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Capsule Biography Number 25 - Malú Ordóñez
Malú Ordóñez has been called Mexico’s greatest living puppeteer. It is possible to contest this designation—the constituents of “greatest” and even “puppeteer” are open to debate—but without question, Ordóñez’s imagination and technical command mark her as one of the most visionary marionettists and general puppeteers at work today. She is renowned for her mastery of both farcical entertainments and fully-realized surrealist explorations as well as for her personal life, which includes three years in prison for the murder of her first husband.
María Luisa Ordóñez (she abandoned her given name as a teenager) was born in Mexico City in 1947. Her father operated drying machines for the El Buen Tono cigarette manufacturing company; her mother was a printmaker and artist best known for creating masks for local exhibitions and theatrical productions. Ordóñez has called her mother, now deceased, an uninspired artist though a significant influence on her. “She was unwilling to be constrained by stricture,” Ordóñez has said. “She could be unruly.” Variations of this same epithet have been pressed on Ordóñez nearly as often as “genius.”
Ordóñez was one of two sisters. By the time she was 11, she had gained a rudimentary grasp of Latin through obsessive self-study. The poet and playwright Abigael Bohórquez once wrote that Ordóñez, whom he met through her mother, was “a pensive girl, her gaze appraising, her expression dubious, her clothing not only shabby but spectacularly rank. I felt she was neglected. I did not understand until much later that, rather, she was untamable.”
Ordóñez’s parents granted her and her sister nearly unlimited freedom, a license Ordóñez exploited. She quit school at 13. When she was 15, she traveled—without notice or permission—to the beach town of Tampico with two boys from her neighborhood, the trio returning after three weeks. The sole order in the Ordóñez home was a regular Saturday dinner frequented by painters, musicians, and— Ordóñez attests—a local woman who interpreted attendees’ dreams.
On impulse, Ordóñez married a sculptor—part of her mother’s circle—two decades her senior when she was 16. Self-doubting, brutal, and frequently inebriated on the Japanese alcohol known as shochu, Ordóñez’s husband almost immediately took to chaining her to a radiator in their apartment after regularly forcing opium on her. On the six-month anniversary of their wedding, Ordóñez stabbed him to death with a jade-handled paper knife, ultimately serving only three years of a ten-year sentence.
In 1966, on Mexico City’s Madero Street, Ordóñez happened upon a traveling puppeteer playing the harmonica while causing two cloth puppets to dance on the pavement before her. Three days later, Ordóñez enrolled in a puppetry course offered at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.
Ordóñez excels at nearly all forms of puppetry: finger, sock, glove, and rod, as well as marionette work (she favors the Asian paddle and eight strings) and occasional shadow displays. She is a formidable ventriloquist. Between 1967 and 1970, her fame as a performer spread widely in her native city; she was a tireless and inventive busker, her shows often attracting throngs as she offered comedic pieces and satirical political sketches.
In 1971 she founded a glove puppet theater named “The Lantern Shadow” with her second husband, a former tennis champion from Angola who is known only as Babu. Over the ensuing decade, with support from the Mexican Ministry of Public Education, Ordóñez formed a dozen additional puppetry troupes across the country; she has performed in scores of venues, urban and rural. Perhaps her best-known major theatrical work was a marionette ballet in collaboration with the composer Luisa Tapia called “La Daga de Jade.” It was presented at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1978.
Since 1982, Ordóñez has focused on perfecting her version of Vietnamese water puppetry in which the puppets—wooden and controlled by rods—seem to move above a pool of water roughly waist-high. “Small villages in Vietnam used to hold competitions to see which of them could stage the best water-puppet shows,” Ordóñez has explained. “Many villages formed elite, private societies to sustain their efforts.”
Her puppets, all of which she makes herself, have become increasingly elaborate. Many now are of a translucent and varicolored leather and are more than three feet in height. Ordóñez reportedly goes into seclusion for several days before beginning work on her puppets and then celebrates their figurative birth with prayers, incense lighting, and a ritualistic binding of clusters of roses. Some of her performances transpire over a period of nine days, during which Ordóñez sleeps for only four hours each night and consumes little beyond pine nuts and yogurt. An annual performance of this type is reserved for members of the Lisbon Circle exclusively, a custom initiated a half-decade ago.
Ordóñez has explained her enthrallment with puppetry as follows: “Marionette work is both an inner and outer process. It is a transformation of my soul from within as I create souls without, as I breathe life into their bodies and minds, as I absorb and create music, as I discover and respond to movement, as I give and receive love from these creatures before me. These beings of wood and cloth and paint erupt into life through both imagination and desire. They become more human than most humans. They pass beyond the human. They become immortal.”
In December of 1987, Ordóñez announced she would, henceforth, offer performances only in private homes and to audiences of precisely three dozen.
Sembla Intelligencer, July 17, 1988
BEN GUTERSON’s writing includes the Edgar Award–nominated middle-grade novel Winterhouse (and its sequels) with Holt/Macmillan in 2018–2020, and the New York Times bestseller The World-Famous Nine with Little, Brown/Hachette in 2024.