City Lights in conjunction with Pocha Nostra present

Guillermo Gómez­-Peña

delivering a special solo performance:

Imaginary Activism: The role of the artist beyond the art world

In the past years, Gómez-Peña has explored in his solo work two distinct territories: 1) The ongoing rewriting and re-enactment of some of his classic performances (he calls this project, his "living archive"), 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, languaging and performing the material becomes the actual project. It is precisely in his new solo work where his literature, theory, pedagogy & live art come together in a very strange mix. Not one solo performance is ever the same. Half of the material is scripted & the other half is ad lib. Let's see what happens tonight.

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 US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US­Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU­MIT). Gómez­Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute Institute of performance and Politics, a Patron for the London­based Live Art Development Agency and in 2012 he was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists.

for more info on Pocha Nostra and Guillermo Gómez­-Peña visit: http://www.pochanostra.com/