MALA Burlesque

Mala Burlesque is a live stage production created, directed and produced by Alejandra Chen between 2018 and 2019.

 

The project was born from a central question: what does it mean to be a “bad” woman?
To speak one’s mind? To inhabit one’s desires? To exist outside of imposed expectations?

 

Using burlesque as a performative language, Mala Burlesque explores femininity, freedom and self-determination through the body, gesture and presence. In this work, clothing is not merely costume, but an emotional and symbolic layer. The act of undressing becomes a performative gesture of shedding judgments, constraints and inherited beliefs about how a woman “should” be.

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The piece featured the participation of guest and iconic performer Alejandra Bogue, a trans woman, whose presence naturally expanded the work’s reflection on femininity and opened it to a broader and more complex understanding of womanhood.

 

Rather than focusing on provocation or seduction, the piece proposes burlesque as a space of agency: a place where the performer reclaims her own image, her narrative and her body on

her own terms.

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Mala Burlesque was presented as a full live stage production during the 2018–2019 season.