By Dawnell Smith
Daily News correspondent

If you want details, I can give you a list: feather headdresses, loincloths, tools of death, a blond wig, shimmering skin, saturation, a wheelchair, drums, an exercise bike, wine in a paper bag, a lectern, executioners, vodka and Pepto-Bismol in a martini glass, savages, roulette.

If you want analysis, I can tell you only this: The "La Nostalgia Re-Mix" will blow your mind and sear your heart.

If you want advice, I can say nothing.

Photo by RJ Muna

Performance art like "La Nostalgia: Best Hits & Outtakes for an Imaginary Bar" rarely comes to Anchorage, and what James Luna and Guillermo Gomez-Pena did Friday night left onlooker-participants exhilarated, repulsed, uncomfortable, out of control, sacred, illuminated, confounded.

People sat mired in emotion. Some refused to watch simulated sex, while others couldn't turn away. People held their faces as companions posed with a gun pointed at Gomez-Pena while one woman held the weapon and wept. Some smiled at Luna's animal forms, others cried.

Though distinct in style, delivery, content and even location in the room—each used a wood block on each end of the bleacher seats so that the audience had to turn left and then right to see each man's performances—Luna and Gomez-Pena exposed everything from the lust for Otherness to its inhumanity.

Within this expression of the indigenous and immigrant, angry and loved, artifact and terrorist, layers of complicity, story, inquiry and social criticism deepened and bloomed. Where Gomez-Pena drove the tension, Luna allowed the release.

Back and forth. Unconnected and entwined.

In line with this exploration of culture, ethnicity and Otherness, local performance artist Allison Warden—an Inupiat Eskimo—worked the floor first as a waitress offering Eskimo Pies. Later she guided people in the crowd to the stage, orchestrated poses, stood in the center of the room as a militant, a transformed animal warrior, a woman in a bathing suit.

For now, anyway, I can only describe the entire experience in terms of everyday life. When I make essays at 3 a.m. or run my dogs in a howling wind, I occasionally latch onto undeniable clarity.

Then I stop and it dissipates, unravels, so that writing and running become both drug and tonic. Vodka and Pepto-Bismol.

Ah, but "La Nostalgia" is far from ordinary. "Nostalgia" engages onlookers not as voyeurs but as accomplices. It seduces and betrays; it acknowledges that choices will be made; it expects a response but does not judge it.

Seeing "La Nostalgia" means admitting collusion. The safety granted by the invisible wall of theater does not exist here, but a collective self-awareness builds, a willingness to see what hurts, what might be imagined, a presence of mind to own responsibility, to feel the warble of choice inherent to change, to understanding, to action.

Watching "La Nostalgia" can make you feel raw, exposed, but not nearly as vulnerable as these performance artists, fearless and bare.

Luna and Gomez-Pena came to Anchorage to workshop "La Nostalgia," calling it a work in progress founded on three decades of art making. I ran into them, along with Allison Warden and local artists, at a restaurant late Friday.

However undaunted onstage, they are simply kind in person, curious, gracious and embracive.

Now looking back at the show, I wish I could change one thing. During one of Gomez-Pena's pieces, Warden looked through the crowd for blond women. One onlooker refused to go up, so Warden came to me and said, "Will you come up and help with an image? You won't get hurt."

I felt torn. As a reporter/reviewer, the consummate maker of "Other," I knew I should keep my distance and I did, but now, many hours later, I see I made the wrong choice.

"La Nostalgia Re-Mix: Best Hits & Outtakes for an Imaginary Bar" continues tonight at 7 and Sunday at 4 p.m. at Out North, 3800 Debarr Road. Tickets cost $18 online and $20 at the door Out North.
Photo by RJ Muna