La Pocha Remix: Psycho-Magic Actions For a World Gone Wrong
LA POCHA NOSTRA / (Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Violeta Luna & Erica Mott)
Performance
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)
