The Benefit of Re-Viewing

Mapo Corpo. Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Pocha Nostra. Highways Performance Space. 9/15/06.

This piece was advertised as a Latino New Works Festival, which it honestly was not. It was two nights (Friday and Saturday) of a performance by Guillermo Gomez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra and one night of something else (Sunday). This is not what I think of when I think of a New Works Festival. But, that being said, I was really glad I got a second chance to see Mapo Corpo. You may or may not recall that I saw it in Irvine a while ago, but this was a much revised and expanded version of the same idea.

First of all, what was the first half of the piece in the last performance, with the beautiful and talented Violeta Luna dancing, became instead a pre-show performance in the Lobby/Gallery space. This was a wise decision in terms of changing the length and emphasis of the piece as a whole, but it was also a bit of a tragedy in that people (including myself) missed a great deal of Luna's captivating performance. It seemed like the mood of her performance changed significantly, too. This time she seemed more powerful, more violent but less of a victim, which I think is wonderful.

The other major change to the piece, however, was the addition of a second "diorama" to balance out Luna in the second half of the performance. With the edition of a young man's similarly inert body being ministered to and performed over, the piece had much more balance. It wasn't just Peña as a powerful voice drawing attention from the endurance of Luna as a metaphor for occupied territory. With the second performer, the piece felt much more equal, and much more visual attention was drawn away from Peña and focused on the other performers, encouraging the audience to actually move around in the space and change focus much more.

While there's still a lot of room for feminist critique of this piece (the woman was land and the man was an alter- um...), and Peña remains the only one who gets to speak, I found the gender politics less disturbing this time around, and the piece in general much more interesting, although I do wish I hadn't missed so much of Luna dancing.