Eight bodies entwine in a tableau that’s a cross between postapocalyptic anime and a fetish fashion show. A man in white lace stockings, high-heeled vinyl boots, and shorts enhanced with a Dirk Diggler-size prosthesis displays a red legend scrawled on his bare chest: Who’s Your Daddy? His teeth clamped onto one end of an American flag, he’s engaged in a tug-of-war with a woman wearing a hijab and a flowing skirt, a rifle tucked into her sash. The director, a man with flowing salt-and-pepper locks, nods admiringly. “This looks like Hollywood gone wrong,” he says. “Or National Geographic.” Another woman dressed in a bright peasant skirt and wearing a headdress that could have belonged to an Aztec priestess aims a rifle at the “pregnant” belly of a woman in a muumuu and hair rollers.
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It’s Friday evening at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, and the eight performers–Columbia students from various disciplines–are slipping in and out of costumes and changing props and scenarios under the fevered guidance of Guillermo Gomez-Pena. A California-based writer and performance artist, and a 1991 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Gomez-Pena and his company, La Pocha Nostra, are in the middle of a two-week visit at Columbia. Readings and video presentations of his past work are part of the residency, but the centerpiece is this experimental performance workshop, called the Brown Sheep Project. Gomez-Pena and his colleagues Juan Ybarra and Michelle Ceballos have conducted the workshop–which is designed to explore sexuality, race, ethnicity, and power–at colleges and community centers nationwide, but this is the first time they’ve brought it to Chicago.
The three members of La Pocha Nostra, along with a videographer, roam around during the rehearsal, encouraging, prodding, and occasionally “freezing” the action so the videographer can capture a particularly provocative scenario. “Think of an advertisement,” says Ceballos to the group. “Now add racism as an element. Sexism.” A man fondles a woman’s breast. She looks at him in fright. “In an advertisement, you’d be happy about that,” says Ceballos. The woman’s expression changes to a stiff, wide-eyed smile.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Eric Fogleman.
