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An evening with Guillermo Gómez-Peña with cameos by Pocha Nostra members Saula Garcia Lopez and Balitronica
Combining spoken word poetry, activist theory, radical storytelling and language experimentation, Gómez-Peña offers critical and humorous commentary about the art world, academia, new technologies, the culture of war and violence in the US, organized crime in Mexico, gender and race politics, and the latest wave of complications surrounding gentrification in the “creative city”.
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La Pocha Nostra Performance Workshop
On Saturday May 4 and Sunday May 5, Guillermo, Saula and Balitronica will conduct a two-day cross-cultural/cross-disciplinary/cross-generational workshop for performance artists, actors, dancers and students from diverse ethnic communities, generations and artistic backgrounds.
Workshops will run from 4 PM to 10 PM on May 4 & 5 at THEMUSEUM, 10 King Street West, Kitchener, ON N2G 1A3.
Two-day registration fee is $150, $75 for students.
Click here for workshop information and registration form.
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Guillermo Gómez-Peña (US/Mexico) is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 11 books have contributed to the debates on cultural & gender diversity, border culture and US/Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at over nine hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU/MIT) and the Live Art Almanac (Live Art Development Agency-UK). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists in 2012 and received a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2013.
Gómez-Peña’s unique format reveals to an audience the process of creating, languaging and performing material and this process becomes the actual project. It is precisely in his new solo work where Gómez-Peña’s literature, theory, activism, pedagogy & live art come together in a wonderfully strange mix.
Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique solo style, “a combination of embodied poetry, performance activism and theatricalizations of postcolonial theory.” In his ten books, as in his live performances, digital art, videos and photo-performances, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what’s left for artists to do in a repressive global culture of censorship, paranoid nationalism and what he terms “the mainstream bizarre.” Gómez-Peña examines where this leaves the critical practice of artists who aim to make tactical, performative interventions into our notions of culture, race and sexuality. Most recently he has also been exploring the poetic and activist use of new technologies and social media.
For more information contact [email protected], (519) 744-5123.
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The Big Ideas in Art and Culture lecture series is a co-production of Musagetes and CAFKA.
The Musagetes Foundation is concerned with the role the arts can play in addressing the fault lines of modern society. Musagetes is a hub for activist interventions that advance the role of the arts in modern life. It operates mainly by convening – by creating living experiences, some small, some large, that bring people together to articulate social needs, generate ideas and spark action.
CAFKA initiates conversations around public space and the social and critical functions of art. CAFKA's programming seeks resonance and support in the community where issues of ecology, marginalized communities, cultural participation, technology and urban life overlap with the issues addressed by contemporary artists.
Photo: Piero Viti