Interview with Jesusa Rodríguez y Liliana Felipe

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio and Claire Crosby interview Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, who talk about their beginnings both as artists and as a couple. They conceived their wedding as a performative act, which was a symbolic statement against a law in Mexico called "Sociedad en Convivencia" (living together in society). Their wedding was immediately followed by their divorce as a part of a contract that should make the couple's life easier. As they do not believe in marriage or in a social legalization of affect, Jesusa and Liliana talk about how institutions impose and shape issues as sexuality, gender, and human rights. These two wonderful women speak about how society understands masculine and feminine; they also discuss how their art practice and cabaret performances question women's oppression and inequality of power, and how cabaret can function as a thermometer for political struggles. For them, revolution starts from within ourselves, and then it could expand to transform our world. Jesusa and Liliana ran together the famous El Hábito in Mexico City, where they staged hundreds of shows over the course of fifteen years. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Jesusa Rodríguez is Mexico's most influential cabaret and political performance artist, and recipient of an Obie Award. Often referred to as a chameleon, Rodríguez moves seemingly effortlessly and with vigor across the spectrum of cultural forms, styles, and tones. Her work challenges 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. Most recently, she heads up the Resistencia Creativa movement in Mexico, whose key strategy is using 'massive cabaret' as a tool for political action. 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. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics