VOLUME 39 NUMBER 1973 OCTOBER 1 3 - 2 0 / 2005

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NADA SURF • STEPHEN LEWIS ON AIDS • CAMERON CROWE

FEATURE
A s t r i d H a d a d h a s appeared on-stage with
BY JANET SMITH

a giant, blinking sacred heart strapped onto her
head. She's had stagehands use pulleys to manipulate her long, black hair into a crucifix shape.
She's masqueraded as a veiled Mary Magdelene
wearing a massive skirt fashioned out of rubber
breasts, and she's crooned campy cabaret numbers while sporting an aura-radiating Virgin of
Guadelupe costume. As much as all this might
horrify Pope Benedict XVI, Hadad is still pretty
sure she won't go straight to hell. The Mexico
City-based performance artist, who hails from a
deeply conservative Catholic family of 11 in the
Yucatan region, knows she has at least one person
trying to make up for her blasphemous ways.
"Even now my mother is a cucaracha de iglesia" the affable Hadad says on the phone from
Mexico City, breaking into a husky, tequila-cured
laugh. In Spanish, she has just called the Hadad
matriarch a "cockroach of the church", but what
she's trying to say is that her mom is a bona fide
holy roller. "I go by in my life very confident because I know my mother prays for me every day."
At least the church can take some consolation
in the fact that it's not the sole target of Hadad's
freaked-out one-woman musical revue, which
blazes into the Chan Centre for the Performing
Arts next Saturday (October 22). Donning costumes that are Dada meets Dali, the cabaret artist takes on everything from domestic violence
and female stereotypes to American imperialism and political corruption. At the same time,
she's a walking pastiche of Mexico's outrageously
colourful culture, integrating cacti, sombreros,
Christmas lights, Mayan symbols, traditional
fringed shawls, and saint icons into her "wearable
sets". It ends up looking like a mammoth pinata

Outrageous
Mexican cabaret
^ ^
artist Astrid Hadad knows no bounds

full of Frida Kahlo imagery has exploded all over
the stage. Hadad, who designs all her outfits, says
she pores over everything from historical books
and classic artworks to Mexico City's lively sidewalks for objects to wear: "When you walk by
downtown, you can take a lot of ideas...I love to
just walk a lot along the streets, and I think we
have a very rich culture."
Her love of that culture extends to music:
backed by her band, Los Tarzanes, she also works
old ranchera tunes, boleros, rumbas, and mariachi numbers into her act.
Hadad is appearing here as part of the LIVE
Biennial of Performance Art (which opens Saturday [October 15] and runs to November 26), and
like many of the 50 or so acts appearing at the
festival, she defies categorization.
"She both lampoons and loves traditional Mexican culture," explains Gary Cristall, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival founder and one-time
Canada Council music head who's a huge fan of
the artist. He's speaking from an apartment in
Lucca, Italy, where he's on a three-month sojourn
and where Hadad's music has made it into the 25
CDs he carried in his suitcase. "But it would be
a mistake to think she's just a comedienne or a
social comic; she is able to move from being very,
very funny and acerbic as an artist addressing
Mexican society into being a great singer. She's a
genuinely original interpreter of Mexican music,
and her band is just phenomenal, so her act can
be enjoyed on that level too."
Music, in fact, is where Hadad got her start in
show business. Where she grew up, in the small
town of Chetumal near the border of Belize, there
wasn't much else to do. "There was no television;
it was like a ranch. There was no running water.
My brothers and my mother and everybody sang
and we made theatre all the time," she says in her

Dada meets Dali in Astrid Hadad's wearable sets, which mix religious iconography and Mexican kitsch.

unique brand of Spanglish. "But it was the happiest part of my life, because now, even though I
am happy, I have to work and worry about everything." She showed obvious talent, but becoming
a singer never looked like an option for Hadad:
"For my parents it was not possible, because my
destiny was to get married," she says.
Hadad rebelled and eventually escaped the
countryside to Mexico City to study communications and political science. While there, she started singing with her guitar in pubs. "I thought
life was like in the movies, and some producers
would find me in those places and I would be famous. But it was not that way," she says, and then
there are more peals of throaty laughter.
Soon, Hadad was transferring to the prestigious Centro Universitario de Teatro, where she
had to pass a series of rigorous auditions. "I found
that just to stand up and sing was not enough for
me, so I went to theatre school. I wanted to train
my body and my voice to be an emissary for all
kinds of things."

Her stint there led to immediate work: she
toured Europe in a well-received theatrical
version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don
Giovanni. Later, she became known as an actor in
another kind of opera: a popular Mexican soap.
But at the same time, she was developing a very
different act in the thriving underground cabaret
scene of Mexico City. Here, her women characters
were born. More exaggerated versions of those
satirical females still exist in her act today: her
Rancherita ("ranch girl"), her bolero-crooning
femme fatale, and others. Between tunes, she'd
talk politics; she was trying, she says, to recreate
the subversive cabaret energy of Bertolt Brecht
and Kurt Weill's Berlin scene.
Hadad had also discovered the songs of Lucha Reyes, a rowdy Mexican singer who created
a scandal in the '30s and '40s. Reyes was the first
woman to take on such ranchero numbers as
the drunken ode to drowning your sorrows in
the national drink, "La Tequilera". "At that time,
^Ivee next page

VANCOUVER GOES LIVE FOR PERFORMANCE-ART FEST
The funny thing about organizing a performance-art
festival is you're never quite sure
what you're going to get. That's
the position Glenn Alteen finds
himself in as he prepares for the
latest installment of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art (which
runs Saturday [October 15] to
November 26)—or prepares as
much as can be expected. "I was
in theatre years ago, and if all
goes well there, you know exactly
what's going to happen, whereas
with performance art you only
have a vague parameter," the
chair of the event says over the
phone from the grunt gallery,
where he is director.
Adding to the element of surprise is the fact that performance

•

art can take so many forms. In
this, the biggest biennial yet,
there are 50 acts—almost double
the number of the event's first
year in 1999—and they span everything from music to processions to reading rooms. They
range from big touring productions like Mexican cabaret singer
Astrid Hadad and American musician and interdisciplinary artist
Meredith Monk to smaller, sitespecific and interactive projects.
The latter includes Irene Loughlin's November 16 presentation
ofNadia, where she and the Renfrew Gymnastics Club, in the Waterfront Station lobby, explore the
darker side of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci's life. Then
there's the Hal Winkler Project's

The Nova Library at the Vancouver Public Library's downtown
branch: a public reading room of
books, chosen by addicts from the
Downtown Eastside, that opens
October 17. In contrast to that relatively small setting, visitors are
taking over the cemetery grounds
at East 41st Avenue and Fraser
Street for Paula Jardine's A Night
for All Souls on October 29. (See
story on page 41.) And all month,
LIVE celebrates Vancouver jazz,
performance, writing, and visualart innovator Al Neil as a father
of the form; he takes the stage at
the Western Front (October 15)
and the Roundhouse Community
Arts & Recreation Centre (November 10).
Believe it or not, there is a link-

ing theme to all the work. The
last fest was called Performance
Art and the Academy, and it centred around pieces that helped
legitimize the form. This year,
LIVE dubs itself Altered States
and takes a swing in the opposite
direction: the curatorial statement declared that the fourth
installment would centre on
"performance art incorporating
the irrational, the subversive, the
spiritual, the intuitive, the confrontational and the traumatic. It
focuses on the artist as prophet,
as shaman, as masochist, as addict, as anarchist."
In other words, the lineup promises to shake things up around town.
Still, Alteen expects the fest's turnout to continue to grow: "Vancouver

is such a performance-art town. It
has a role in the cultural life of the
city that you just don't see anywhere
else, and there's always been a lot of
it," he says. "A lot of other art forms
are envious of performance art because of its freedom."
LIVE has played a big role in
bringing performance art, if not
exactly into the mainstream,
then out from the under-underground. "What's exciting is that,
for a lot of traditional venues, they
wouldn't look at performance art
as a form that would be viable to
present," Alteen says. "But when
LIVE comes in, it becomes more
of an event."
View the entire schedule at
www. livevancouver. bc.cal.

OCTOBER 13 - 20 / 2005

> JANET SMITH
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT

39

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Conference on Controversy 2 pm
Keynote speaker John Dixon, BC Civil Liberties
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Sterling Prize presentation 6 pm
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580 West Hastings Street (enter from Seymour)
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Outrageous
from previous page

women could only sing bucolic
songs and sing about town and family in a soft voice, like a beautiful
flower. But she dared to sing these
kinds of songs, and the middle class
would turn off their radios. So I love
the life of this woman, and I began
to sing the songs that she sang."
Hadad's first fully realized show
was a kind of warped one-woman
musical about Reyes's life. Her tequilera chick lives on on-stage,
wearing a cheesy tourist-issue sombrero, a huge peasant skirt covered
in icons of the Virgin of Guadelupe,
and a conical bustier. Making it
clear she can hold her own in the
local cantina, she guzzles Jose Cuervo straight from the bottle. In the
French documentary Astrid Hadad,
La Tequilera, she takes the act one
step further while performing at a
cabaret: drowning her sorrows becomes the only way she can survive
the indignities of a downtrodden
ranchero wife. "As a good Mexican
woman, I'll suffer agony," she sings
to a mariachi-style beat, and then
starts flailing herself with rope.
It's just one in a parade of provocative female archetypes. In Astrid
Hadad, La Tequilera, they range
from a Carmen Miranda type—who
rumbas with two ridiculous paper
pineapples sprouting breastlike
from her head—to her most controversial persona. The woman wears
a giant peacock tail of spiky cactus
leaves and a skirt covered in Day of
the Dead skeletons. She limps in on
crutches, one eye obscured by a head
bandage, because she has been beaten by her macho husband. "You beat
me up so much yesterday evening
and still I haven't left you yet," she
croons in a kitschy lounge number.
And then she holds her hand out to
ask her hubby for more money.
"The economy has to grow together with women's liberation,"
Hadad says, turning quite serious.
"It's very hard for women here; it's
easier [financially] for women to
stay with the man. That's very sad
but it's true."
Cristall remembers seeing another scathing evocation when he
caught Hadad's show on one of his
frequent trips to Mexico City. She
staggered submissively under the
weight of gigantic lilies strapped
to her back, satirizing the famous
Diego Rivera painting of a virginal
flower vendor. "She was essentially
saying Diego Rivera was a jerk,"
Cristall says. "To say he was a lady's
man is an understatement."
On the Astrid Hadad DVD, she
also appears wearing a big sombrero with a moving rubber hand
on top that she tells the crowd is

Astrid Hadad is as likely to lampoon such icons of Mexican culture as Diego
Rivera's flower vendor as she is modern-day male-female relations.

for "self-pleasure".
"I was reading not long ago that
in Mexico, most of the women don't
have sexual satisfaction, 70 percent
of them," Hadad says. "And in rural areas, the number was more like
80 percent. There are many women
that, when they go to my show, when
it is finished they say: 'You make me
reflect on things.'"
Although Mexican women have
made great strides after centuries
of oppression, her blunt representations of domestic abuse, sexual
satisfaction, and submissive wives is
still nothing less than shocking in a
Latin American context—and even
a North American one.
"To a small degree, women have
been breaking down the patrilineal
society in Mexico, but in many ways
it's still brutally misogynistic," Cristall observes, pointing to the ongoing serial murders of young female
factory workers in the border town of
Juarez. "The levels of violence against
women is terrifying, as it is in many
countries. But Hadad, along with
other women artists like Lila Downs
or Liliana Felipe, has been able to
challenge that. In that sense, she's an
important artist with links to those
social movements. When she takes
on a stage persona of a macho Mexican man, there are howls of laughter
there because many Mexican women
have been waiting all their lives to do
something like this."
Still, Hadad says her main goal is
to entertain and never to blame; she
jokes that one of her own faults is being too nurturing with the men in her
life. "I say some things that are shocking sometimes, but what I do in the
show is not to speak out against men

but speak about relationships between
men and women with humour," she
clarifies. "The young women that are
students now have different attitudes
with men, but even these women
who are cultured, many of them have
all this damn education but in their
houses they believe if you are a mother you still have to give everything to
your sons." And more laughter crackles over the phone again.
That's Hadad, after all: a woman
who can find humour in almost everything around her. That ability
has secured her place at the front
of an irreverent Mexican renaissance that includes filmmakers like
Amoves Perros director Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu and visual artists
like Damian Ortega.
"I'm amazed that somebody has
the courage to bring her to Vancouver, and one of my few regrets
about being in Lucca is that I'll miss
the show. If I could think of 10 or
15 great performers that, if I had
the means, I'd charter a Learjet to
go to see them in concert, she'd be
one," Cristall raves. "She represents
a level of Mexican culture that most
people in Vancouver are not going
to be able to see. Mexican culture
and music is still, unfortunately, a
victim of stereotypes, so the chance
to see a contemporary artist who is
so sharp and smart about deconstructing and interpreting and lampooning those stereotypes is really
a rare opportunity."
Who knows if all that work will
earn her a place in heaven, but
wherever Mexico's demented diva
is headed in her big skirts and crazy
hats, you can be sure she'll be laughing all the way. 0

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