Astrid Hadad

Perhaps Astrid Hadad's performance is best described as "one of the most provocative stage acts since the Weimar Republic was in bloom" (New York Times). When this outraged and outrageous Mexican diva comes onstage nothing and nobody is safe from her sharply pointed and bawdy mockery. And no one can resist her enigmatic voice, the polished and powerful musical arrangements and the sensuous and thrilling performance. Her wildly energetic revue is a fusion of old songs combining ranchera, bolero, rumba, rock and jazz, performance art, political barbs and a mix of the most surreal and extravagant costumes and settings. A unique, self-created style, suitably called "heavy nopal," after this quintessentially Mexican cactus whose juice is distilled to make tequila.

She may first appear as an Aztec Pyramid complete with carved snakes, a skull rack and a peacock's tail of agave leaves, change into the Virgin of Guadalupe (Mexico's patron saint), embody La Malinche (the devil women who sold out the Aztec Empire to the Spanish conquerors), or become a psychedelic plant glowing with all-seeing eyes and the bleeding heart of Christ.

Subversively turning upside down the symbols, stereotypes and traditions of Mexican and Latin popular culture, she attacks macho culture, the Mexican government or the U.S.A.'s neoimperialism ("Visit the United States before it visits you").

Hadad says her act has its origins in the cabaret of Brecht and Weill, "the political cabaret that was a new way of experiencing life." In the 1920s and '30s, Mexico City's clubs were also filled with performers who skewered the powerful in their acts. But no one since has stuffed all of Mexican political and cultural history into a dress and laced it up with a feminist attitude quite like Hadad. —Courtesy Calabash Music