La Pocha Nostra: Monstros en la Frontera
Research Workshop and Show


La Pocha Nostra’s "Monstros en la Frontera" is a live art performance / jam session at Club Palazzo in downtown Phoenix. The show will feature 3 core members of the Pocha troupe and Pocha associates including School of Film, Dance and Theatre professor Micha Espinosa and poet Logan Philips of Tucson, with technology envisioned by School of Arts, Media + Engineering professor Christian Ziegler. The show will examine the criminalization of the border identity, using voice as a site of identity
 
The work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra seeks to explore how social categories reinforce unequal social and political relationships by evoking the border as a physical, conceptual and spiritual terrain that must be challenged. Their work is famous for advocating "a borderless community of human kind,” and the troupe members are expert at helping others come to see a new future that is more diverse and ever-changing the world. "Monstros en la Frontera" will examine the criminalization of the border identity, using voice as a site of identity and investigating how its manipulation affects oppressed/marginalized speakers.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Through his performances and writing Gómez-Peña has contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented in more than 800 venues throughout the world. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, Gómez-Peña is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Nov. 14, 2015 - 7:30 p.m.
Club Palazzo, Downtown Phoenix
Cost: Free

This event was sponsored by: Performance in the Borderlands School of Art
Arts, Media and Engineering
ASU Art Museum
Film, Dance and Theatre
Herberger Institute
Transborder Studies