¿Con Qué se Come?

Queer Chicanx Dance Theater – Reimagining the quinceañera as ritual, exclusion, and belonging through abstraction and memory.

World Arts & Cultures/Dance presents ¿Con Qué Se Come? as part of UCLA’s MFA Upstarts Series 2026. Choreographed and directed by Gilberto Martinez Martinez. 10 performers in this evening-length dance theater work investigating the cultural, religious, and social strutted embedded within the quinceañera tradition and take into consideration, their impact on queer Chicanx subjectivity. The performance draws from its emotional and ceremonial logics: processions, preparation, spectacle, communal celebration, and expectation, to construct an abstracted world of ritual and transformation. Movement is developed through gestural research, familial ritual practices, Catholic iconography, collective improvisation, and social dance vernaculars that echo the celebratory aesthetics of a quinceañera. ¿Con Qué Se Come? asks What does it mean to celebrate when the celebration was not meant for us?