La Pocha Remix: Psycho-Magic Actions For a World Gone Wrong

Employing La Pocha Nostra’s trademark “robo-baroque’ aesthetic, cyborg-kitsch and acid humor, Psycho-Magic Actions for A World Gone Wrong is LPN’s newest adventure into ritual presentation of live art and live language. Through a series of ‘corporeal transformations’ including the sampling of performance classics and new work, LPN addresses and tries to make sense of the current culture of far right isolationism, xenophobia, and the violence of organized crime. 
Within the devising process of Psycho-Magic Actions, LPN will excavate and examine the following questions:
1. What are new performance strategies to express our process of reinvention in front of an audience? Careful consideration will be given to questions such as:
●       What is X-treme when everything is extreme?
●       What is meaningful interactivity when everything is interactive?
●       Is audience participation relevant when pop culture is constantly asking us to participate in meaningless consumerism, and every new technological gadget is asking us to “talk back”? And whom do we talk back to?

2. How do we critically navigate the institutionalization of performance art as a form through our unique aesthetic lens?
3. How can we remain open, original, porous, funny, critical, without falling to post-ironic jadedness or becoming one more “packaged product” for international festivals?
Through this investigation, we will cultivate a new format that incorporates simultaneous dialogue between live art actions and images, poetic interventions, and de-constructive commentary. The piece can be viewed as a hybrid between a ‘living archive’ and our radical pedagogy: a performance within a high-energy jam session and weird reality show ritual format.

As always, audience members are invited to participate in this bizarre experiment. They will be invited to collaborate as we incarnate “the dreams and nightmares of our current times,” and to help the performers re-imagine new iconography whether by intervening the performance with their own bodies, or with verbal provocations. Through this, LPN will invoke a “clumsy but radical democratic practice.” The revelation of the process as well as the search to discover new images in situ and a new form to contain them becomes the actual project.

Authors: La Pocha Nostra (Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Violeta Luna & Erica Mott)

Production and Organisation: City of Women, La Pocha Nostra; In collaboration: Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana.