The Stars are Aligned for stefa marin alarcon (STEFA*) and Xenia Rubinos

stefa marin alarcon is the vocalist, composer, and multimedia artist who fronts STEFA*; Xenia Rubinos is a NY-based vocalist, composer, and performing artist. STEFA*’s debut record, Born With An Extra Rib, just came out earlier this summer on Figure & Ground (which was preceded by 2022’s visual work, Born With An Extra Rib: The Film), so to celebrate, stefa and Xenia caught up about its creation. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

stefa marin alarcon: It’s good to see you, babe. 

Xenia Rubinos: Good to see you, too. It’s been a long time. 

stefa: I know, last time I saw you was at your show. 

Xenia: That’s crazy! I didn’t see you there. We didn’t get to talk.

stefa: I know. You were conjuring.

Xenia: How have your shows been? I wanted to go to one of them, and I’ve missed them.

stefa: It’s been really good. I’ve been playing with my full band, and that includes Puck, Nick Jozwiak and Miles Francis. Puck started playing keys with us kind of recently, which feels really good. Everyone sings and everyone has very full hearts, and you can’t ask for much more than that. So the shows have been good — and also really intense, because I feel like they’ve definitely been reflecting the times, the energy. I’ve just been trying to hold on to groundedness and not let myself fly away with stress or pressure. Just trying to show up for the moment.

Xenia: That’s awesome. Congratulations on this release. How exciting.

stefa: I know, we did it! Everyone’s like, “Finally!” And I’m like, “Have y’all been waiting that long?” [Laughs.] But it really does take that amount of time. When the work is ready, you can’t rush it, you can’t stall it. You have to wait until it’s ready to fly. It feels really good to have it out.

Xenia: I bet!

stefa: In my astrology, it’s all about publishing right now, and it’s all about sharing my voice and going on the record. So this also feels very of the moment today. 

Xenia: The stars are aligned. 

stefa: How are you today? How’s your summer been?

Xenia: I’m good. I am really grateful to be healthy and to be working on a lot of things. A lot of really beautiful work has come my way, and I’m really grateful to have that and to have the health to be able to do the work. I’m working on a choral piece for the first time. I’m working on a film project, and then working on my new solo stuff.

stefa: Do you feel like that’s all bleeding into your solo work?

Xenia: Yeah, I think it’s all coming from a similar space, and they all feed each other. The choral work, and just the work on embodiment and the voice, is kind of the centerpiece of everything that I’m doing. I’m trying to apply that practice to all of the projects, of a more embodied way of working. 

stefa: I love that you’re talking about embodiment because that was such a central part of this album — my body, and feeling in my body. I feel like when people see the way that I like to work, embodiment is something that comes up a lot. The way that I move in a rehearsal space or on a stage — embodiment is so important to me. I’m disembodied, then I can’t work from that place. So I just love that you’re sharing that. I feel like so many people are craving embodiment right now, because we’re really disembodied as a society and as a country. I feel like the body and the brain are so disconnected, and it’s to our detriment. It’s kind of a tactic, I think, to control and to make us feel unwell. So embodiment in my music and in my performance is at the core of where I want to kind of start from. 

How are you feeling with the choral piece? 

Xenia: I’ve been doing this project called Circulo de Voces. Something that we talked about a long time ago was just missing the team sport of singing in a group, and wanting to tap into that experience and figure out different ways that that could look. Just thinking about the choral spaces that a lot of us grew up in, and what’s the music that was sung — I’m really curious to ask those questions, of what a choir can be, and reimagine the choir as a public space like a park or a library. It doesn’t need to be only for, quote-unquote, “professional singers,” but anyone with a voice. The commission I’m working on right now is for New Latin Wave. I think you played that same series last year, at Lincoln Center?

stefa: Yeah! 

Xenia: They commissioned me to write a piece for Voices of the New, which is a vocal ensemble. They’re going to premiere in September a piece I’m composing. 

stefa: Oh, fab.

Xenia: Yeah. It’s interesting because it’s a different way to think of it in terms of, I’m organizing vocal parts to be sung. But even in that, thinking about different ways to score and what I want the music to feel like and what I would like to suggest the singers to feel in their bodies, and how to translate that into a score or composition that’s planned — as opposed to a lot of the things that have been happening in the school, which are more improvised. So it’s a new challenge. But yeah, I just love singing with people. I love singing with you.

stefa: I love singing with you, too! When I was thinking about this conversation, I was revisiting your album [2021’s Una Rosa], and I was just like, Oh, my god. We sang.

Xenia: We did that.

stefa: We har-mon-ized. [Laughs.] I felt like we were really grounded in our performance. That was such a whirlwind year, and I was just so thankful for those harmonies holding it down. It was so beautiful. And we will always have Una Rosa. 

Xenia: We will always have Una Rosa. I’m curious to hear about your work in this process of putting this album together, and your [use of your] voice as your instrument?

stefa: Something that I wanted us to talk about in this convo is origin stories, and what was the seed that then grew into our latest work. This word “concept” album has been presented to me about my album, and I was like, “Oh… sure!” I didn’t really think of it that way, and then I was like, “I guess it is a concept album.” When I think about what the seed was for this record, it was “Costillas” — which means “ribs” — and it was about my body, and me trying to understand my body on a deeper level; a level beyond colonization and identities that have been placed on me. It’s wild thinking back that that song also is like my punk song — I’m kind of screaming and I’m using different parts of my voice that I hadn’t used before. So for that to be the starting point of the album — it started with the feeling of wanting to do away with these expectations that were placed on me. 

My first record, Sepalina, which was my four song EP — I think about the question behind that being, Where am I from? And I think about the question behind Born With An Extra Rib being, Who am I and where am I going? I’m just feeling really thankful that I get to process my life and my reason for being through my music and through my art. I just feel so thankful that I can do that, and people can resonate with it.

We talk about manifestation — which is so real, like 110%. As orators and storytellers and people who use voice and words to communicate, we are incredibly powerful when it comes to that. I know that I have a very strong word, and when I say something, it becomes real. So I have to be very careful with what I say. In terms of what I was hoping for this project, I was obsessed with the idea of multimedia, and it not just being one thing. I was able to do that with The Kitchen here in New York City — I was an artist-in-residence, and they commissioned me for [Born With An Extra Rib: The Film], essentially. I was able to work with the biggest team that I had worked with, and it was just so mind blowing. And I had a bit of imposter syndrome, too. In a way, I felt out of my body. 

Xenia: Sometimes this happens to me, too, where you are actually embodied, but you’re transcendent in that moment. We talk about embodiment so much, but I think in your practice, it’s quite possible that you are often transcending your body. 

stefa: Absolutely. And it’s also that responsibility as a lead artist, having to be leading this project, needing to be so embodied and so present so that you can show up for everyone and for yourself. I’m grateful that you use the word transcendence, because I’m like, Was it borderline disassociation? I’m actually not sure what happened there. But I like transcendence better than dissociation. 

Xenia: It could be both. Maybe you had moments of transcendence, moments of dissociation. When you’re the director, the actor, the singer, the composer — when you’re doing all of the things at the same time, it’s like you’ve split off into many different selves. 

stefa: Yeah. It’s like when you get off stage and you’re like, Wait, what did I just do? And you look back at videos and you’re like, Oh, my god, I was going off. [Laughs.] But creating the visual world of the album as we were also building the sonic world of the album was really interesting, because it was kind of like this flow between the music and the visuals that was building upon itself. Some songs came after the film, and some songs [from the film] aren’t on my album. It was this mix of where I was in my process as an artist, and what I wanted to include in the journey of the ritual — which was really a ritual, about returning to your body and to your ancestors, and undoing the myths that we inherit and deciding what is yours to take on in this world.

Xenia: I’m curious about what you found in that process of returning to your body. In my current process of composition — which is working from a fully embodied state of improvisation with only my voice, and letting ideas emerge from that — I’ve been surprised by what shows up sometimes. Sometimes I’m not surprised; sometimes when I watch it back, I’m like, Yep, that’s exactly who I thought was there. [Laughs.] I’m curious what that process has been like for you, if you’ve had any moments that may have surprised you.

stefa: Oh, my god. The first thing that comes to mind is when we were filming [the final scene]. We set it up so that we were filming in the exact order that the film was kind of going to be edited in. In film sets, [typically] you do the easy shots and then you do the harder shot, and it’s a mix. But for this, we were like, “No, we’re going to follow the journey throughout the entire filming day, and that’s going to reflect on film.” The last song was the end of the ritual, called “Same Body.” Spoiler alert, for people who haven’t seen the film: I perform this song, I disrobe, and my friends pour honey on my body. Then they lay me down on a bed of soil and they cover me in flowers. For me, it was meant to be like a moment of death, of rebirth, of leaving things behind, and emerging as myself. So, it’s the night of filming and it’s like, “OK, we’re almost to the last shot!” And when the time came, I completely exploded. I cried like I had not cried in so long. I was like, “I can’t do it. I can’t finish the ritual.” And we were cut for time — we had gone over hours at that point — and they were like, “stefa, we need to do this, and we’re going to do it right now.” For me to see the end of the ritual — really feel in my body what it meant — was just so shocking. 

I think you really feel that in the film. It is such a vulnerable moment. When I was filming it, I was slowly coming out and publicly saying, “I’m a trans person,” and this film was really cementing that. There was no running from it anymore. In that moment, I had to let go of so much, and it really left my body after that. It was a real ritual. It was really wild.

Xenia: That’s so beautiful that you experienced that. It’s more rare, I think, than we might like. You’re touching on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is: what is performance? Just thinking about emotions and what you just described — I’m curious how you as a performer, as an artist, as a creator of ritual, navigate that. Because I think a lot of my training is actually about not feeling those emotions, or feeling them but having them in check. Sometimes as performers, we don’t allow ourselves [those emotions], and we are actually concerned about giving out and holding space for others. So I’m curious how you’re navigating that.

stefa: I love the last thing you just said, that we’re giving out and holding space for others. But also, our audience is holding space for us. So giving ourselves grace and tenderness as performers… I think about this a lot, what happens when the artist has given so much and we are left depleted. Who takes care of the artists then? Who heals the healer? That’s something that I’ve also realized in the last few years, since making this: I’m not just a performer, I’m also a facilitator. And that connects to, I think, our desires of wanting to expand how we perform and how we build community. It’s that mutual desire to hold space for each other. 

But in terms of how we let ourselves really feel: I feel like because we’re also, quotes, “trained” performers, there is this responsibility that we feel as well to keep it together, because we need to finish the song or the show or the tour. We can’t let ourselves fall apart completely. I don’t necessarily know if I agree with that, but I know that that’s in me from my training. It makes me question what I’ve unlearned and what I’ve learned. But I just remember in my conservatory training, specifically in drama school, [the idea that] the audience doesn’t want to see you crying and giving into the emotion. The audience wants to see the struggle of you fighting that emotion — that is more interesting to the audience than you completely giving in. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it is something that’s constantly in my head. 

“Same Body” is still really hard to sing in public. I say, “My mind says that I’m your man and that I can take care of you, too.” And I remember when I was writing that song, I had a crush on this woman, and I was like, Wait, I could be her man. I could be her knight in shining armor. I can be her picking her up. I just felt like, Finally, I can be these things. I think I’m still trying to believe that I could be that for someone, and so when I sing it, it’s so vulnerable to say those words. Even though I don’t identify as a man, the idea of being that for someone — being told my whole life, “You will never be that. You look like this. You were born in this body. That’s who you are. That’s your role” — and finally feeling like, No, I can be something else, is so, so vulnerable to share. And I still feel like, Don’t look at me! when I’m singing it. My voice breaks. But I do think it’s really beautiful when I can see the cracks in a performance. Because I could be pitch perfect, I could be unmovable, but it’s the glimmers of something else, the ability of that imperfection, that make you love an artist. 

Xenia: Yeah, absolutely. 

stefa: I feel like we both really have that desire in our practice to expand what performance looks like for us. Not only because we’re interested in it, and because there’s this kind of innate desire to do more. But also, I think, as a way to challenge what we’ve seen and been taught as artists who went through conservatory and who had to do things a certain way, to kind of convert or be seen. 

Xenia: We’re winding down with time, so I wanted to make sure that I got to hear about your world building on Born With An Extra Rib. I would love to hear about how you were thinking about the arc of the record. In one of your bios, you are described as “genderless and genreless” — I think the “genreless” is so present in particular in this work. There’s punk, there’s dance jams, there’s four-on-the-floor, there’s vocal exploration, there’s beautiful acoustic bass moments. I’m curious to know about that process for you.

stefa: With the film, we were thinking about the journey of what it was going to be. We start the film with “Sepalina,” from my first record, and it was kind of my first exploration into what my ancestral language was. So we wanted that to be the opening of the film and of the ritual, because even though it’s not on the record, we wanted my ancestors to be present in that moment, and we wanted to make sure that everyone had space for their ancestors. I think my desire to be genreless and genderless — it’s just about having faith that what you’re making will be understood and will be seen. And I feel like up until that point, I had been making music videos and really wanting to push myself to make something bigger, to make something longer, to make more of an experience for people. It was 2021, so it was very early in COVID, and we had this opportunity to not have an audience present. So that made me and my collaborators think, “OK, what can we really do in this space if there’s no audience? What are we able to share with them after of what happened, the document of that ritual?” That circumstance really shifted things. The fact that we were able to transform that experience into this like, “Oh, no, actually, we’re going to make this warehouse into a theater, and then we’re also going to make this warehouse theater into a film set, and then we’re also going to make it into a ritual space that’s supported spiritually. We’re calling in our ancestors, we have brujas, we have the altars so that people can take care of themselves. We are going to transform this space.” And that’s something that I’ve always adored about theater and performance: It’s about the intention. If you tell us we are traveling in a spaceship through time, that’s where we’re going to go. I want to believe. I want to be taken on this journey. Whether it’s fantasy or it’s a spiritual journey, I want to be there with you. 

So just to have the opportunity to create this document that was then going to be able to be shared — I wasn’t used to that. I was used to, “OK, you got one night at this venue and it’s one and done.” But to be able to create something that felt like it could be timeless in this way, that I could experience it as a different person in a few years, was just such a gift as an artist. And I was like, “Now’s the time to dream as big as possible.” And that’s what The Kitchen told me. The Kitchen was like, “Dream big. Come with your biggest ideas, and then we’ll scale down from there.” And actually, everything happened that I wanted, which was just so unheard of. And I’m so thankful to Lumi Tan, who curated me for artists-in-residence at The Kitchen, because she really made me see the possibility. And also to my co-director, Lilleth, who comes from theater and was seeing the expansion of possibility. I think that’s what this film was for me. Coming from theater and from these spaces where narrative and story is so important, [I was] really wanting to push against that, and not necessarily wanting to spoon feed my audience what everything means, but really just have fun and and explore different mediums and materials and vignettes. I’m speaking poetry and I’m doing monologues, and then I’m doing a Shakespeare monologue, and then I’m in a punk show. All of that being able to exist in this film was really an affirmation. You actually can do what you want to do. You can dream outside of the boxes that you’ve been given and create something that really heals.

Xenia: Mhm. And I feel like that spirit is very much present in the sound of this record. 

stefa: I feel like we’re similar in that way. I feel like we’re world builders, and it really comes down to the voice and sound being the catalyst and the holder of stories for us as artists. It’s wild how much trust will move you. Having trust in yourself, having trust in your vision, having trust in your voice — it’s wild where that will really take you.

Xenia: Oh, I’m trying to practice that. I just realized that I don’t trust. I don’t trust at all. [Laughs.] Mine is more blind locura — just like, I can’t do anything other than this thing. But I’m trying to learn to trust.

stefa: I mean, same. 100%. But it’s wild: even with those voices in our heads, we do so much.

Xenia: We’re still just doing it. 

stefa: It’s about quieting those voices down for sure. 

Xenia: Yeah. And being like, “Thank you, ma’am! “Thank you, sir!” I’m learning to listen and just accept them and say, “I hear you, I hear you.”

stefa: “We’ll circle back. Thank you for your concern.” [Laughs.] 

Xenia: It was so good to talk to you. Congratulations on the record. Everybody go listen. Go run it up. Add it to your playlist. 

(Photo Credit: left, Viento Izquierdo Ugaz; right, Michelle Arcila)