Astrid Hadad, Liliana Felipe & Eugenia León at NYC's SummerStage 2000

In 2000, New York City's SummerStage hosted a unique concert where three powerful women offered the best of their repertoire. Astrid Hadad, Liliana Felipe, and Eugenia León performed both individually and together, in a show organized and directed by Jesusa Rodríguez. The presence of these women in Central Park, singing in Spanish, speaks about the intertwined relationship between the local and the transnational, as well as the interest in Latin American and Latino/a culture in New York City. The political strength of this performance comes from the voices, the bodies, and the words of these amazing women. This video documentation includes mostly Astrid Hadad's participation in the show, as well as a grand finale where she and Liliana Felipe and Eugenia León delight the audience with smart and fun rancheras. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

$aAstrid Hadad is a singer and actress, graduated from Mexico City's Centro Universitario de Teatro. She looks to cabaret and performance to represent social, cultural, and political crisis in Mexico and, at the same time, to entertain. Costumed in her signature wearable art, Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls 'Heavy Nopal'. Her work takes on the stereotypes of Mexican culture and reframes them to comment on the forms of machismo in a variety of local and global contexts. Eugenia León is a singer born in Mexico, defined as a singer committed to the people and their causes. She has performed all around the world and her repertoire includes diverse genres, such as tango, bolero, norteño, Latin American music and rancheras. The strength and versatility of her voice makes her one of the most beloved and recognized Mexican singers. Liliana Felipe is a composer, singer, actor, 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. She and her partner, Jesusa Rodríguez, owned and operated El Habito and Teatro de la Capilla, alternative performances spaces in Mexico City. Jesusa Rodríguez is a Mexican director, actress, playwright, performance artist, scenographer, entrepreneur and social activist, who has been called the most important woman of Mexico. Her 'espectáculos' (as both spectacles and shows) challenge traditional classification, crossing with ease generic boundaries: from elite to popular to mass, from Greek tragedy to cabaret, from pre-Columbian indigenous to opera, from revue, sketch and 'carpa,' to performative acts within political projects. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics