Workshops

As part of the first Critical Encounters Artist Residency, the San Francisco-based “trans-disciplinary arts organization” La Pocha Nostra, featuring renowned Mexican-American performance artists Guillermo Gómez Peña, Violeta Luna & Roberto Sifuentes, will lead an intensive artist workshop on campus that incorporates and challenges ideas of race, gender, faith, and boundaries. Inspired by the past work of La Pocha Nostra, the project aims to offer participants a dynamic and multiple-stage mentorship opportunity, initiated and developed over several months, and culminating in a public presentation.

Critical Encounters is a college-wide civic engagement initiative intended to synchronize conversations between the school and the community in an ongoing dialogue around a central, socially and culturally relevant issue each academic year. Fact & Faith explores how we negotiate the tension between the need to believe and the need to know, examining the concept of truth, what shapes it, and how it is expressed.

The workshop will comprise twenty participants, including students from Columbia College and other colleges and universities, joined by practicing artists, educators and community members. The diversity of cultures, ideas, abilities, perspectives, beliefs, and aspirations of participants will inform and shape the collective work. This workshop will explore the ideas of Columbia College Chicago’s Critical Encounters Initiative: Fact & Faith, while building a bridge between the Columbia College community and beyond.

The intensive will take place from October 23 through 30, 2009. The residency culminates in the Chicago debut of La Pocha Nostra’s most recent work “Corpo Illicito” on Friday, October 30, 2009. From December, 2009, to March, 2010, participants will take part in additional workshops with Roberto Sifuentes, of La Pocha Nostra, and other artists/individuals through a partnership with Links Hall (dates and times to be determined by organizers and participants). On April 15 and 16, 2010, the workshop attendees will re-convene with La Pocha Nostra to rehearse their final participant-created performance, which will be presented at the 6th Annual Gender Fusions on Saturday, April 17, 2010.

Participants MUST be available the following days:

• October 23 – 25, 2009, 1 p.m. to 8 p.m.       
• October 30, 2009, 3 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
• October 26 – 27, 2009, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
• April 14 – 16, 2010, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
• October 28 – 29, 2009, 4 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
• April 17, 2010, 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Students are encouraged to work with their departments to use this opportunity as an independent study.

Applications are due by Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 5 p.m. Late applications will not be accepted, and e-mail applications are preferred.
Chosen participants will be notified by October 9, 2009 5 p.m.

Questions and applications can be submitted to:

Dia Penning, Associate Director of Civic Engagement
Center for Teaching Excellence
600 S. Michigan, 8th Floor
dpenning@colum.edu
312.369.3286