Thoughts by Gómez-Peña on Corpo/Ilicito

Corpo/Ilicito premieres Sept 11th and 12th, 8:00 pm @ CounterPULSE
1310 Mission St @ 9th, San Francisco
Tickets: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/73700

Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Violeta Luna’s latest duet Corpo/Ilicito premieres in San Francisco next weekend and we wanted to share with you some thoughts behind the project — as articulated by Guillermo himself:

“We are now facing serious challenges as artists: The performance work we have created in the past 8 years — which has been mostly in opposition to the Bush administration and its international policies — may no longer be pertinent in the new era. The question we are asking is: As artists, what will be our new voice and role in the post-Bush era? We all have been left standing atop a political, economic, cultural and spiritual disaster site. This tragic inheritance requires the immediate intervention of artists and intellectuals. Not only should we articulate and chronicle the change, but we also can partake in the healing process and that includes a certain element of reflection, and a vast amount of imagination.

As live artists, our task is to create living metaphors that articulate a new aesthetic, culture, spirituality and a sexuality that emerge out of the ruins of our Western civilization. This need maybe clear to us, but will the new political class acknowledge the importance of art in the reconstruction process?

As performance artists, can we contribute with our practice to the creation of a sanctuary in which both artists and audiences can engage in critical thinking and meaningful interactivity? We can ask the tough questions and render the beauty, but will the audience be willing to participate in the fate of the performance? As artists we can provide the support necessary to sit with discomfort. Corpo/Ilicito is our response to this period of global change, uncertainty and strange hope.”

The following offers a brief history of the series:
For the past years, as part of our ongoing Mapa/Corpo series, we have examined the human body as a site for radical spirituality, memory, penance, activism, stylized anger and corporeal reinvention.

The first in the series was Mapa-Corpo—a performance/installation that toured internationally from 2004 to 2007 offering a poetic, interactive ritual that explored neo-colonization/de-colonization through political acupuncture and the reenactment of the post-9/11 “body politic.”

The second part of the series was Divino Corpo—a performative temple where the sacred and the profane intertwined with racy contemporary issues. In this project we posed as living saints and Madonnas of unpopular causes (border crossers, undocumented migrants, prisoners, the infirmed and displaced invisible others) in an attempt to articulate a radical spirituality located in the body that emerged out of the debris of war. Corpo-Ilicito is the last in this series.

PHOTO: Performance artists Violeta Luna and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Photographed by Zach Gross, 2007.