Presentation: Xandra Ibarra

" I hope to implicate and overwhelm the audience with my racial melancholia. I want to illuminate how performing racially perverse material often fails because it is read and embodied as reality by my (white) audiences. I do this by juxtaposing the rumored death of Lupe Velez, the original Hollywood Mexican “Spitfire” who purportedly died with her head in the toilet, with the life of La Chica Boom. My hope is to present these stories side by side in order to foreshadow the destiny of my burlesque personae. Although I don’t resolve my actual life with death as Lupe did, I propose that the afterlife of La Chica Boom will be lived as a cockroach; reviled, untamable, and always pregnant with yet another disciplined reality."
-Xandra Ibbara

http://stanceondance.com/2012/09/24/an-interview-with-seth-eisen-and-xandra-ibarra/