Lamesha Ruddock
“That’s why the world shakes so we can be aligned again.”
Xquenda is a visceral, poetic and unflinching act of remembrance. Written and directed by Isabel Quiroz and performed by Quiroz and Nicollah Sekete, the production honours ritual and the endurance of women who refuse to be erased.
Xquenda, the Zapotec word for “soul”, is a call to action for the missing souls. The production sits against the real crisis of missing Mexican women, with more than 28,000 recorded as missing or unlocated as of March 2025. Quiroz transforms this statistic into a living wound. The story begins as a personal loss but grows into an indictment of structural silence.
The narrative follows a young Indigenous woman from rural Oaxaca who tries to find justice for her best friend Ruby, who has disappeared. Her journey becomes a dialogue with a matriarchal lineage. She calls to her Abuela and Ñaa for guidance as she confronts danger and the apathy of authorities. The piece asks the audience to consider how silence is maintained, not only through institutions but also through neighbours and communities who look away.
The performance begins quietly with Abuela standing at the edge and the daughter standing in the middle of an unbroken circle of soil, drawings, handwritten notes and missing person flyers. This circle becomes a ritual site the performers never cross. Its integrity mirrors the resilience of memory. Soft lighting, a lone microphone, a ukulele and ancestral folkish music form an intimate soundscape.
Sekete delivers a tender and focused performance as the daughter. Her recurring movement motif, arms outstretched from left to right, becomes a physical claim to space in a world that refuses to acknowledge her. Quiroz shifts fluidly between characters by using direction and movement. Abuela crouches and listens at the circle’s edge. Ruby enters with swinging arms and bouncing knees that convey youth and promise. Authority figures appear through recordings that the daughter looks up towards, a simple gesture that clarifies the power imbalance.
Warm pink tones wash the stage during moments of ancestral communion. Cooler blue tones signal the daughter’s realisation that she must leave to survive. Flyers eventually flood the stage, overwhelming it with faces of the missing. The daughter’s single candle vigil becomes the emotional centre of the piece, its flame flickering as if in dialogue with the surrounding darkness. The ritual of sewing her own funeral dress brings the work to a devastating climax. Each stitch becomes a prayer for an alternative and safer existence. In the next life.
Xquenda is political, tender and absolutely committed to remembering what the world prefers to forget.
Performances of XQUENDA have now concluded at Voila! Theatre Festival 2025.
Jake Mace
Jasmine Silk
