La Pocha Nostra, featuring Roberto Sifuentes and Erica Mott

Image courtesy of Roberto Sifuentes

La Pocha Nostra is a trans-disciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists. Every year, La Pocha conducts a summer and a winter performance art school in which Pocha’s radical pedagogy (a performance ‘methodology that has been developed during the last 10 years) is shared with a group of radical artists. The site for this pedagogical adventures changes every year. La Pocha Nostra was founded in 1993 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Mariano. Current core members include Gómez-Peña, Sifuentes, Erica Mott, Michele Ceballos Michot, Saul Garcia Lopez, Dani d’Emilia, and Brittany Chavez.

Image courtesy of Roberto Sifuentes

Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist. His work fuses highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From homeland security to extreme reality television – from video games to military training – from fetishism to evangelism – Sifuentes creates interactive performance installations where personas wind their way through psycho/sexual/political/ universes. The result is a cinematic style that uses satire, humor, and spectacle to peel away the viewer’s protective layers and reveal society’s desires, fears and obsessions.

A founding member of La Pocha Nostra performance troupe (San Francisco), Sifuentes has exhibited and performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Projects with La Pocha Include: “Corpo Insurecto (2012-“Corpo Illicito” (2009-2011), “The New Barbarians Collection Fall ’07 X-teme Fashion show and Human Auction” (Arnolfini, 2007), “Divino Corpo” (NRLA, 2008) “The Mapa/Corpo Series: Interactive rituals for the new millennium” (2005-2009), The Mexterminator Project (1997-2001), BORDERscape 2000 (1998-99), The Temple of Confessions (an interactive performance/installation which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in October 1996), El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD (an interactive performance art television special which was broadcast to over 6 million homes in 1995), and The Dangerous Border Game (an experimental Spanglish opera).

From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was Artistic Director of The Trinity College/La MaMa Performing Arts Program NYC. He was the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia.

Sifuentes is currently Chair of the Department of Performance & Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image courtesy of Roberto Sifuentes

Erica Mott is a choreographer, puppeteer, performance maker, and cultural organizer who, through a variety of body based sculptural forms (mask, costume, object), transforms discarded materials and disregarded spaces. Using the tools of humor and surprise, she captures and heightens the magic and mystery of the mundane and invites communities to re-view and re-envision shared spaces and practices. She endeavors to find universality that may be communicated across social, economic, and cultural boundaries. Erica’s most recent site-specific performances were featured at SOMArts (San Francisco), Ingenuity Fest (Cleveland), NES (Iceland), Museo del Ferrocarril (Mexico), Chicago Arts District Special Exhibitions Space/Artopolis, Minneapolis Fringe Festival, Chicago’s Millennium Park, and Chicago’s PAC/edge Festival. Erica has collaborated nationally with Tim Miller, Eighth Blackbird, Sharon Bridgforth, Coman Poon/re[public] in/decency, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. She continues to work with La Pocha Nostra Performance Troupe as a core member. She instructs workshops for Lookingglass Theater, Northeastern Illinois University’s Teacher’s Center and The Second City. Additionally, she has designed and facilitated lectures for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, Amnesty International, The Memphis Theological Seminary, and the Universities of Witwatersrand and Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa. She is the former collaborator and Artistic Director of Johannesburg based arts collective, MUKA Project. She has a masters degree in Psychophysical Theatre Practice with an emphasis on intercultural performance and Asian Martial Arts practice from the University of Exeter in the UK. Erica is a recipient of several awards including The Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Ragdale Foundation Residency, NES Artist, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Fellowship, The Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, the City of Chicago CAAP program and the Neighborhood Arts Program (NAP). For six years Erica has served as the Director of Education and Community Programming at Links Hall, Chicago.

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La Pocha Nostra: The Insurrected Body from herbst remixed on Vimeo.

www.pochanostra.com

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