DAY 1: The Like of it Begins
DAY 2: Disorder at the Border
DAY 3: The Image Factory
DAY 4: Across the Wire
DAY 5: The Art of Crisis Management of Art
DAY 6: Games without Frontiers
DAY 7: Jamming the Human Enigma Machine
DAY 8:Crossing the River
DAY 9: Last Minute Politics
DAY 10 Pt. 1: Space Time Motions
DAY 10 Pt. 2:

Image Gallery

Running Blind: The Tucson Border-Crossing Diaries

Day 9 Friday, August 10, 2007

Last Minute Politics

Today we began planning for our public performance on Saturday night. Apparently all the local newspapers have published articles on Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra today. A cable access TV show has requested to film us but not everyone is eager to participate. To make things even more complicated someone has suggested we do a public performance on Saturday afternoon in downtown Tucson to publicize the event. Admission to the show is $10 but someone has suggested that we allow the homeless to enter for free. While this seems like a generous gesture on the surface it turns out to be fraught with peril for MOCA. Anne-Marie Russell, MOCA’s Director is attending the meeting and is visibly uncomfortable with the idea. The topic quickly turns into a minefield with some advocating for and others against the homeless presence. Everyone is choosing his or her words very carefully but in the end the idea is scrapped. I opposed the idea and am relieved.

In fact the whole idea of a public performance was only decided on a day or two before the workshop began and the calendar was extended a day to accommodate it. Throughout the week we have been hearing arguments from some for why we should not perform for the public. The ones who oppose feel that by giving a public performance we are corrupting the purity of our share experience by offering it to the outside world. I don’t hold this view and I’m looking forward to performing for an audience.

With this business taken care of, everyone is breaking up into collaborative groups or working alone on their ideas for the big show. The performances will take place in two separate spaces across the street from each other. La Pocha is very protective of how their image is used and so no documentation will be allowed by the public, perhaps because of the graphic nature of some of the images. To control the crowds, ticket holders have been asked to arrive during staggered time slots.

Fort the first part of the evening I am going to work with Lorena, a PhD candidate in sociology from Madrid. I will also do a solo performance as a sketch artist, moving around the space and documenting the crowd. We went way overtime today, almost three hours. I returned to Charlotte’s house, ate a frozen dinner and went to bed; time 1:30 am.

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