Aaron Wilson - Choose your own adventure - Week 4

I don’t know how to properly synthesize key ideas/learnings so I am just going to talk about the piece and hopefully share some of my learnings in the way that you were looking for. I read Dangerous Border Crossers by Guillermo Gomez Peña, specifically the section titled Conversations across the border fence. Towards the beginning they were talking about context and how that affects how the performances are perceived depending on the context of where they are. They also try and keep the interpretation open to everything  “It’s very important for us that the complex images we use in performance be open to multiple interpretations that we may never have imagined ourselves.” “It changes meaning with the context.” Because of all the audiences and places they perform the audience members always have a different background and observe the work differently. Also because of their travel to so many places they are seen as performances before they even step onto stage. “We travel to the most unlikely places where our audience has never encountered Chicanos—which means that often our performance begins the moment we step off the plane. We become, in a sense, field workers conducting “reverse anthropological” research.” Another facet of the work that I found interesting was the way they introduce new ideas over controversial ideas and ways of thinking to audiences. “If people don’t want to see something, we show it to them when they least expect it, and in a way that they actually accept it, even enjoy it. If they don’t want to talk about a certain issue, we scream at them, but we make them laugh. If they just want us to whisper it, we say it louder and force them to confront the issues they don’t want to talk about, but in such a way that they don’t realize right away that we are forcing them to confront these issues. Performance art utilizes a very complex set of communication strategies.” They use these communication strategies to communicate ideas or ways of thinking to these new audiences while also exposing them to what life is like or stereotypes about life.