 |
|
|
 Entertainment | October 2006 
Rebel Performer: Mexico's Astrid Hadad Skewers The Status Quo
 Jordan Levin - MiamiHerald.com
| | In some ways Astrid Hadad is as conventionally Mexican as you can get. |
The middle child of 11 siblings born to devoutly Catholic parents, she grew up in a village in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo. Her family had no television, and pumped water from the well to bathe. Hadad loved music, listened obsessively to the radio, and recited religious poems her mother taught her.
But the adult Hadad's vision of Mexicanismo is considerably less traditional.
In her radical cabaret-performance art, she turns Mexican convention and culture upside down and inside out. She'll wear a skirt with the image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Mexico's patron saint, while she whips herself enthusiastically; she'll sing an absurdly masochistic ranchera bandaged and on crutches so she'll "really look like a national monument;" she'll lacerate Tio Sam ("visit the United States before it visits you") and Mexican politicians.
She's a diva, a comic, a powerful singer, a conceptual artist and political satirist with an irreverent streak that would do a drag queen proud. And she brings it all together in a wild, singular persona that has made her an underground icon among the Mexican intelligentsia and contemporary artistic scene.
And despite the cultural specificity of her work, she's increasingly recognized outside her native country. Tigertail Productions brings Hadad and her band, Los Tarzanes, to Miami this weekend for the first time since her appearance at the In-Roads Americas Festival in 1998.
BLAME - OR CREDIT?
Blame her attitude on her Lebanese grandparents on her father's side, who gave her an outsider's perspective on her country. Or blame her need to rebel against her strict religious upbringing. Or credit an intense imagination honed by the absence of TV and the fantastical imagery of Mexican culture. Or credit an iron will and irrepressible desire to say what she thinks.
"It's stronger than I am," Hadad says of her need to perform in towering paper fruit headdresses, speaking by phone from her Mexico City home. "Besides, I always liked challenges."
It has been that. Hadad's ultra provocative act at one point had her banned from Mexican television. She's had people walk out on her blunt jokes on sexism and Catholicism. She is a formally trained singer and actress educated at Mexico's best theater schools, but when she took a traditional acting role (on a Televisa soap opera with Salma Hayek) it was to help pay her musicians, because for years hardly anyone came to see her act.
"Really, in Mexico at first, it was very, very difficult," Hadad says. "But I'm a person who's really convinced of what I do. When I started touring internationally was when Mexico started to understand my work more - I had to go outside for them to appreciate me."
'People were always saying to me, `Why do you do this, you sing so well? You're ruining your career and your life.'
But Hadad has always taken her own path.
Instead of getting married and settling down in her village, she made her way to university in Mexico City, initially studying political science and journalism, then switching to theater. She began to sing and play guitar at tiny clubs and bars.
On graduating in the early 1980s, she came up with her own vision of performance, a combination of Weimar German cabaret, the didactic political theater of Bertolt Brecht, and old-fashioned Mexican music hall.
THE OUTSIDER
Her outsider status: as the grandchild of immigrants, as a country girl in the big city, and an actress fascinated by popular Mexican culture in the serious theater world, all fostered her individuality. (Hadad doesn't give her age, but seems to be in her 40s).
Her Lebanese background "made me see Mexico with a vision that in one way is more critical and in another is more loving," Hadad says. "A lot of people [in Mexico] want to be blonds, or live outside of Mexico. I'm the reverse. Precisely because I had an immigrant family, this made me feel more loving and grateful for where I live."
On one hand, Hadad adores Mexico's over-the-top culture - its rip-your-heart-out rancheras, its tortured religious imagery. But she also sees the absurdity of a society that views a song in which a woman practically begs her man to beat her as romantic.
"I love boleros and it fascinates me to sing them, the intense emotions," she says. "This is part of the essence of being Mexican. If you read a little of the history, [you'll see] it's a people that have suffered a lot, but that it's also a people that have an impressive capacity for the grotesque."
"Of course I love Mexican music and Mexican culture. What happens is I take it in a way that's a little more contemporary, post-modern. I take the traditional values, the images that have always been in the collective Mexican unconscious and do them in another way, a more real way."
Much of the reality Hadad presents has to do with the treatment of women. She embraces female clichés so hard she squeezes new meaning out of them.
MANY ROLES
In one number, she appears in a skirt in the shape of an enormous pair of breasts, modeled after an Egyptian goddess, and, she says, "the Mexican Republic, which is an exuberant, generous goddess, and all the politicians have suckled and suckled her and she keeps on giving and giving."
She often takes on the persona of a vedette, or old-style, sexually provocative showgirl, and talks about "giving pleasure" in her performances, taking control of a demeaning role in order to take power over it. She'll go on about the low rate of orgasms among Mexican women on stage. It's all tremendously provocative in a country that still takes a very traditional view of women.
"I grew up in such a conservative family, they always told me that if a man raped me I would be worthless," Hadad says. "Things are still so inconsistent. People say you have the same rights now. No, wrong."
But instead of ranting, she jokes. It's as if the country's pain and contradictions are so intense all she can do is laugh, and make others laugh with her.
"My father had a great sense of humor, we laughed a lot in my family," she says. "In theater school they tell you it's all suffering. When I got out I thought, `Life is so sweet, why does it have to be all about suffering?' And I changed my shows radically so that they would be humorous, so they would make people enjoy themselves intensely. To me, humor is the best way to pass your life."
jlevin@MiamiHerald.com |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us