ABSTRACT
Narrating his experiences of being the “other” within the neoliberal landscape of migration politics, the performing artist Gómez-Peña disrupts the hegemonic narrative of globalization by foregrounding the everyday experience of living in fear. Performance for social change embodies the politics of representing issues of social injustice, oppression, power, control, and resistance in public spaces through the use of aesthetic forms of representations. In discussing the performance of social change, this chapter draws our attention to the gamut of micro and macro practices of communication that disrupt the status quo through their embodiment of alternatives to dominant configurations. These alternatives open up new possibilities for imagining states of being, feeling, and living, and thus bring about shifts in consciousness in how social realities are approached, lived in, reaffirmed, and challenged. It is through these shifts that possibilities are opened up for material transformations.
