Guillermo Gomez-Pena "Chicano Cyber Punk" Performance to Mandel Hall

Called a "wizard of language" by the Chicago Tribune and praised as "one of the handful of great performance artists in America today" by director Peter Sellars, Gomez-Pena will showcase his uniquely subversive style's blend of acidic Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, rapidly shifting personaes, theatricalizations of post-colonial theory and multilingualism (from English to Spanglish to Nahuatl).A frequent National Public Radio commentator and the 1991 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's Genius Prize, Gomez will focus on identity, race, sexuality, pop culture and the impact of new technologies in the post-9/11 era in his performance, which some have described as "Chicano cyber punk."Gomez-Pena's Mandel Hall performance is part of his University of Chicago Artspeaks fellowship. The Artspeaks series, developed in conjunction with the Court Theatre, the University of Chicago Presents and the Smart Museum of Art, showcases the University's vision of converging artistic theory and practice.