2010 Theatre Studies Summer Institute: La Pocha Nostra

For ten days in June 2010, York University students had the privilege to work with renowned performance artists Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes of La Pocha Nostra in an intensive workshop as part of the Department of Theatre’s Summer Institute course. A graduate level course available to students in the Faculty of Fine Arts, this workshop gave insight into the intensive body and image based work that forms the core of La Pocha Nostra’s performance practice. For many, this course was their first foray into performance art. Coming from backgrounds in dance, clowning, realist theatre, and many other technical and practical techniques in performance, the students’ experiences and expectations collided with the Real-ness of La Pocha’s practice in beautiful and productive ways during those ten revelatory days in the studio.

Students involved in the workshop participated in “exercises borrowed from multiple traditions including performance art, experimental theater and dance, the Suzuki method, ritual shamanism, performance games and live jam sessions” (La Pocha Nostra). Each day the students explored La Pocha’s performance pedagogy in practice, learning and deepening our understanding of not only how La Pocha creates their renowned performance pieces, but also how we as physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual individuals connect with our bodies, our impulses, and each other to create performance art that is deeply personal and socially interrogative.

 

Throughout the workshop each of us drew from our own experiences - not only as performers and academics but also as individuals with multiple and diverse subject positionings - in the development of performance personae. Personal “artifacts,” objects of the mundane and spectacular that accompany and accentuate who we are as people be they newspapers we read, a dress we once wore, a belt bought far away, or any and all other items that connect to us as individuals, became the mode and means through which each personae came to life and interacted with the life of the performance and those observing it. The personae created functioned as aesthetic creations and social interrogations because they fragmented the corporeal body by destabilizing culturally cohesive sign systems. Indeed, this is the very crux of La Pocha’s work; to deconstruct social norms and discourses that affix bodies to an image or idea(l) of an identity as a means to interrogate where and how one might go about to create spaces that promote discursive interaction with the subject rather than the imagery and symbolism of subjectivities.

How these personae functioned, and what they articulated, then, was that corporeality does not equal identity. Corporeality and reality are not equal. (Corpo)reality is not reality. Our bodies are a simulacrum. A simulacrum perpetuated by capitalist socio-economic structures as a system of governmentality in order to regulate individual subjectivity. We are part of society and discourse only so far as we consume, propagate, and perpetuate the current socio-economic norm. Everywhere there are reflections of our selves in and in the act of consuming (culture). Mirrors and glass reflecting our bodies reinforce the idea that the body is the central focus of culture, of discourse, and of identity (Jameson qtd. in Fraser and Greco 27). We see ourselves. We see ourselves participating in normative discourses. What we don't see is that normative discourses, especially when concerned with the body, are not participatory: they are illusory. In the reflection we only see external physical structures. That, however, is not where identity lies. That is the lie of western social structures. The simulacrum of the body. The body is, in truth, without substance. Substance comes from the virtual body, that body that exists beyond the flesh. The body that is the social body. The body politic. The body without organs; that is where identity is imaged and performed (Deleuze and Guattari). The problem though, is that the body that is created through social discourse has nothing to do with the self. Nothing to do with the corporal body of the individual. It has everything to do with social governmentality.

The body is a simulacrum and this simulacrum positions the body as a cohesive, contained, and unified body and body of images. By framing the body as a composite structure, a formation of a multitude of images, some iconic, some abstract, the Pocha Nostra Performance Salon that took place on 26 June 2010 at York University as the culmination of the work undertaken throughout the workshop revealed the fallacy of the body as a unified individual(ized) (id)entity. Breaking the body (of images) that constitute the signs and symbols of individual subjectivity apart and reorganizing them to operate as a bricolage overlay on the body, the images created in the Performance Salon privileged the image of the body as the site of individual subjectivity (both creation and reception of) rather than the body itself. Here the body becomes a skeletal structure that operates as a site of exchange but not the mode of exchange or the means of discursive (inter)activity; rather, it is the image of the performing body, or the body performing a subjectivity where the (exchange) value of the individual resides.

If we are to consider the body not as the matrix that forms individual subjectivity but as the medium in/through which individual subjectivity is ascribed as a result of its imagistic relationality with broader social discourses and repertoires, than the Real(ity) of the body is not contained in its corporeal form but in its cognitive, affective, and psychic form. Additionally, what I also discovered during the course of the workshop was that by articulating how individual subjectivity is located in the image of the body we can also begin to see the extent to which the regulation of images regulates performances of subjectivities. Turning the body into a simulacrum (of subjectivity) is an effective  strategy in the governmentalization of a population. It is through this simulacrum, and these images as a manifestation and tool of the simulacrum, that borders are established and maintained for populations in terms of how, when, where, and what one performs (as) “their” subjectivity. –

Bradley High