Mario Patino Sanchez
Lukas Avendaño is an indigenous man, a Mexican, free enough to think and act differently than Western norms dictate. As an artist, he offers resistance through dance, with political stagings and using his naked male body. This evokes admiration, anger, and rejection – as though the world were afraid of going down in peace and freedom.
His latest piece is called “Lemniskata” and is based on a geometric curve in the shape of a figure eight lying on its side. The concept, direction, and choreography are all by Avendaño. Just recently, in October 2022, he created his latest escapade in Mexico. In December, he will be bringing it to Europe, where it will be performed at Kampnagel in Hamburg, followed by a performance at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam in June 2023. “Lemniskata” is performed by 14 naked men – first they lie on the stage floor, later they dance in a spider’s web, a trapeze, on a double floor, and then things become bottomless. Only during the finale does Avendaño allude to the traditional, indigenous dances of Central America. These are dances that shake the body, wake it up, stir it up. They are originally war dances with messages to match, dances about survival and thus about the most essential thing: about being. They are danced rituals, certainly sacred, definitely archaic. But to simply transfer ancient dances to the present, from a world that has faced nature to a world that is exposed to the rigors of civilization – isn’t that a betrayal?
Avendaño wears women’s clothes. He was born in 1977 in Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico. A good 250 kilometers south of the city lies Tehuantepec, where he found his ethnic, artistic, and cultural roots. In this remote rural area, he learned of customs and traditions of the indigenous community that often prove more democratic and viable than the laws and regulations of Mexico’s so-called civil society. While there is a political constitution for all Mexicans, it is violated so systematically that you would almost rather believe that no such constitution exists.
As a “muxe,” the knowledge of his own Zapotec heritage has given him clarity. “Muxe” is traditionally the term for a man with feminine aspirations. From a young age, he was asked: “Why do you dress like that?”; “Why do you have long hair?”; “Why do you paint yourself like a woman?” – “Because I like it,” was his answer. However, the notorious skirt-wearer did not need to find answers to satisfy the curiosity of others, but rather to understand himself.
In Mexico, it is quite common to dress proudly as a Tehuana – a native of Tehuantepec – at a gala or on other special occasions. The word Tehuana also means a skirt, a garment typically worn by women. For all non-natives, a skirt worn by a man is a mockery of man, or at least a contradiction. And Lukas Avendaño loves contradictions. A Tehuana who travels the world, from Veracruz to Chiapas, from Mexico City to the United States and to Europe, he is an educated man, a scholar, an anthropologist, and thus one who looks at the totality of sciences to correlate biological, cultural, and social aspects of humans. At the same time, he is a dancer who has created works such as “No soy persona, soy mariposa” (“I am not a human, I am a butterfly”) and “Réquiem por un alcaraván” (“Requiem for a thick-knee”). An educated, dancing skirt-wearer, then.
Avendaño loves acerbity and relevance. That is also because of Mexico. The country is in constant turmoil, plagued by every conceivable form of violence and is more divided than ever. Critique and art are threatening to disappear. Both are too confusing for this Mexico, divided into very poor and very rich, far up and far down, extreme right and far left. Accordingly, audiences are shrinking. “If art is called into question, ethics are called into question,” Avendaño will later tell me.
The anthropologist is concerned with an artistic work ideal, archaic and modern at the same time. Above all, he places great importance on a clear design vocabulary. He found what he was looking for in the archetypes of indigenous people, in the cultures of the Maya, Zapotecs, and Nahua – as historically distant as they may be.
When we met, Lukas Avendaño had just spent weeks traveling across the country, to communities in the state of Jalisco on the Pacific coast. He met indigenous people in Tonalá, Mezcala, Amatitán, Acatic, Zapotlán, and Tuxpan. Interviewing dozens of villagers, he made a discovery that he would not call the result of research in the traditional sense: “I wouldn’t even dare say that I researched thoroughly. I listened. I paid attention to everything in the conversations, to symbols and signs, and discovered a depth in these people that I would call their rootedness.”
Was this the anthropologist or the artist Lukas Avendaño? The anthropologist would have initiated documentary field research that would have led him and a team of collaborators to postulate hypotheses based on the findings, which they would then either prove or disprove. The artistic streak, on the other hand, dictates other rules. The artist was concerned with the tone, the emotional content of the conversations. He calls his method “Sentimentar”:
“When I asked people to talk, they asked me what I wanted to know, and I answered that I didn’t want to know, I wanted to feel.” They let him do his thing, they talked to each other, and Avendaño listened, heard the voice of his counterpart, in which a collective resonated, not just personal experience and opinion; he heard humans as a plurality, his influences through others, his ability to think as a “we” as well as an “I” and thus also to be able to offer another opinion, to channel another voice. We are not singular when we speak. We are plural.
“Sentimentar,” Avendaño says, is a process “in which we knock on the doors of perception so that the essence of the other person comes out. Both, speaker and listener, construct with feeling an idea of what they are talking about or listening to someone talk about. As Avendaño stated: “The fewer questions asked and answers given in the process, the better. This eliminates the expectations that a question formulates and the expectations of an answer. Having a conversation is free of these expectations. People talk rather than answer. Simple as this truth is, being able to talk freely is a complicated matter.”
Avendaño tried to find conversational partners who did not belong to the same community. After a short time, these struck up a conversation despite not having the same interests, origins, and experiences. He found that human communication works without hierarchy when people do not make a statement, but instead share of themselves, their knowledge, beliefs, myths, or legends.
Let’s try it out for ourselves. Avendaño and I go for a walk. It’s a sunny afternoon, and we walk along cobbled streets, stopping where some refreshing shade beckons. An older person with tanned skin sits there and enlightens Avendaño about what his skin will look like in a few years. Like his own. The old man is witness to another time, the middle of the last century, when his tan complexion and indigenous features were still a source of shame, not pride. People didn’t talk about it then. This man was among those who said nothing and consequently did not exist. The mute were overlooked, the overlooked remained mute. Mexican nationalism overlooked its own diversity and hastened to form an idealized, light-skinned syncretism, a modern state, a Mexico that spoke only to those and with those who felt they belonged to this modern culture.
Since then, belonging and listening have been two fundamentally different, even contradictory things for Avendaño. For him, walking, talking, and “feeling” is an antidote to this division. “Who belongs to whom?” is the opposite of “Who listens to whom?” Strolling through the city with him is like listening to the unheard. For him, listening feels like “bringing a doll to life.”
As we leave the old man in the shade, Avendaño continues to talk about his journey through the villages of the state of Jalisco on the Pacific Ocean, about how they found a “batea” – a pre-Hispanic device consisting of a rectangular stone plate and a roller used to grind corn – in a cultural center in Tuxpan. They asked the name of the device, because it did not look like a regular batea. They were told that it is called a “güilacha” and was intended exclusively for use by women.
Avendaño was taken aback by the word “güilacha.” Over in western Mexico, on the Atlantic side, the word “güila” is used to refer to whores, prostitutes, or women with multiple partners. The name of the device thus reveals everything about the intended role of the female sex: it is to harvest and prepare food including that subjugation which reduces a woman to a tool, destined to work on the ground with lowered eyes. This is reflected in the traditional attributes of the Mexican mother, still common today: self-sacrificing, long-suffering, and resigned.
“Mujerismo” is what Avendaño calls the antidote. He recommends it against all the common, Hispanic terms like “puto” (fucker), “joto” (faggot) or “gay” (homosexual). “Mujerismo” resonates especially with the LGBTQIA+ community as a counter-concept to the ubiquitous “machismo.” But for the average Mexican, “mujerismo,” “femininity,” is difficult to accept. The only thing even harder to take is the sight of a naked man. It is worse than that of a naked woman.
Avendaño puts 14 naked men on the stage of “Lemniskata.” As aesthetic as the sight is, as shameless and as enjoyable as the bodies are through the choreography of unison, they still remain… physically, intellectually, and morally… a cultural battlefield. “Lemniskata” inverts the naked man as an unworthy being into an aesthetic event. Nevertheless, Avendaño knows: One hour of a dance performance barely scratches the surface of the more than five centuries of Mexican history and the genocide of more than 50,000 people upon the arrival of the Spanish in a country unknown to Europeans until 1492. At that time, they encountered nothing but “naked men.” For Avendaño, the naked man can be a “risk, no, an opportunity” to rebalance aesthetics and ethics.
“I believe that at some point, aesthetics was an expression of ethics,” he gushes. “I don’t know when the ethical began to distance itself from the aesthetic, or vice versa, not only in art but also in everyday life. The disintegration of this country is a crisis of ethics. The humanitarian crisis we are suffering today is also a crisis of aesthetics,” Avendaño says. “Of course, art must respond to violence, discrimination, or a hegemonic order – but no sooner does it do so than it is labeled protesting, militant, and politicized, as if art were something negative.”
Avendaño conciliates: “I’m not actually an activist. I am an advocate. My practice isn’t that of ideological bias, but an act of disobedience against any inhumane order. I am a conscientious objector to any form of inhumanity.” He says this as a man, and, more importantly, as a “muxe,” a man who assumes feminine roles in personal, social, or even sexual spheres within his Zapotec culture. The man in a female role is by no means a special case, not even in Mexico, much less in the world as a whole. Millions of them are targeted because of their feminine side. They are discriminated against, not to mention the racist and classist attacks they also suffer. However, the more deeply-rooted the machismo, the more brutal the response.
There is a well-known Spanish proverb that goes: “God created them all and alone they come together.” It means that people always meet only those who are physically, mentally, and spatially close to them. Communities emerge that see themselves as different from others. This is how thousands of communities of fate – war veterans, homosexuals, victims of domestic violence, and mothers of advanced age – come into being, and no one succeeds in communicating beyond their protective walls of distinction.
In essence, the men in “Lemniskata” are also such a community – it has simply matured over time. In the beginning, it was a Butoh dance workshop in a study center in southern Mexico. People danced, talked, went on stage and met over beer, tequila, and mezcal. One of them is Ismael Rodríguez. Born in Campeche in 1983, he is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, and architect, who has just been named “Craft Designer of the Year 2022” in India. Rodríguez and Avendaño quickly realized that they had common interests: In addition to the art and culture of the body, both are fascinated by the roots and customs of indigenous peoples. Their main focus is on those ancient indigenous customs that today seem to go against the norm.
A complicity developed between Rodríguez and Avendaño. Both are persistently searching for information about disappearing cultures and exploring oral traditions through information in various documents, also in Guatemala, Ecuador, Brazil, and China. It is precisely the foreignness and the otherness of the old traditions that fascinates them: the different way of handling resources and food, of dealing with each other and objects. All of this also inspires art. In a nutshell, the field of art is interaction with archetypes, i.e., stable forms and meanings that are nevertheless constantly changing, in order to be able to explore questions of identity, violence, infinity, motherhood anew from generation to generation.
In Nahua culture there is even a deity who represents this concept, called “Xipe Tótec,” literally “the molting.” It means a kind of rebirth, a molting snake or a woman who regenerates at the moment of birth, as shown in pre-Columbian sculptures of women giving birth,” says Rodríguez. Men, too, can shed their skin, renew themselves, redefine the image of their masculinity and give it a new form and meaning.
“If I may say so, ‘Lemniskata’ is for me a choreographic construction to bring the body back from the place that is historically denied,” murmurs Avendaño. Was man always just an armor-clad fighter? The household despot? The rediscovery of the “other man” would also be a rebirth, a molting. What could be more obvious than to show this act of molting quite archaically through bare skin?
Such a metamorphosis reminds him of the evolutionary process of the caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis as a butterfly. The motif of the butterfly, used time and again by Avendaño, also inspired the title of the 2017 piece “I’m not a person. I am a butterfly,” For him, professing to be a butterfly in order to cross boundaries has always been accompanied by the charm of the exhibitionist and the wish to create accomplices in the game of desire.
One such accomplice is Dego Martínez from Guadalajara, a sound artist born in 1985 who wants to uncover and save the sounds of the old “Mariachi” found in the state of Jalisco. Everyone is familiar with the famous mariachi bands with their stringed instruments and huge sombreros – the quintessential musical symbol of Mexico all over the world. Mariachis are said to originate from Cocula, the competing Sones from Tecalitlán. In truth, both emerged in Acatic in the north-east of the state of Jalisco. Today, Jorge Negrete is considered the most representative singer of this form of popular music. The singer was usually accompanied by trumpets when he performed. The Mariachi, however, never had such instruments, which are known as “bronces” (the word used for trumpets in the military). According to Martínez, they were ensembles of string players and percussionists, and the musicians were dressed in blankets and wore sandals called “huaraches” rather than the gold or silver embroidered costumes we know today. The latter are more akin to the “traje de luces,” the bright costumes worn by Spanish bullfighters.
Martinez believes that Mexico wants to uncover itself, to push aside the Spanish influences that cover it like a bedspread. This can best be achieved through research. Martínez perceives his kinship with Avendaño thus: “We lived through the same time without knowing each other. I, for my part, look for sounds and music. When we met, a synergy emerged that is expressed as a circle leading from the traditional to the contemporary and back, often addressing the question of how pre-Columbian instruments are used, how to compose with them, which timbres to create and which not to create, whether to approach these instruments with a Western aesthetic or with an aesthetic that is steeped in our academic musical training.” Together with musicians from Acatic, Martínez also heads the Tecuexe Band project, which mixes traditional mariachi chords with contemporary sounds.
It’s a clique, then, that meets to develop from tradition contemporary archetypes which redefine the identities of music, of men, and of their own culture in an exemplary manner precisely by getting to the bottom of tradition. They wish to recreate archetypes and use their art to create prototypes that existed before modernity, before colonialism, before capitalism.
They are also concerned with a phobia – the phobia of the foreign. This can mean people from other cultures or equally those with a different faith, a different order, different laws. Phobias become especially interesting when they turn against our own interests. When men develop a phobia of the male body, this is not based on a biological protective mechanism, but is a culturally bred fear that ensures competition among men. Especially in the Americas, there exists a deep-rooted phobia of communists, socialists, and anarchists – although these forms of organization were and are commonplace among the original peoples, e.g., in Oxaca in southern Mexico, even in times when capitalism as such did not yet exist.
For Avendaño, this phobia affects two fundamental factors above all: our own bodies and the territory that surrounds them. My country, my body – both insist on the right to integrity. Both are to be protected. What was once protected in the community is now protected by law. If the executive and political branches are able to do so, they also protect the body and territory from the community.
Avendaño is convinced that “there is a mechanism for the control of bodies that Michel Foucault called the ‘microphysics of power’. The body and its extension, the territory, are both defended. So there is resistance. It’s important to me to also conversely recognize our own bodies as an extension of the physical territory. Others want to have power over both,” he says.
“Land and liberty,” Emiliano Zapata shouted in 1910, when he took up arms to demand rights for the indigenous peoples at the time of the Mexican Revolution. In his time, there was no democracy, no dialogue, and no other way out. Little has changed with regard to their situation – not even in 1994, when the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada stirred hopes among Mexican technocrats and business leaders of no longer being on the threshold to the “first world,” although people in the cities, but especially in rural areas, continued to struggle with extreme poverty and legal inequality.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 did some things for the better, however: the protection of farmers, a right to land for sowing and harvesting, usufruct, a right that offered protection from rich landowners. Nevertheless, all of these reforms did little to help indigenous peoples. 1994, the year the FTA was signed, also saw the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which would actively spotlight indigenous peoples, their situation, their needs, and their demands for at least another decade. There is no question that Avendaño sympathizes with this movement, which has shown him one thing above all, namely that no one is alone:
“Communist practices prevail in the communities of Oaxaca. Because of their perspective on land ownership, the inhabitants have always been anti-capitalist. There is no land ownership in the 570 municipalities of Oaxaca: Property is usually communal, very pragmatically out of resistance toward the large landowners,” he says.
Just as a territory can belong to a municipality that will defend it, so, too, does the body need protection. In the theater, the entity offering protection is the stage. Even in his solo shows, Avendaño works collectively and cooperatively. That’s how he learned to do things in the community he comes from. No one is alone unless there is a power that drives them apart, a power that sows discord, that separates people, imprisons them, chases them away. Choreography, for Avendaño, is space and a form of resistance rolled into one. Collective body movements meet art and sound. Everyone on stage faces public discussion and debate. This is the ideal.
But even a community is only a singular entity; it cannot live without the others, without being protected by and from others. A territory, even if it is simply a stage, can never be protected by just one ensemble – only the audience can do so. But it is the tradition itself of having a theater at all that leads to our protecting it. “No theater, no resistance, can be financed only by those who perform or resist,” Avendaño says. “It seems to me that it is a fundamental mistake to think that a territory, a theater, a community can be protected by the community itself.” Emiliano Zapata already knew this in 1910.
Avendaño’s notebooks and scripts are full of thoughts like this. For him, every step on stage, the figures of each dance, however contemporary they may be, refer to rootedness and identity. His notations include phrases like, “You go on stage to claim your place, to claim what belongs to you and is yours.”
“Bruno Alonso Avendaño Martínez disappeared on May 10 in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca.” This sentence appears on Lukas Avendaño’s Twitter profile. It is an event that has shaped his life. His brother Bruno disappeared in 2018, probably the victim of a crime. Thirty months later, he was found dead. No one was held responsible. Justice will not be served for Bruno.
Official figures say that more than 31,000 people have disappeared in Mexico in the last three years alone. The relatives of the disappeared are also victims, though their numbers are not included in the statistics. Indirect victims do not count. But the bereaved families often find the bodies faster than the authorities – a task mainly performed mainly by women, often mothers.
“We talk about the disappeared as though people could just vanish. ‘Disappear,’ this euphemism is part of the problem. The fact that people in Mexico can simply ‘disappear’…,” says Avendaño, drawing quotation marks in the air before continuing, “is also evident in the disappearance of indigenous peoples. They, too, are declared ‘disappeared’. Their languages are disappearing.” Why? Avendaño’s sadness and horror turns into anger: “Who benefits from the disappearance of the more than 60 indigenous groups in the country? Only a nationalist policy would have anything to gain from it, as it would make it possible to homogenize the history of this country: Indigenous peoples serve as a mere staging of culture, because indigenous peoples represent the history of the country after all. In reality, however, they are being assimilated completely. I call it a low-intensity war. This war is being waged selectively and systematically against indigenous peoples and has been going on for a very long time. You can’t make an ethnic culture, a cultural lineage disappear just like that. First of all, you make it disappear physically. Fade away. You might still recognize a dialect here and there, a skin color, a certain peculiarity, but the community itself is wiped out. It has disappeared; they call it ‘assimilated’. This is what is happening to us.”
In response, there is the resistance of dozens of peoples struggling to defend their rights to self-determination. This is also the main concern in the work of Lukas Avendaño. He is resisting the disappearance. In his eyes, it is an erasure of the indigenous past in order to forget it or to mock it so that its descendants will deny it.
In Mexico there is another essential phenomenon: narcoculture. What do uprooted people do? What do people do when their past has been declared concluded? They look for new communities – and are taken in by organized crime, a protective force of violence and machismo, which, like a parallel government, has enormous economic power and firepower that allows it to formulate its own rules and nullify existing laws.
However, it is not this mixture of brutally competing powers that is Avendaño’s concern: “Rather, I see my work as a shared responsibility for the citizenry. There is not only a responsibility for what I do myself. There is the shared responsibility for the citizenry, for the public servants, right down to the workers who sweep the streets, because accidents can happen if they do not sweep them. So they have an ethical responsibility. So do public sector workers. If they don’t accept their responsibilities, the public sector will crack and collapse faster than they themselves can benefit from it. I believe in ethical responsibility. It is identical to the responsibility one bears as an artist. On stage, I am responsible for what the audience experiences. I am responsible for the audience. I am responsible for the aesthetic experience, be it olfactory, gustatory, or multisensory. This experience becomes art only when it conveys this responsibility.” In other words: Let’s stop listening to those who want to benefit from their actions, the business leaders or politicians. Let us listen to the artists.
