Guillermo Gomez-Pena Michele Ceballos-Michot to Give Special Lecture/Performance, 4/11-12

Cornish College of the Arts and the Neddy at Cornish are is pleased to present a lecture/performance and a workshop by La Pocha Nostra artist-activists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Michele Ceballos-Michot.

The Robert E. "Ned" Behnke Annual Lecture, Imaginary Activism: The Role of the Artist Beyond the Art World, will take place Friday, April 11, 2014 at 7 PM at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Tickets are free, but reservations are required. For tickets, visit http://www.cornish.edu/events.

Experience the work of performance artist, intellectual DJ, reverse anthropologist, radical pedagogue, deviant shaman, post-Mexican Guillermo Gómez-Peña who, for 30 years, has explored border culture, immigration, intercultural issues, extreme culture and new technologies through multiple genres. Gómez-Peña helps create transnational communities of rebel artists, erase the borders between North and South, and between the art world and the real world. His cultural icons are César Chávez, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, Kathy Acker, Marc Bolan and Tin Tan.

In the past years, Gómez-Peña has explored in his solo work two distinct territories: 1) The ongoing rewriting and reenactment of some of his classic performances, and 2) Writing and testing brand new material dealing with radical citizenship and what he terms "imaginary activism." In both cases, revealing to the audience the process of creating, language-ing and performing the material becomes the actual project. It is precisely in his new solo work where his literature, theory, pedagogy and live art come together in a very strange mix. Half of the material is scripted and the other half is ad lib; no solo performance is ever the same.

The La Pocha Nostra Workshop, Exercises for Rebel Artists, will take place Saturday April 12, 2014 at 1 PM at the Beebe Building in Seattle. The workshop is free, but participation is by application only. To apply, visit http://www.cornish.edu/events.

This one-day intensive workshop on performance art focuses on the human body as a site for creation, reinvention, memory and activism. The workshop is free for participants but an application is required to take part.

This intensive workshop led by Pocha Nostra members Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Michele Ceballos-Michot is an amazing artistic and anthropological experiment in which selected artists from every imaginable artistic, ethnic and sub-cultural background begin to negotiate common ground. Performance becomes the connective tissue and lingua franca for our temporary community of rebel artists. In this cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary and cross-generational intensive, participants are exposed to the "Pocha Method," an eclectic combination of exercises borrowed from multiple traditions including performance art, experimental theater and dance, the Suzuki method, ritual shamanism, performance games, and live jam sessions. Parallel to this hands-on process, the group will analyze the creative process, the issues addressed by the work, its aesthetic currency, cultural impact and political pertinence.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the U.S. in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to debates on cultural diversity, border culture, and U.S. / Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at more than 800 venues across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the Bessie and American Book Award, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYUMIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and in 2012 was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists.

A pioneer in arts education, Cornish College of the Arts sprang from the remarkable vision of Nellie Cornish, a woman determined to cultivate the arts in Seattle when it was scarcely more than a frontier town. Her philosophy of educating the artist through exposure to all the arts was progressive in 1914, and continues to be innovative today. The College offers Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Art, Dance, Design, Performance Production and Theater, a Bachelor of Music degree and an Artist Diploma in Early Music. The College is accredited by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges, and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.

Photo Credit: Cornish College of the Arts

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