Thursday, March 11, 2010
7:30 p.m.
McCullough Social Space

Strange Democracy: Guillermo Gómez-Peña

MacArthur Fellow, post-Mexican writer, and border artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and activist theory as subversive strategies. Described by renowned theatre director Peter Sellars as “one of the handful of great performance artists in America today,” Gómez-Peña creates spoken-word works that defy description. Critics have called it “Chicano cyber-punk performance,” “ethno-techno art,” and “magnificent, melodramatic, robustly hilarious, and precisely, exquisitely witty.” Sponsored by the Middlebury College Performing Arts Series, Dance Program, the Office of Institutional Planning and Diversity, the Center for Campus Activities and Leadership, and the Committee on the Arts.

Tickets: $24/18/6
http://go.middlebury.edu/tickets or 802-443-MIDD (6433).

Additional Residency Activities

Tuesday, March 2 
Screening: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Border Brujo (52 minutes, 1990)
7:00 P.M.
Ross Commons Seminar Room, B11

Sitting at an altar decorated with a kitsch collection of cultural fetish items, and wearing a border patrolman's jacket decorated with buttons, bananas, beads, and shells, Gómez-Peña delivers a sly and bitter indictment of U.S. colonial attitudes toward Mexican culture and history. Whirling through various Mexican American stereotypes, pulling on costumes as easily as accents, Gómez-Peña emphasizes the collision of Mexican and American cultures, their mixture and misunderstanding of each other, each appearing as a dream/nightmare reflection of the "Other." In turns powerful and playful, Border Brujo poignantly illustrates the double edge of forced cultural occupation. Directed by Isaac Artenstein.

Tuesday, March 9
Cafecito Hour: Excerpts and Discussion of Multiple Journeys: the life and work of Gómez-Peña
4:30 P.M. 
Mahaney Center for the Arts, Dance Theatre

Cafecito Hour is an informal series of presentations and discussions around special interest topics, drawing from our Middlebury community of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other special guests. The series provides an innovative and dynamic venue for individuals to present challenging topics that engage critical dialogue. Artist and activist Gómez-Peña presents excerpts from his latest work, Multiple Journeys, which chronicles his 30 years of performance art practice and exploration of border culture, immigration, intercultural issues, "extreme culture," and new technologies. Co-sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, the Office of the Dean of the College, and the Dance Program, among others. Free; RSVP to jherrera@middlebury.edu or (802) 443-5743

Artist Biography

GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA

Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978.  His pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A MacArthur fellow and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).

He has recently produced an artist-made DVD featuring performance and video art of his own work and the work of over 30 of his international collaborators. Designed for screenings, video installations, intelligent TV and as a pedagogic tool, DVD vol 1., "Ethno-Techno: Los Video Graffitis" is available through La Pocha.

Gómez-Peña's performance, installation and video work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, Russia, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Argentina (see below). Most recently, he has presented work at Tate Modern (London), the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), The Chopo Museum (Mexico City), the Encuentro Hemisférico (Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and NYC) and the Habana Bienale.

Among numerous fellowships and prizes, Gómez-Peña was a recipient of the Prix de la Parole at the 1989 International Theatre Festival of the Americas (Montreal), the 1989 New York Bessie Award, and the Los Angeles Music Center's 1993 Viva Los Artistas Award.  In 1991, Gómez-Peña became the first Chicano/Mexicano artist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.  In 1995, he was included in The UTNE Reader's "List of 100 Visionaries."  In 1997 he received the American Book Award for his book New World Border. In 2000, he received the Cineaste Lifetime Achievement award from the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival

Chronicles, essays and scripts of his large-scale projects can be found in his books:

Mexterminator (Editorial Oceano, 2002)

Dangerous Border Crossers (Routledge, 2000)

Codex Spangliensis (City Lights, 2000)

Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (PowerHouse, 1997)

The New World Border (City Lights, 1996)

Warrior for Gringostroika (Graywolf, 1994)

The film version of his solo performance Border Brujo (in collaboration with Isaac Artenstein), was awarded first prize in the 1991 National Latino Film and Video Festival and first prize in the category of "Performance Film" at Cine Festival (San Antonio 1991).  His videos, "El Naftazteca: Cyber Aztec TV for 2000 AD" and "Temple of Confessions" were awarded first prizes at Cine Festival in San Antonio, Texas in 1996 and 1998 respectively. In 2001, his film

"Borderstasis" was awarded the prize for "best performance video" from the Vancouver Video Poetry Festival. His work was recently featured in the HBO special "Americanos." His videos are distributed by Video Data Bank (Chicago).

For twenty years, Gómez-Peña has been exploring intercultural issues with the use of mixed genres and experimental languages. Continually developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances," and "ethno-techno art." In his work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members in the position of "foreigners" or "minorities."

He mixes English and Spanish, fact and fiction, social reality and pop culture, Chicano humor and activist politics to create a "total experience" for the viewer/reader/audience member. These strategies can be found in his live performance work, his radio chronicles, his award-winning video art pieces, and his books. Through his organization La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has focused very intensely in the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generation as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create "ephemeral communities" of rebel artists.

Gómez-Peña's experimental radio works have received the following honors: Border Notebooks won the Silver Award in Performance/Spoken Word Category from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1991. "We Don't Speak English Only, Vato" was awarded first prize by the National Association of Community Radios in 1993. "Menage-Trade" received the Golden Reel Award in 1995.  A collection of his audio work entitled "Borderless Radio" was released on compact disk by Toronto's Word of Mouth in 1995.

"Apocalypse Mañana," his latest audio CD was recently published by Calaca Press, and is available through La Pocha Nostra.