La Pocha Nostra: Group Jamming Session

Jorge Luis Morejon. Stage Center. Group Jamming Session
Tucson, Arizona. La Pocha Nostra Workshop and Performance
Day 10: Saturday, August 11, 2007

Space, Time and Motion
By Perry Vasquez

Our final performance for the public will take place in two separate sites, inthe MOCA itself and also across the street where the administrative offices share space with a cluster of artists' studios in an industrial warehouse. Most of us organized into groups of two, three and four performance squads. But most of us also have solo performances to do after our collaborative ones are done.

We held our final Zapatista-style break out session today. All during the workshop, these sessions have given us a way to unload our minds with the many issues, ideas and contradictions that pile up by the end of our days. What’s worked really well is the way of converting the group’s feedback into a piece of collaborative writing that's read back to everyone. It’s one more way of doing a little mass creativity La Pocha style. The results have been polemic, poetic and sometimes incomprehensible.

After our Zapatista sessions we start getting ready for the show. This means practicing our moves, rehearsing transitions, doing the equipment checks and putting the final touches on our costumes and makeup or for some, getting a little sleep. The characteristics of the main performance site are rough and industrial. The walls are made out of brick, and the studio walls go about 7 feet high in a building with 15’ high ceilings. It feels very open. Exposed lights and conduits hang from the wood beamed ceiling. Cockroaches occasionally scuttle across the floor. There are theatrical lights were installed to illuminate the performance spaces as the sunlight fades.

As people have sought out locations in the building, performance universes have popped up all over the space. I have a good idea of what a few of those universes will contain, but mostly I am clueless about what the others are doing. Basically, our performance spaces break up into two different categories: primary and liminal. The primary spaces are large and centrally located. The liminal spaces tend to be smaller in scale and at the margins and edges of adjoining spaces. Therefore, our performance universes get determined to a large degree by the spatial restrictions we encounter or choose to deal with.

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Time and mood will also be organized in a specific way. The first hour will have slow, religious music playing. The second hour will have music with a slightly quicker tempo. And the final hour will have high-energy dance music. The timing of the music applies to our movements as well. In the beginning, the idea is to add gravity to our movements by slowing them down dramatically. As the performance progresses to the last hour we’ll have a group jamming session at full speed.