Performance Art Can Be Dangerous

"Mapo Corpo." Beall Center for Art and Technology. UCI. 8/24/06.


I was definitly challenged by this piece, and I'm not sure what to say about it. It was a strong performance, interestingly organized. And Peña and his collaborators definitely had something to say. If the benchmarks for performance art include having something to say, communicating it effectively, and doing so in an attention-getting manner, then this work very much succeded. Its message is important and its mode is powerful.

This piece was part of the "TechnoSpheres: Contemporary Work in Art and Technology" conference at UCI. "Mapo Corpo" by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his La Pocha Nostra performance group with video remixing by Rene Garcia. The focal piece of the show, however, was Violeta Luna, who is a beautiful and powerful perfomer who did brave and frightening things with and to her body.

But that's where my qualms about this performance begin. Luna's powerful use of her body, especially in the first part of the piece, brought a true sense of danger to the piece; I was genuinely concerned that she was going to do something to hurt herself. Despite the strength and immediacy of Luna's performance, Guillermo Gómez-Peña is the artist who receives the major attention for the work. He talks, while Luna is silent (though part of that may have to do with the fact that Luna speaks Spanish rather than English). His name is the one people recognize. And because he basically delivers a speech through the second half of the performance, taking attention away from Luna's body while also giving the performance meaning and shaping viewer's ideas, providing a textural frame to view Luna's performance which may or may not represent that text, he becomes the most powerful aspect of the performance, even though it was her work that I found the most challenging and the most compelling.

The piece itself dealt with issues of the body (Luna's body), covered and uncovered, powerful, threatened and in pain, but most of all colonized. The text emphasized many of the same themes as much of Peña's work, including a political stance against war and colonization, professing resistance to hegemony through performance, and the awareness of the commonalities between all oppressed groups: non-white, immigrant, disabled, female, and queer among others. These are things that need to be said. They need to be said repeatedly. And Peña says them, for which I applaud him. But I wish Luna's work, and the video pieces mixed by Rene Garcia had more of a chance to speak for themselves. I worry that the force of Peña's performance of himself as performance artist overshadowed them. And to me, Luna's body, not Peña's text, were the most dangerous and different pieces of this performance.