Striptease
(2019)

Live performance. Approx. 30 minutes. Material: music, several pieces of clothing, high heels, 100 A4 pages with short found and own stories, piñata filled with fruit, peanuts and sweets, stick.
Ciudad del Arte. Museo Zapadores, Madrid/ES. Curator: Alba Soto. Images: Alba Soto / Doris Steinbichler. ©2019.

Maricruz Peñaloza criticises the violence perpetrated against women, against the migrants who arrive and enter through the southern border of Mexico, where she herself comes from. Within the performance, she interweaves autobiographical stories and memories with those of these people who have arrived in search of a better life, while criticising the corruption of the Mexican government and those who have power and abuse it. Especially the current government. Everything is a lie. Lies. Therefore, at the beginning of the performance, she dances to the rhythm of the song ‘Mentiras’ (Lies). The audience sings along!

After the dancing, she goes to the grille she found in the room with a STOP sign on it, like a warning for the women at the border. Are they not welcome? A coincidence? Then follows the striptease. She has many clothes on -one after the other are taken off- , and she throws them on the floor in the long corridor. Here she also leaves stories on paper for the audience to read. Afterwards, Maricruz Peñaloza uses -as a metaphor- the ritual of breaking the piñata and thus the idea of the “destruction of evil” and the triumph of “good”. She breaks with the problems and manifests her discontent. Inside the piñata there are sweets, fruits and peanuts, as is typical in Mexico for children’s birthdays but also for special celebrations before Christmas. Maricruz asks the audience to smash the piñata after she has given it several blows. The performance ends when the piñata breaks completely and the fruit and sweets fall to the floor and the audience takes it all for themselves and eats them.

The title of the performance does not only refer to the fact that I take off several pieces of clothing, but rather it is a metaphor for the work done by migrant women who come to my hometown from Central America and part of the Caribbean, via Guatemala, and who are mostly involved in prostitution, as the only possibility to survive.