La Pocha Nostra - Performance Workshop
LA POCHA NOSTRA / (Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Violeta Luna & Erica Mott)
Workshop
Workshop by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Violeta Luna & Erica Mott
Since 1993, Gómez-Pena and members of the Pocha Nostra performance
troupe have conducted
cross-cultural/cross-disciplinary/cross-generational workshops involving
performance artists, actors, dancers and students from diverse ethnic
communities, generations and artistic backgrounds.
During the time of Workshop, two parallel processes take place: For 5–8
hours a day, Participants are exposed to La Pocha’s performance
methodology, an eclectic combination of exercises sampled from various
traditions (experimental theater and dance, Suzuki, ritual performance,
shamanism, etc.). Parallel to this hands-on process, the group
theoretically analyzes the creative process, the issues addressed by the
work, its aesthetic currency, cultural impact and political pertinence.
If conditions allow, at the end of the process there can be a public performance open to the local community.
The objectives of this educational project are:
• To feed / stretch emerging artists and inquisitive
students, helping them to sharpen and develop their performance and
analytical skills in dialogue with like-minded cultural radicals.
• To create temporary communities of rebel artists from
different disciplines, ages, ethnic backgrounds, gender persuasions, and
nationalities, in which difference and experimentation are not only
accepted but encouraged
• To develop new models for relationships between artists
and communities, mentor and apprentice, which are neither colonial nor
condescending.
• To find new modes of relating laterally to the ‘other' in
a less-mediated way, bypassing the myriad borders imposed by our
professional institutions, our religious and political beliefs, and
pop-cultural affiliations. To experience this, even if only for the
duration of the workshop, can have a profound impact in the
participant’s future practice.
• To discover new ways of relating to our own bodies. By
decolonizing and then re-politicizing our bodies, they can become sites
for activism and embodied theory; for memory and reinvention; for
pleasure and penance.
• To raise crucial questions: Why do we do what we do?
Which borders do we wish to cross and why? Which are the hardest borders
to cross both in the workshop and in our personal lives? How do we
define our multiple communities, and why do we belong to them? What is
the relationship between performance, activism, pedagogy and our
everyday lives? What about the relationship between the physical body
and the social body?
• To seek a new hybrid and interdisciplinary aesthetic,
reflective of the spirit and tribulations of our times, and of the
concerns of each participant.
• To empower participants as individuals to become civic-minded artists.
• To make performance art pertinent to a new generation of
potential activist-artists. They may eventually have to save us from the
very monsters and pitfalls that we, their arrogant forefathers, have
either created or allowed to happen.