As part of the 2022 Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Class of 1956 Distinguished Speaker Series, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and members from La Pocha Nostra Ensemble will visit Wellesley to host a performance and workshop. These events are open to Wellesley students, faculty, and staff.

Performance of “The Pandemia Chronicles”

Wednesday, November 16, 5:30-7 pm
Tishman Commons

A brand new spoken-word monologue and “live-action juke-box” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez.

La Pocha Nostra and the artists are thrilled to present excerpts from their most recent performance manuscripts and bank of ritual actions. Utilizing a casino roulette and traditional tarot deck, Balitronica utilizes various forms of oracular magic to select spoken word texts and props for Gómez-Peña’s live performance. The fate of the script and the performance are determined by methods of divination and chance. 

Friday, November 18, 12-4pm
Jewett Auditorium

These events are co-sponsored by: the Davis Museum, Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Committee on Lectures and Cultural Events, the departments of Women’s and Gender Studies, Art, Theatre, English, and American Studies, and the North American West Faculty Group.
 

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the U.S. in 1978, and since 1995, his two homes have been San Francisco and Mexico City. His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations.

His artwork has been presented at more than 1,000 venues across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Performance Art Week Journal of the Venice Biennale, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Balitronica Gómez is a senior core member of La Pocha Nostra, a cyborg-feminist poet, performance artist, radical pedagogue, ritualist, hereditary witch, and 2nd Degree Cabot Priestess. Born and raised on the border of San Diego/Tijuana by a family of magical practitioners, she has a background in Classical Theater and Victorian Literature and holds an MFA in Poetry & Writing from Mills College. Her performance work has been largely influenced by her time spent living in a 17th Century Catholic Convent in Paris with a Dominican Order of Nuns. Since joining La Pocha Nostra, she has made a full-time performance practice that explores the ideas of ritual psychomagic acts, occult methods of transcendence, and the human body as conduit. She has been touring internationally with Gómez-Peña since 2013 and currently resides between San Francisco, Mexico City, and the San Diego/Tijuana Border.