Lukas Avendaño – Zapotec Muxe & Contemporary Performer from Oaxaca

$12 Advance, $15 Door

The Zapotec culture, through the “muxe” identity, includes homosexuality, gayness and same-sex marriage as a part of the society: A muxe is a man who assumes affective, emotional and sexual roles that are culturally reserved for women. The muxeidad is simultaneously a veiled social acceptance, and a celebration of what is still considered a transgression.

In this presentation, the artist portray the zapotec man-woman through dance, and invites the spectator to participate in the “female rites of passage”: the traditional wedding; the stewardship; the Healer-prayer; the Mourning; the Metamorphosis. The dancer´s soul is incarnated in a local bird called the stone-curlew (berelele in Zapotec, or alcaravan in Spanish), where the male cycle closes when they mate. Sometimes the male is sacrificed by the females.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Lukas Avendaño is an emerging Mexican performance artist whose recent work constitutes a queer performatic 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 he was born. His 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. 

La Peña Cultural Center   3105 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705    

lapena.org   510-849-2568