Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Photo by Piero Viti.
Performance artist, writer and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña will present a spoken word monologue, “Imaginary Activism: The Role of the Artist Beyond the Art World,” at California State University, Northridge on Wednesday, April 6.
Gómez-Peña’s performance at 12:30 p.m. in the Little Theatre in Nordhoff Hall will combine embodied poetry, activism and theatricalizations of post-colonial theory. The piece proposes a critical reflection on radical citizenship and performance as a unique form of art.
“Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work is transformative and enables us to think through our relationships to globalization and to one another,” said Suzanne Scheld, professor in the Department of Anthropology and coordinator of the Global Studies GE path. “This year, faculty are seeking to unify the Global Studies path in the GE Paths program by collectively amplifying the concept of performance in their courses. Global Studies faculty in theatre recommended Gómez-Peña as a performer who could tie the year together, and collaborated extensively to bring such a special performance to our campus.”
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 United States in 1978. His performance work and 11 books have contributed to the debates on cultural and gender diversity, border culture and U.S.-Mexico relations.
His artwork has been presented at hundreds of venues across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow and Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the U.S., 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, as well as a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency. In 2012, USA Artists named him a Samuel Hoi Fellow.
The event is presented by the Global Studies path of the General Education (GE) Paths program, Undergraduate Studies, the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication and the Department of Theatre with additional support from the Departments of Chicana/o Studies, Central American Studies, Anthropology and Geography.
For more information contact either professor Hillary Miller at hillary.miller@csun.edu or Suzanne Scheld at suzanne.scheld@csun.edu.