Choose Your Own Adventure - Gray Gall

For this assignment, I chose to read the chapter from Dangerous Border Crossers written by Guillermo Gomez Pena. I read Part III, titled Conversations Across the Border Fence. I knew nothing about the artist or their performance art before this assignment and I’m really intrigued by the type of work they’re trying to do. It seems complicated, but worth learning about. In the chapter they discussed the general life of a performance artist and the problems they associate with when putting on certain shows and trying to discuss cultures with the audience. The biggest piece that caught my eye was the “Identity make-over booths.” This piece seems so hard to actually articulate well and it seems very delicate. They bring audience members in, and let them pick their “favorite” culture. They then get dressed up and put on makeup that lets them “participate” in that culture. It sounds terrifying to me just reading it. The audience then works with the performance artists to create poses that they think associate with the culture. And it’s not till after the experiment when the audience realizes what they've participated in. I’ve never really done a lot of performance art but immersing the audience within your own piece is very interesting to me. They talk about the fact that they are performing the second they step off the plane. Their performance begins immediately. They also say “Half the work we do is the civic realm, rather than the art realm.” I want to do stuff like this. I want to work on a piece where the aftermath is more important than the actual performance.