Radically refashioning a host of reactionary fashions, La Pocha Nostra Live Art Laboratory puts all borders up for grabs. The international performance art troupe returns to San Francisco Sat/30 for the US premiere of La Pocha Nostra’s latest creation, Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat.
A performance project by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Erica Mott (with LPN associates Brittany Chavez, Rico Martin, Marcos Nájera, Esther Baker Tarpaga, and Allison Wyper), Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat asks the time-old question: What might you discover at the intersection of “an aging deviant shaman, a Neo-Aztec priest making romantic religious tableaux with a goat, a flamenco drag king, and an Oil Spill Madonna”?
Audience members are invited to help figure this one out, in corporeal dialogue with the performers, in what LPN calls a “wonderfully clumsy but efficient form of radical democratic practice.” The piece will also be an exactingly strange multidisciplinary exploration of the forms ideology and power take on and through the body. LPN’s exuberant Chicano cyborg/cyberpunk sensibilities brilliantly limn the boundary lines defining the (secretly amorphous) “truths” and “identities” of masscult’s virtual reality show — those hipster beards concealing the voracious colonial maw of capitalist society.
In related news: In coming back from Mexico City to home-base San Francisco, LPN’s artistic director — artist/intellectual and border-crosser extraordinaire, Gómez-Peña — returns too from the border town of illness, from whence he is steadily extricating himself and about which he has written powerfully and eloquently here.
Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat
Sat/30th, 8pm, $15-20
435 23rd St, SF
http://theperformanceartinstitute.org, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/350355