Imaginary Activism: the role of the artist beyond the art world
a performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Thursday, March 13, 2014, 8pm
Chan Centre, Telus Studio Theatre
Performance artist, writer, and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña performs a solo work where literature, theory, pedagogy and live art come together in a thought-provoking mix that is half scripted and half ad-lib. In the past years, Guillermo Gómez-Peña has explored two distinct territories in his solo work: 1) The ongoing rewriting and re-enactment of some of his classic performances. He calls this project his “living archive”, and 2) Writing and testing brand new material dealing with radical citizenship and what he terms “imaginary activism.” In both cases, revealing to the audience the process of creating, languaging and performing the material becomes the actual project. No two performances are ever the same.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña 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 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight 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). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London- based Live Art Development Agency. In 2012 he was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists and this year received the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship.