Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Balitronica Gómez

The Pandemia Chronicles: A performance & film screening

A brand new spoken-word monologue & “live-action juke-box” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Balitronica Gómez

La Pocha Nostra and the artists are thrilled to present excerpts from their most recent performance manuscripts and bank of ritual actions. Utilizing a casino roulette and traditional tarot deck, Balitronica utilizes various forms of oracular magic to select spoken word texts and props for Gómez-Peña live performance. The fate of the script, the performance and films screened are determined by methods of divination and chance. In this new project, the artists are unplugged, thinking out loud and articulating the challenges and possibilities of reinvention in the midst of multiple pandemics.

About La Pocha Nostra’s latest filmmaking process: Over the course of the pandemic, La Pocha Nostra got to work developing a collaborative filmmaking format, drawing directly from our own performance methodology and responding to the immediate artistic constraints posed by the multiple pandemias and prevailing culture of fear. The complete process of making the performance films is de-centered, experimental, and collaborative, defying traditional filmmaking practice. Moviemaking against all odds but by any means necessary. We are currently working on 6 films and this event will present several in process.

Artist Statement by Gómez-Peña:

“My new performance represents the fruit of my life’s work in all its iterations: live performance, lecturing, archiving, literary work, mentoring, community activism, all coming together to address the dangers of the times we live in with its disregard for human life and insidious undermining of democracy.

At this time in my life I am thinking as much about legacy as I am trying to continually produce socially conscious experimental artwork that is simultaneously plugged into the national debates. I have learned from decades of touring performance material to locations beyond the Border that a call to action - in the form of a work of art - has the power to elicit compassion and inculcate a desire for social justice.

For me performance art is a form of radical democracy and citizenship which depends on the presence of the audience/community to succeed. I view my approach to creating this hybrid piece as "performing the archives" for multiple contexts: The art world, academia, community and the media. I am particularly interested in connecting with a new generation of audience members who may not have been exposed to the history of my generation, performance art and the Chicano movement.”  - Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his two homes have been San Francisco and Mexico City. His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations.

His art work has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Performance Art Week Journal of the Venice Biennale, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. For Gómez-Peña’s archive of performance, visit guillermogomezpena.com.

Balitronica Gómez, Senior Core Member, Performance Artist, Poet, Radical Pedagogue, Ritualist, Hereditary Witch, Cabot Priestess. Balitronica is a cyborg-feminist poet, performance artist, radical pedagogue, ritualist, hereditary witch, and 2nd Degree Cabot Priestess. Born and raised on the border of San Diego/Tijuana by a family of magical practitioners, she has a background in Classical Theater and Victorian Literature and holds an MFA in Poetry & Writing from Mills College. Her performance work has been largely influenced by her time spent living in a 17th Century Catholic Convent in Paris with a Dominican Order of Nuns. Since joining La Pocha Nostra, she has made a full-time performance practice that explores the ideas of ritual psychomagic acts, occult methods of transcendence, and the human body as conduit.  She has been touring internationally with Gómez-Peña since 2013 and currently resides between San Francisco, Mexico City, and the San Diego/Tijuana Border.