been employed in feminist performance in the U.S., Europe and Latin America, as well as in that of Chicano-Latino artists, among others. . . . In these cases, it aims to subvert the stereotypes which fetishize women or Latinos [we could add native Americans], in parody often adopting the signs built by mass media [and the national official culture].29

79  

Rodríguez’s Coatlicue is a satire against the idea of Mexico as a harmonically mixed culture of

indigenous and Spanish elements. In fact, indigenous icons are commodified in order to affirm

national pride, but contemporary indigenous peoples are forgotten and discriminated against. On

the other hand, the pope and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church still hold great political

influence in this supposedly secular state.

<A>By Way of Conclusion

The Argentinean critic Jorge Dubatti has argued that theatre is a way of going against the

spectacularization of social relationships stated by Guy Debord.30 If theatricality has been taken

over by the social (as nowadays a politician is even more of a performer than is a theatre actor),

the stage resists by reformulating the concept of theatricality and denouncing social artifice. I

consider this to be a prominent feature of Mexican cabaret. Dubatti’s ideas remind me of what

Fischer-Lichte states in her book The Transformative Power of Performance regarding the

performative turn at the beginning of the twentieth century in the establishment of ritual and

theatre studies in Germany, which occurred along with a change in the field of anthropology

from myth to ritual. According to Fischer-Lichte, ritual and theatre studies “advocated the

reversal of hierarchical positions: from myth to ritual and from the literary text to the theatre

performance.”31 Extrapolating this idea, we can say that myth as a master discourse is put into

question by the performative strategies of cabaret performers, particularly regarding the

dominance of religion in public debate in Mexico as the model of what being Mexican should be.

In the field of academic theatre in Mexico there was, and in many ways there still is, a relation

between a textual understanding of theatre and the master narratives linked to strong, hierarchical

80  

and paternalistic cultural institutions, which coincide with the concern for a unified patriarchal

national identity. It is not strange, within such a context, that many queer and feminist artists

have found in cabaret a performative space to play with texts and renegotiate myths and

identities beyond heteronormative constraints.

In Latin American culture, there has always been the need for live critical spaces within

communal life often due to a distrust of written discourse. Jorge Gaitán Durán in a 1955 essay

considered that Latin American culture was not in a state of infancy as compared to that of

Europe, but rather it was the expression of the clash between a language inherited from Europe

and a reality that overflowed it.32 I will develop this idea within the contemporary Latin

American context in order to better place cabaret as a counterrepresentational performative

practice.

We may add that nowadays hegemonic cultural models in the arts still to a great extent

relate to conceptions of the individual that are rooted in the Enlightenment (i.e., ideas about

human equality solely based upon individualist Western European cultural traits). In addition, a

dominant trend within contemporary European and Anglo-American art forms is a celebratory

assumption of postmodern conceptions that emphasize fragmentation and alienation with regard

to the cultural roots of both the performers and the audience. In contrast, the Mexican cabaret

performers discussed in this essay, while very familiar with the history of European and Anglo-

American theatre, rely strongly on their specific cultural history. This aspect is connected to a

particular anthropological condition, which is the Latin American need for communal spaces and

cultural manifestations based on traditional collective practices.

81  

The enthusiasm for events integrating music and representational performances which

dates back to pre-Hispanic dramatic forms (i.e., Rabinal Achí) as well as Greek tragedy and

comedy have always been characterized by a live and ritual connection to the daily life

experiences of communities.33 Greek tragedy and the European tradition have offered many

Latin American artists rich material to reflect on their own realities. Yet, due to our particular

history, there is also a profound cultural and existential need (common in other cultures as well,

perhaps) to recognize ourselves not in transcendent characters but in what may be called the

antihero. Being able to laugh at ourselves unsparingly, something that may be considered

antinationalist in other contexts, is an important self-critical and self-reflexive skill. This is also

why carpa theatre has been so important for contemporary Mexican cabaret.

As Erika Fischer-Lichte states by paraphrasing Ernst Bloch, “[i]nterweaving cultures in

performance can thus be described as an aesthetic ‘Vor-Schein’ . . . : an anticipation in and by

the arts of something that will become social reality much later, if at all.”34 The openness of

cabaret theatre as well as the crossing of genres and cultural interweaving implies an aesthetic

that wants to anticipate a future social and political reality, without caring about whether it can

be achieved or not. This exercise of building an in-betweenness to imagine other spaces within

Mexican culture is, in my opinion, the premise for interweaving cultures in Mexican political

cabaret; and as such, it must be understood as an artistic exploration of nonhegemonic cultural

codes, even if these cannot, in fact, be completely separated from hegemonic perceptions of

Mexican reality, whatever that may be.

 

Notes

82  

 1 V. Turner, “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors:

Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 2.

2 See G. Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: Una civilización negada, México, D. F.:

Grijalbo, 1982.

3 Two main examples here are the 1910 revolution and the indigenous Zapatista uprising

that went public in 1994. The latter includes both indigenous and urban intellectuals and

has a civil society front led until recently by a historian specializing in the colonial

period. The second example is the post-NAFTA campaign Sin maíz no hay país (Without

corn there is no country) to protect Mexican corn and farmers against imported U.S. corn

and against contamination by transgenic seeds.

4 This trait is significant. One might compare/contrast the Mexican case with contemporary

German cabaret artists, who tend to be popular comedians.

5 I use the word dogmatic here because there are Catholic Mexicans, such as the Catholic

Pro-Choice Women’s Organization, who do not share this model.

6 Political cabaret has blossomed in Mexico City to the point that there are currently at

least four bar theatres continuously presenting shows and a month-long International

Cabaret Festival held every year during the last eleven years. Neighborhood theatres,

formal theatre spaces, and high schools have also become venues for cabaret

performances. It must also be mentioned that there are currently a few state-sponsored

fellowships for cabaret artists due to the popularity of the genre.

 

83  

 7 C. Monsiváis, “La carpa, el teatro, la imagen, la risa, la consagración,” Proceso, 24 April

1993.

8 These include Las Reinas Chulas (The Cute Queens), Género Menor (Minor Genre),

Carlos Pascual, Hernán del Riego, Leticia Pedrajo, Las hijas de Safo (Sappho’s

Daughters), Adriana Jiménez-Moles, Oscar Oliver, Blanca Loaria, Andrés Carreño,

Tareke Ortiz y Minerva Valenzuela, among others.

9 S. Marchán, “Entre el retorno de lo real y la inmersión en lo Virtual,” in S. Marchán (ed.),

Real/virtual en la estética y teoría de las artes, Barcelona: Paidós, 2006, p. 37 (my

translation).

10 A. Prieto, “Performance y teatralidad liminal: Hacia la represent-acción,” Archivo de

artes escénicas, Universidad Castilla-La Mancha,

<http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva/interactiva07/ensayos/antonio_prieto.pdf> (Last

accessed 15 March 2011), p. 3 (my translation).

11 D. Pettigrew, Fellini: Je suis un grand menteur, Motion picture, Portrait & Cie, Arte,

Tele+, Dream Film, Asylum Pictures, Italy, 2002.

12 E. Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, S. I. Jain (trans.), New

York: Routledge, 2008.

13 I. Diéguez Caballero, Teatralidades liminales: Teatralidades, performances y política,

Buenos Aires: Atuel, 2007, p. 12.

14 V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ,

2001.

 

84  

 15 It must be emphasized that cabaret is not the only type of theatre diverging from this

approach.

16     P. Johansson, “Dilogías, metáforas y albures en cantos eróticos nahuas del siglo XVI,”

Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM,

<www.rlp.culturaspopulares.org/textos/11/04-Johansson.pdf> (Last accessed 5 April

2011), p. 76 (my translation).  

17 Malitzin, her Nahuatl name, was an indigenous woman enslaved by the Mayas. She

served the Spaniards as a translator between the Mayan and Nahuatl languages, and also

had children with the conqueror Hernán Cortés. Historically, she has therefore been

blamed for selling out her people to the conquerors. In The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio

Paz traces back the subalternity complex of the Mexicans to being the children of raped

indigenous mothers (la chingada). O. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings,

New York: Grove, 1985.

18 Rodríguez has included variations of this sketch in other cabaret plays such as El maíz

(2006–11).

19 H. Hesse, The Nuremberg Trip, quoted in K. Valentin, Teatro de cabaret, H. Hengst and

P. Alvárez-Osorio (eds.), Madrid: Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 2007,

p. 41 (my translation).

20 A. Hadad, Pasión sin puñales [Passion without knives], Pabellón de La Casilla, Bilbao,

22 August 2010.

 

85  

 21 K. Pemsel, Karl Valentin im Umfeld Münchener Volksängerbühnen und Varietés, quoted

in Valentin, op. cit., p. 51 (my translation).

22 G. Alzate, “Dramaturgy, Citizenship, and Queerness: Contemporary Mexican Political

Cabaret,” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 62–76.

23 Due to the narrow margin between the two candidates (0. 58%) and the many

irregularities found in various areas of the country, a recount was requested, but the

Mexican Federal Electoral Institute denied it.

24 “Further Written Remarks by Jesusa Rodriguez,” Hemispheric Institute of Performance

and Politics, <http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/modules/itemlist/user/593-

zenabibler?start=420> (Last accessed 15 March 2011, my translation). For an insightful

analysis of Rodriguez’s creative resistance movement through Victor Turner’s concept of

‘communitas,’ see Diéguez, op. cit.

25 F. Taviani and M. Schino, Il segredo della Commedia dell’Arte, Firenze: La Casa Usher,

1982. p. 309–29,

<http://web.archive.org/liveweb/http://www.dass.uniroma1.it:8080/pdf/dispense/quareng

hi_0809/6_taviani.pdf> (Last accessed 12 March 2011).

26 M. Bakhtin, La cultura popular en la edad media y el renacimiento, J. Forcat and C.

Conroy (trans.), Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.

27 See M. R. Smith, T. Vasconcelos, L. A. Lamadrid, and X. Lizárraga, Censura y teatro

novohispano (1539–1822): Ensayos y antología de documentos, México, D. F.:

Conaculta, INBA, Citru, 1998.

 

86  

 28 J. Rodríguez, “La gira mamal de la Coatlicue,” Debate Feminista, yr. 1, vol. 2, 1990, pp.

401–3.

29 Prieto, op. cit., p. 3 (my translation and comments).

30 J. Dubatti, “Teatralidad y cultura actual,” Dramateatro Revista Digital,

<http://www.dramateatro.arts.ve/dramateatro.arts.ve_respaldo/ensayos/n12/dubatti_web.h

tm> (Last accessed 12 February 2011).

31 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power, op. cit., p. 31.

32 Gaitán Durán, J., “De las retóricas,” Biblioteca Virtual Banco de la República,

<http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/historia/ensayo/retor.htm> (Last accessed 22

March 2011).

33 M. León Portilla, Aztecas-Mexicas: Desarrollo de una civilización originaria, Madrid:

Algaba Ediciones, 2005.

34 E. Fischer-Lichte, “Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-

Between,” TEXTURES, <http://www.textures-platform.com/?p=961&page=6> (Last

accessed 18 January 2012).

87  

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