Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (review)

In 1993, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Nola Mariano founded La Pocha Nostra, a "trans-disciplinary arts organization" that aims to "provide a base for a loose network and forum of rebel artists from various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds" (www.pochanostra.com). Over the past two decades, La Pocha Nostra has gained an international reputation for its uncensored approach to politics, avant-garde aesthetics, radical images, and even more radical performances. Some of the group's most successful and influential contributions to performance art and studies, however, are its laboratories and workshops. La Pocha Nostra is as committed to pedagogy as it is to creation and presentation. Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy expands on these training workshops, offering students and teachers a manual from which to plan and implement their own series of exercises and laboratories based on La Pocha Nostra's methodology and overall structure. Throughout the book, Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes offer their extensive experience as performers and teachers, presenting those exercises that have been most useful to them: "Our eclectic methodology includes performance exercises, rituals, and games that have been borrowed, 'cut-and-pasted,' and excerpted from several disciplines and cultures. They range from experimental theater (Boal, Grotowski), dance, and contact improvisation to ritual performance, Shamanic practices, and everything in between" (8).

Gomez-Peña's brief introduction to the book provides not only a history of the group and its trajectory and goals, but also a look at how his own radical performance ideology was transformed by significant social and political events. This section is especially useful in allowing students and practitioners an opportunity to see what it means to create and embody an artistic ideology that is influenced by the geopolitical landscape of its times. Gomez-Peña reflects on everything from the "culture wars" to the Zapatista revolution, NAFTA, NEA, and 9/11. He sees performance as the vehicle through which to enact change and transform the individual caught within restrictive political ideology and conservatism. For him, La Pocha Nostra is one way of combatting hegemonic and oppressive forces: "We promoted artistic collaboration as a form of 'citizen-diplomacy' and began to look for strategies to develop temporary communities of like-minded rebels" (3). This book is a continuation of that project and goal.

Even more important to Gomez-Peña is the transformation of the traditional training space into something where politics and imagination merge into something new for teachers, students, and artists: "In my vision, the classroom/workshop would become a temporary space of utopian possibilities, highly politicized, antiauthoritarian, interdisciplinary, (preferably) multi-racial, poly-gendered and cross generational and ultimately safe for participants to really experiment" (ibid.). This emphasis—on exploring and imagining new possibilities and a desire to move into otherwise unimagined directions—is an essential component of La Pocha Nostra's exercises and workshops. Gomez-Peña continues: "With these elements, students and young artists could push the boundaries of their fields and identities, take necessary risks, and talk back. . . . If performance was to embody theory, these encounters would have to happen using the whole body in a conscious, politicized, and performative way" (ibid.). In this way, the training and rehearsal space—and this book—becomes a site for new ways of thinking about performance, politics, and the body. For Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes, radical pedagogy is enacted upon and through the bodies of workshop participants who share a willingness and need to cross social boundaries and traditional barriers.

One of the shorter though more interesting sections of the book is the "mini-pedagogical manifesto," which outlines the goals of a La Pocha Nostra workshop. It lists ten main objectives, one that is "to feed/stretch emerging artists and inquisitive students, helping them to sharpen and develop their performance and analytical skills in dialogue with like-minded cultural radicals" (10). It is followed by a series of notes to producers and workshop facilitators, as well as a...