October 17, 2012: Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe’s El Sexto Sol at Dixon Place

Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe’s El Sexto Sol at Dixon Place

October 17, 2012 | 7:30pm

A night of raucous, musical truth-telling by two of Latin America's most famous and infamous artists. Co-presented by Dixon Place as part of the Hemispheric New York Performance Network initiative (HNYPN).

Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe's legendary musical performance cabaret lands in New York City for one raucous night. Combining Felipe's transporting song with Rodriguez's indomitable presence, El Sexto Sol turns our world inside out—men become women, women become gods, and we come to know our world for what it is and for what it may become.

Jesusa Rodríguez is Mexico’s leading cabaret and political performance artist, who ran the famous Teatro Bar El Hábito in Mexico City with her wife Liliana Felipe.  Often referred to as the most important woman in Mexico, Rodríguez moves across the spectrum of cultural forms and styles. Her performances challenge classification—from Greek tragedy to cabaret, from opera to "carpa," from theatrical presentation to political action. Humor, satire, linguistic play, and the body are constants in her productions. In the 1980s, Rodríguez notably directed an adaption of Mozart's Don Giovanni, featuring an all-female cast, entitled Donna Giovanni (1983). In 1993 Rodriguez' Coatlicue transformed a pre-Hispanic statue from the Aztec Room of Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum into an animated being running for Mexico’s presidency. Rodríguez won an Obie for Best Actor in Las Horas de Belén, A Book of Hours (1999) along with Ruth Maleczech and Mabou Mines. Other famous female icons recreated by Rodríguez include Frida Kahlo, La Malinche, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Rodriguez’s Sor Juana made celebrated appearances at Mexico City’s Pride marches. Rodriguez was the first artist named Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute.

Liliana Felipe is a composer, singer, gardener, tango musician, and clergyphobe. She left Argentina for Mexico just before the military coup in 1976, but her sister and brother-in-law remain among the 30,000 disappeared. Felipe's music and activism are intimately intertwined. She has been an essential voice for civil rights in Latin America for the last 30 years, and continues to be a powerful presence in Argentina, working with human rights organizations—especially H.I.J.O.S. (the organization of the children of the disappeared). Together, Liliana and Jesusa created  two performance spaces, El Cuervo and later El Hábito in Coyoacán, Mexico City, which they managed until 2005, when they passed the torch to their colleagues Las Reinas Chulas, who changed the venue's name to El Vicio. El Hábito/El Vicio is a hotbed for intellectuals, feminists, gay rights activists and open-minded, progressive people who want to be engaged by a smart and critical humor. Most recently, Jesusa and Liliana head up the Resistencia Creativa movement in Mexico, whose key strategy is using "massive cabaret" as a tool for political action. | resistenciacreativa.org.mx
 
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a transnational network of institutions, artists and scholars throughout the Americas whose work focuses on the intersection of art and social change. Housed at New York University, the Institute promotes vibrant collaborations at the level of artistic practice and pedagogy, builds collections of artistic and academic materials for research across borders, and aims to train the next generation of performance-based political artists. | hemisphericinstitute.org  

Special thanks to Susana Cook for her help with this production and T.L. Cowan for partnering with us to make Jesusa and LIliana's visit possible. This performance is generously supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund.