Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Strange Democracy
- to This is a past program
He's one of the handful of great performance artists in America today. —Peter Sellars
His award-winning solos combine languages Spanish, English, Spanglish, Ingleñol, Nahuatl, wild theatrics and guerrilla satire to convey a new internationalism, a borderless ethos. —Jan Breslauer, L.A. Times
Gómez-Peña is magnificent, melodramatic, robustly hilarious and precisely, exquisitely witty...I emerge from his performances somewhat dazed... —Lucy Lippard
Gómez-Peña is a wizard of language. —The Chicago Tribune
In his new solo-performance, post-Mexican writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña deals with the end of the Bush era and articulates the formidable challenges facing Obama. He also denounces the anti-immigration hysteria and assaults the demonized construction of the US/Mexican border—a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities.
To this effect, the "border artist extraordinaire" uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and activist theory as subversive strategies. Shifting between languages, Gómez-Peña morphs into various performance personae and bombards audiences with his infamous, border savvy techno-ideology, ethno-poetics and radical aesthetics. In this journey to the geographical and psychological outposts of Chicanismo, Gómez-Peña also reflects on identity, race, sexuality, pop culture, politics and the impact of new technologies in the post-911 era.
Public programs are made possible by Hammer Members and the generosity of Bronya and Andrew Galef, Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, and an anonymous donor.
