Bardaje
Lukas Avendaño (Mexico)
Presented with
Embodiment // Resistance // Ancestry
Rooted in Zapotec understandings of muxheidad, Bardaje reanimates a word used to enforce difference with the gestures, memories, and cosmologies it once pushed to the margins. The work emerges from a lineage that stretches linguistically from Persian barah to Arabic bardaj to Italian bardascia—a genealogy of dissent that refuses colonial definitions of gender and sexuality.
Lukas Avendaño moves within a ritual landscape of feathers, metallic paper, gold, silver, and ayoyotes, ancestral seeds that rattle with each step, summoning the sensual and the sacred in equal measure. Through movement, sound, and adornment, ash emerges as a polysemic ritual element unfolding in metaphors—a quintessential symbol of scorched earth, and of the survivors who rise from the ashes of their own bodies. Bardaje becomes a living archaeology of memory and matrilineality, where identity resists containment and vibrates through body and lineage. Neither confession nor spectacle, Bardaje is an embodied meditation on muxheidad: a third gender that defies translation and insists on its own cosmology of beauty, vitality, and becoming.
The February 3 performance will be followed by Encuentro, a post-show reception in honour of visiting Latin American artists, with beats by DJ Kachonda and a complimentary drink.
This show is part of Encuentro: programming at the 2026 Festival centering Latin American artistic impression. Visit the Encuentro page for related performances, workshops, artist talks, and more.
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Artist Bio
Lukas Avendaño
Avendaño’s career has been described in many ways: artivism, militant disobedience, sexual dissidence, rurality, Indianness, ugliness, illiteracy, street theater, happening, sketch, monologue, lectern theater, witticisms, improvisations, obscenities, vulgarities, lewdness, bad taste, pornography, Art Nako, and/or forced disappearance. For him, these ways of being labeled only reveal a hegemonic narrative: patriarchal, heterosexual, Christian, which is constructed from what Avendaño calls “the thesis with a flaw of origin,” hence he inhabits his very existence as a story of the collateral damage of this “flaw of origin.”
Partners
Venue
Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre
181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver
Content Advisory
Audience interaction, partial nudity
Showtimes & Tickets
Standard: $39 // Generous: $59
The February 3 performance will be followed by Encuentro, a post-show reception in honour of visiting Latin American artists, with beats by DJ Kachonda and a complimentary drink.
Accessibility
Spanish with English surtitles
Credits
Performer Lukas Avendaño Assistant and prompter Nayla Altamirano Original music Nnux + Eyibra (MUXX Project) Digital scenography Óldo Erréve