Enter the Intox Lounge…
Intox Lounge is a new performance lab coordinated by La Pocha Nostra and Artists’ Television Access. Bringing together artists and theorists from diverse communities in the Bay Area, Intox Lounge is our attempt to consolidate and develop an experimental arts culture in a post-9/11 San Francisco. This is the first salon open to the public. Open salons in this series will continue every other month. For more information, contact Gilbert Guerrero at gilbert@atasite.org.
The performances you’ll experience tonight are all works-in-progress: images from our performance sketchbook. Some will never be repeated again; others will transform into something else.
MUSIC
Guillermo Galindo
with live Tabla by Mansoor
SPOKEN WORD
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
PERFORMANCE INTERVENTIONS
Violeta Luna
Lisa Manter
Allison Wyper
Adrian Arias
Ginger Murray
Vidhu Singh
and Roxanne (aka Adam Palermo).
VIDEO INTERVENTIONS
Jen Cohen
Evans Hankey
James Hong & Yin-Ju Chen
Mike Missiaen
Kathleen Quillian
and Chickenfish, featuring Dr. Oliver, Tweektech, and DJ Darkat of Cat Five.
Co-produced by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gilbert Guerrero.
For more about La Pocha Nostra, go to http://www.pochanostra.com.
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).
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.
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.
