An Evening with Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Welcome to a very special evening with the internationally renowned author, educator, instructor and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña!
The show is performed in English.
Performance art as citizenship: A brand new spoken-word monologue by «El Mad Mex»: Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
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 generalized violence in the US, organized crime in Mexico, gender and race politics, and the latest wave of “complications” surrounding ultranationalist violence against Latinos and the gentrification (evictions and deportations) of the “creative city”.
«Gomez-Peña’s work is among the most powerful examples of intercultural performance.»
– Richard Schechner, American Theatre Magazine
Imaginary activism
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 12 books have contributed to the debates on cultural & gender diversity, border culture, and US/Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at over a thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia.
Meet him in this brand new performance at House of Foundation in Moss, Saturday November 16th!
>> Tickets here
In this solo work, Gómez-Peña draws from his 35 year old “ living archive” and combines new and classic performance material to present a unique perspective on the scary immediate future of the Americas. His self-styled “imaginary activism” invokes performance art as a form of radical democracy and citizenship.
A wonderfully strange mix
Besides his international work with the legendary troupe La Pocha Nostra, he has presented his solo work at museums, festivals, universities, galleries and theatres throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Australia, Russia, and Africa.
Gómez-Peña’s unique presentational format reveals to an audience the process of creating, languaging and performing material and this process becomes the actual project. In his new solo work Gómez-Peña’s literature, theory, activism, pedagogy & live art come together in a wonderfully strange mix.
“Gómez-Peña is magnificent, melodramatic, robustly hilarious and precisely, exquisitely witty… I emerge from his performances somewhat dazed.”
– Lucy Lippard
Pushing the cultural boundaries
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 14 books (2 in the works) as in his live performances, digital art, videos and photo-performances, he pushes the cultural boundaries of America 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.
“Gómez-Peña is a linguist…As he shifts from one character, one accent, one language to another, I re-experience the vertigo of the border.”
– Cindi Carr, The Village Voice
A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie, and American Book Award winner, Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe, a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU/MIT) and the Live Art Almanac (Live Art Development Agency-UK). He is also a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, He was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists in 2012 and received a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2013. He is currently preparing two new books for Routledge (2019) and a documentary portrait of his beloved troupe.