That Alien Feeling

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More About

• Guillermo Gomez-Pena
• Peter Sellars
• William Hazlitt
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Performance Art

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Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena unveils his new solo work, Strange Democracy — a shocking, gripping and insistently entertaining meditation on both the chalk-white past and the multicultural future of America. Peter Sellars, himself a master of the stage, calls him "one of the handful of great performance artists in America today." Like a seeker missile in heat, Gomez-Pena hits all the hot-button issues dead-on: anti-immigration mania, the easily scalable U.S.-Mexico border fence, the conveniently variable fear of the alien. He's a polyglot with a taste for multiple personalities, and he has a tenacious grasp of both the technical and the humane, the cumulative effect of which is to transform such impersonal concepts as race into the face of the individual. To quote William Hazlitt, that great critic of the English language, "We can scarcely hate anyone that we know."
Tue., April 5, 7 p.m., 2011