ABSTRACT

In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’.

Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.

The book features:

  • Detailed exercises for using Pocha Nostra methods in workshops
  • Inspirational approaches for anyone creating, producing or teaching radical performance
  • A step-by-step guide for large-scale group performance
  • New, unpublished photos of the Pocha Nostra method in practice

Exercises for Rebel Artists advocates teaching as an important form of activism and as an extension of the performance aesthetic. It is an essential text for anyone who wants to learn how use performance to both challenge and change.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

Performance as radical pedagogy – a brief history of the “Pocha method”

chapter |4 pages

Notes to producers and workshop facilitators

Useful suggestions for preparing a performance workshop inspired by La Pocha Nostra

part |36 pages

“Hands-on” physical and perceptual exercises

chapter |2 pages

The monkey-breathing dance

Integrating breathing and movement

chapter |2 pages

Attraction/repulsion

Exploring border polarities

chapter |4 pages

The gaze

Discovering the other “others”

chapter |5 pages

Poetic ethnography

Multi-sensorial exploration and careful manipulation of the human body

chapter |3 pages

“The Aikido/chess game”

Performative dialogues

part |24 pages

Conceptual and poetic exercises

chapter |3 pages

Poetic exquisite corpse

Mapping new territories of inquiry

chapter |4 pages

The spectrum

Multiple communities and fluid identities

chapter |3 pages

“Pulling performances out of a hat”

A tribute to classic performance art

part |34 pages

Exercises to generate performance material and living images

chapter |4 pages

Human altars

Living and dying dioramas

chapter |4 pages

Compositional triptychs

Dealing with movement, location, and composition in performance

chapter |4 pages

Bonus

“Quick and dirty” exercises to spice up the methodology during longer workshops

part |19 pages

The infamous pocha “jam sessions”

chapter |5 pages

“Basic” jam session

Beginning to let go of the methodology

chapter |5 pages

“Stop-and-go” jam session

Creating/deconstructing a “living mural”

chapter |3 pages

Advanced jam session

Creating collective dreams and/or nightmares

chapter |2 pages

The ultimate jam session

“Acting out” in multiple zones

part |78 pages

Preparing for a public performance

chapter |5 pages

Letter from Oaxaca

Performing in the flames

chapter |10 pages

Mapping territories of inquiry

Poetic/performance texts generated by workshop participants