Exercises For Rebel Artists Performative Intervention: Open session of the Radical Performance Pedagogy Workshop

This project is a collaboration among members of La Pocha Nostra: Guillermo Gómez-Peña (USA/Mexico), Dani d’Emilia (Brazil/Italy) and Daniel Brittany Chávez (USA/Mexico), with Camila Bastos Bacellar (artist/activist with Teatro de Operações, Brazil), students from the MACBA Independent Studies Programme (PEI) and invited local artists.

Following a five-day performance workshop with students from the Independent Studies Programme (PEI), La Pocha Nostra invites them to participate in an open session: a ritual evening of live art and language revolving around the body as a site for creation, for constant reinvention, for memory, and for art/ivism.

La Pocha Nostra’s acclaimed international workshops are an ‘artistic and anthropological experiment in which selected artists from every imaginable artistic, ethnic, and subcultural background begin to negotiate common ground. Performance becomes the connective tissue and lingua franca for a temporary community of rebel artists.’ The ‘Pocha Method’ includes performative games and jam sessions, in an eclectic combination of exercises inspired by (and sampled from) multiple traditions including performance art, Fluxus, experimental theatre and dance, the Suzuki method and ritual shamanism.
As in many projects by La Pocha, audience members are invited to participate in this daring experiment. Spectators will be able to participate with their bodies, in dialogue with La Pocha members who will invite them to become part of the living images that embody ‘the dreams and nightmares of our time’. The audience thus actively helps to re-imagine a new iconography, interacting with the images put forth by the performers. The result is what La Pocha Nostra call ‘a wonderful and frenzied, but efficient form of radical democracy’. The revelation of the process and the in situ search for new images and formats becomes the actual project, which can be seen as a hybrid of a ‘living archive’ and the radical pedagogy of La Pocha Nostra: a performance within a jam session.