Réquiem para un alcaraván

Toronto premiere
Accessible to all language groups

The Zapotec culture, through the “muxe” identity, includes homosexuality, gayness and same-sex marriage as a part of society: a muxe is a man who assumes affective, emotional and sexual roles that are culturally reserved for women. In Réquiem para un alcaraván, Avendaño portrays the Zapotec muxe through dance, and invites the audience to participate in the female rites of passage: the traditional wedding, the stewardship, the Healer-prayer, the mourning, and finally, the metamorphosis. The dancer´s soul is reincarnated as a local bird called the stone-curlew (berelele in Zapotec, or alcaraván in Spanish), whose mating ritual sometimes concludes with the sacrifice of the male.

October 5, 2018 at 7:00 PM
October 6, 2018 at 8:30 PM
October 7, 2018 at 7:00 PM

The muxeidad is simultaneously a veiled social acceptance, and a celebration of what is still considered a transgression.

About the artist

Lukas Avendaño is a internally recognized Zapotec performance artist from Mexico whose work represents a queer performance intervention of Mexican nationalistic representations, particularly that of Zapotec Tehuana women. Avendaño embodies the complex identity of “muxes”, or male homosexuals from the Tehuantepec Isthmus, where they were born. Their cross-dressing performance interweaves ritual dances with autobiographical passages and actions that involve audience members, in order to challenge the widely held view of a gay-friendly Indigenous culture, and point towards the existence of lives that negotiate pain and loneliness with self-affirming pride.

Lukas Avendaño will also be offering a professional training workshop during RUTAS. Click here for more info.

Programming Partner

This project is supported by the National fund for Culture and the Arts