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On disappearance

Vom Verschwinden -
In the spider's web:. "Lemniskata" by Lukas Avendaño

Jaime Martin

Mexico is a country that knows how to celebrate the dead. This is, perhaps, for the best given how cartels produce them with assembly-line regularity – all the disappeared and murdered. And although no one believes it, in this country, dance is ensuring that the tide can turn again

Juan Levid Lázaro Nava
Kulturvermittler und Journalist aus Guadalajara

Dancing is fun – even if everyone says it’s hard work. Dancing is work, and not just in our efforts to keep perfecting ourselves. Above all, it is work because we are trying to make a difference, to stand out. In the art of dance, it is not enough just to have an idea. It takes an invention. A conviction. This often only comes from outside pressure. Lukas Avendaño has always felt pressure.

Mario Patino Sanchez

Any man who puts on make-up like Lukas Avendaño, who wears women’s clothes in Mexico can only be a faggot who should go underground and take refuge in the subcultures of Mexico City. But Lukas Avendaño went the other way – out to the countryside, to Tehuantepec in the south of the country, to a province that is poor, where no one would say the word “transgender.” Not because they don’t know what it is, but because a man who has feminine ambitions is good for what is called women’s work: caring, cooking, teaching, and even dancing.

But make no mistake. There is no such thing as ”women’s” work – even in Mexico, which is so marked by machismo.

desaparecer

Anyone who has ever visited my country, and who has come with a desire to see the social reality, will quickly notice that one word keeps coming up: “desaparecer” – to disappear. People disappear – supposedly without a trace. The old cultures also disappear: everything disappears.

Jaime Martin

Choreographer Lukas Avendaño has been gripped by “disappearance;” it won’t let him go. Why did the once common concept of a “third gender” disappear? Why did his brother disappear? He supposedly disappeared “without a trace”, so no one can be held accountable for what is no longer there. The history of the indigenous peoples is also disappearing, their diversity, their trails. Lukas Avendaño is tracing their past, and not only as the choreographer of his current piece, “Lemniskata”, which is currently on tour. He is also an anthropologist by profession. Yes, there is such a thing: an anthropologist who has become a choreographer, or vice versa. His story is full of urgency. Writing it down has been both work and fun.

The man in a skirt

3,16 €

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.