LA POCHA NOSTRA / (Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Violeta Luna & Erica Mott)
La Pocha Nostra is an interdisciplinary arts organization based in San Francisco with branches in Central and South America, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. La Pocha Nostra was founded in 1993 by Guillermo-Gomez-Pena, Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Mariano in Los Angeles. The goal was to formalize conceptually Gomez-Pena’s collaborations with other performance artists. Core members of La Pocha include Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Roberto Sifuentes, Violeta Luna, Michelle Ceballos, Dani d’Emilia, Erica Mott and over 30 associates worldwide. Our projects range from performance solos and duets to large scale multi-sensory performance installations involving photo, video, sound and projection. If there is a common denominator, it is our desire to cross and erase dangerous borders including those between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator – ultimately to dissolve borders and myths of purity whether they be specific to culture, ethnicity, gender or language.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist and radical pedagogue and the director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. He was born in Mexico City and came to the US in 1978. His performance work and 8 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, south Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).
Violeta Luna obtained her graduate degree in Acting from the Centro Universitario de Teatro in Mexico City. She has performed under the direction of relevant Mexican artists. In 1995, she founded Grande y Pequeño (“Big and Small”) an all-women theater company that focuses on developing original works and experimental stagings of classical theater. Violeta has toured her work extensively throughout Mexico, as well as the rest of Latin America, USA and Europe. She works in community-centered projects in Mexico, and with incarcerated and recently arrived immigrant women in San Francisco. Since 1998, she has been an associate artist of La Pocha Nostra, a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary collective under the direction of Guillermo Gomez Peña. In San Francisco, she is also the associate director of El Teatro Jornalero!, a theater company that brings the voice of Latin American immigrant workers to the stage, and member of the collectives La Pocha Nostra and Secos & Mojados. Her current work explores the relationship between theater, performance and community engagement.