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Mexotica. By Elaine Peña The Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois. 1 December 00.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performances are noted for their engagement with issues of race, culture, and nation by visually re-creating shared notions of the popular and the familiar. Similarly, his collaborative performances create spaces of interrogation filled with icons, stereotypes, our familiars, and he makes them strange. The living and the dead--the performers, the spectators, and statues capable of evoking historias that books and memories have forgotten--are all employed to question our collective and personal politics, spirituality and desire. Mexotica, a “living museum” exhibit continued this level of engagement. Gómez-Peña and his colleagues Juan Ybarra and Michelle Ceballos from the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra as well as selected Columbia College students collaborated for two weeks to create this eagerly anticipated performance installation coined The Brown Sheep Project. Mexotica not only raises the intellectual and emotional stakes surrounding issues of race, gender and sexuality but also explicitly and implicitly deploys a scathing critique of the United States’ current political landscape.
Pre-performance, the lobby was filled with eager voices and nervous energy as the audience leafed through multiple programs. One pamphlet contained greetings, explanations and instructions for the visitors “Welcome to Mexotica, a new concept of presenting live art created by a consortium of global corporations catering to your innermost cultural fears, sexual desires and revolutionary aspirations.” The other pamphlet, a “User-Friendly Guide to US Latinos,” offered the visitor a timeline from 181 when “Mexico wins its independence from Spain…kind of” to 00 when the “Latino population of the US reaches 10 million, o sea ¼ of the US and 1/5 of Latin America. Anglos become nomadic minorities and are to learn Spanish to obtain menial jobs in the food, construction and porn industries.” Certainly, the handcrafted timeline, rhetoric and images on these programs produced the initial stage for Gómez-Peña and company to continue his provocative if not tumultuous history in Chicago, (think the 1 Gómez-Peña/Fusco “Two Amerindians in a Cage” visit to the Field Museum). This pre-show tease, these whispering allusions to sex, race, immigration and subjugated history, set the stage for self-reflection around these issues but more importantly prepped the audience for possible psychical and physical interaction with their cultural fears and desires.
As the audience filed in to the performance space, a tart green light, the heavy smell of burnt copal, an erotic beat-heavy soundtrack, multiple projection screens and a plethora of comodified images gone wrong assaulted their senses. The projection screens were effective because they framed the performance in multiple ways. The transformed gallery space housed five staged dioramas occupied by characters such as “El Mad Mex,” “Robo-xolotl,” “Femma Latina Extrema,” and periphery characters with cryptic personas such as “Neo-Karmic Nirvana for Untouchable Exultation.” At first glance, these performers were knowable. We knew them because the media, the history books, globalization, our knowledge in the “first world” has given us access to these representations. Walking into the space was like global window-shopping pictures of veiled women from those countries, Native Americans in full headdress, a meditative East Indian woman, even the corporate businessman. The initial encounter provided the spectator with the dominant cultural images that pervade racial and national discourses but as the performance unfolded, these representations were corrupted, proclaimed bankrupt by Gómez-Peña, his colleagues and the volatile interactive performance space.
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Gómez-Peña’s “El Mad Mex” was one of the first images to come into focus beyond the familiar. He sat on a beauty parlor seat, clad in a bright pink tulle skirt, red heals and robotic protective headgear. The ringmaster greeted the audience with pointed gazes musically timed to methodically survey the flood of spectators. Another diorama at the far end of the gallery space soon came into focus where Ceballos’, “La Femma Extrema,” stood gas masked, heeled, topless and cocked, her gaze also interrogating the scene. This point in the space, anchored aesthetically by a tall wooden cross, would later become the focal point for the spectator/performer’s attention. Offstage, periphery performers roamed freely among the audience. A “Cyber Shaman,” in full Native American headdress, played by Columbia college student Likalee Tamay, whispered into the ear of a cigar shop Indian statue. This bizarre image evoked thoughts of the supernatural, a world dismissed and forgotten by industrial logic and served as a reminder that we are constantly surrounded by what has come before us. At one point this character took a spectator’s head into her hands, whispered and pressed her forehead against theirs creating multiple images, a story with a beginning, middle and an end. This type of interaction methodically dissolved the proximity between the performers and the audience.
As the three-hour performance unfolded, the clockwork transition by the performers from stage to stage was productively disrupted by audience participation. Gómez-Peña instigated this call to action with a megaphone and sweet words. He would approach an audience member and ask can you help me with this image? He would then equip the participants with fake rifles, gas masks, turbans, charro hats and direct them into compromising positions. He would ask some participants to put the rifle in his mouth. One man trembled as he obeyed; one woman tossed her head back in glee and said “pow, pow.” Sometimes these compromises engaged race and sexuality, or religion and war and sometimes all of the above. This collaborative effort between performers and spectators fulfilled “revolutionary aspirations,” and simultaneously challenged prescribed notions of power and domination by working through racial, cultural and gender differences. This interaction between spectator and performer became the heart of the performance, overtook it and elevated this display of fetishized cultural and comodified images to another realm of interrogation. One of the most poignant moments of the night came when Gómez-Peña directed a photo opportunity for President Bush with a combination of about twenty performers and spectators. He roused these spectator/performers by spouting some of the injustices produced by the Bush administration’s negligent and irrational rhetoric surrounding issues such as war, terrorism and immigration. He managed to get these bodies on stage to pull down their pants for the president and salute him with their best assets.
By the end of the performance, many spectators had joined the ranks while others strategically avoided the limelight. The final images of the show were truly a collaborative effort. The extent of this participation varied from fully clothed participation to fully nude participation. Performers, spectators, spectators turned performers shifted their focus towards the towering wooden cross where the final crucifixion of the immigrant “other” closed the show. Juan Ybarra’s character “Robo-xolotl,” adorned with only a bright green extra-terrestrial mask and a twisted cock piece knelt with his back to the cross, destroyed a symbolic loaf of bread and irreverently threw the pieces over his shoulders towards the cross. He then proceeded to crucify himself, blood running down his chest as we projected our questions and our uncomfortable gazes unto this final image. This final image explicitly critiqued the insidious nature of immigration policy and questioned who or what is sacrificed in the name of God, in the name of the nation. This moment was simultaneously epiphanous and deeply disturbing as it silently moved this interrogative space outside of the performance and into our collective memory.
Gómez-Peña’s collaboration has once again tickled and jabbed the skin between spectator and performer. The spectator’s role became an essential component of the conceptual mission of this performance piece. Amidst our precarious international relations, this performance functioned as a call to action join the discussion, partake in dangerous questioning, and challenge the familiar. As we look towards the horizon we can see war and the injustices, poverty and terror that inevitably follow. In our discontent, we wonder about performance and it’s function within dominant discourses. Gómez-Peña and his colleagues are productively thinking through and around these discourses by engaging theory through practice. By creating startling images and pressing a call to action this collaboration has created multiple discourses that have undoubtedly traveled from the collective imagination of the performance space to a wider audience.
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