Quinceañeras

This choreographic project is inspired by Quinceañera parties, a Latin American festivity celebrating the transition from childhood to womanhood, coinciding with a girl's 15th birthday. The celebration is rooted in European debutante balls, combined with Indigenous rites of passage. This work investigates the performativity of its staged ritual and the violence imposed on the Quinceañera by such ritualisation.

Quinceañeras will be an evening-length work in which the audience witnesses a space transformed into a salón comunal, a garage, or a living room. Through the aesthetics of a Latin American birthday party—with its plastic and deflated opulence—and a fascination with Latin America's mimicking of Western aristocratic extravagance, the challenge will be to shape a new ritual through dance: one that inhabits and dissolves the dichotomies between richness and poverty, falseness and originality, holiness and mundanity, longing and belonging, partying and mourning.

Estefanía and Luisa will embody the Quinceañera through an unannounced shifting of roles: from friends sharing their birthday, to twins, doppelgängers, companions, or lovers. In constant transformation through ambiguity and accumulation, as if they were children playing, they will role-play the absent masculine figures of the party for one another. They will become their male cousins and later their fathers—in a space between summoning and farewell—questioning and transfiguring their ghosts.

This work seeks to reiterate what the Quinceañera tradition achieved: a new world where the old, the traditional, the original, the folkloric, the rigid, the corny, and the mysterious can coexist.