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Magic Glue: The Politics and Personality of Jump-StartJump-Start playwright Dianne Monroe describes what holds Jump-Start Performance Co. together as "some kind of magic glue." It is an apt phrase, since magic involves sleight of hand, the illusion of effortlessness and transformation whereas glue suggests deliberate construction and craft. In Keith Hennessy’s interviews, there emerges a sense of creative energy located in a powerful melange of individual artists, of conscious and talented leadership in managerial and artistic practices; and of a big commitment to sweat equity and fun. In its 17th year, exhibiting artistic vitality and a remarkable degree of fiscal health, Jump-Start has evolved as a significant grassroots organization. They have been able to "stick together" through flexible and evolving organizational structures and artistic processes that are both constructively critical and inclusive. The magic here is the sustenance of a wild energy and will to play, a belief in the individual imagination, and the practice of grounded political analysis. Jump-Start’s definition of community is very broad and inclusive, yet they work in extremely distinct communities and neighborhoods, building connections and long-term relationships. This remarkable assemblage of personalities and talents is itself a community of choice. They interview like they work, with practiced conversational and public reflection skills, and the accumulated intensity of the interviews is greatly enhanced by interviewer Keith Hennessy’s like-mindedness with the Jump-Start company members and his reflections via his own work. Everybody speaks; in the audiotapes, one hears joking and crying and tremendous group energy. There are lengthy passages that might be extracted as theoretical texts in and of themselves; artists talk critically about their own work and about the company, and the group as a whole has a contemporary theoretical inclination, formed by cultural politics, feminism and queer studies. Hennessy’s front statement, "A company needs money and a room of its own to create quality performance work," applies Virginia Woolf’s premise that women writers need money and a "room of their own" to an entire company. Hennessy’s citation underscores the fundamentally political and economic nature of aesthetic judgments and organizational structures. Indeed, Executive Director Steve Bailey remarks, "To me, aesthetics are politics and politics are aesthetics." Jump-Start was founded to create and support new work by artists from underserved communities by helping individuals find voice and a space, including the public space of performance. As in so many grassroots organizations studied here, Jump-Start’s strengths are precisely its challenges: operating within and outside of boundaries of arts funding, resisting or supporting dominant public ideology, finding a balance between advocacy and creative expression. As Hennessy writes:
Hennessy puts his finger on the unique quality of Jump-Start — it is an ensemble that doesn’t look like other grassroots community organizations. In its more than 50 performances a year there are widely diverse performance styles - solo work, campy extravaganzas, local historical plays, musical ensemble pieces, and work by many well-established and younger writers and performers. They do not share a single performance methodology or leadership style, although the leadership is very clear, because their intention is to have real diversity. They do have well-developed processes of self-critique and long-term partnership building. With characteristic hip political energy, they notice and respond to where they are, literally and metaphorically. Artistic Director Sterling Houston says, "The easiest way to explain that is that it becomes a company piece when it is created by a company member." The "generator" of the piece may or may not actually use the company performers in an individual piece, but the company will support and commit to realizing the vision. Jump-Start has made work that draws material from the gay/lesbian/bi communities, African-American communities, Chicano communities and women, yet the work comes originally from an individual whose passion reaches out in specific ways. The diversity of the company generates diverse work. This point is simple but very important, because it allows individual artists to bring a variety of political perspectives to the group by way of the creative work. Borders and Audiences A literal kind of border-crossing, from one neighborhood to another, or from one clear community group to another, is often a part of progressive cultural work. In a "liberal" model, an organization strives to bring the underserved into the allegedly "served" or mainstream community, stressing opportunity, representation and inclusion. "Radical" or "alternative" work, on the other hand, stresses the marginalized or oppressed community by defining and validating core community identity. I think Jump-Start strategically uses both of the above models, but it also operates within the "material" structures of historical contexts and existing economic and social conditions. This results in work of a great variety, sometimes very edgy and intellectual, sometimes very accessible and celebratory; sometimes based on highly popular forms, sometimes abstract and experimental. Common ground comes in a deliberate and conscious conversation about the efficacy of the work, and in a strong group sense of speaking from the margins of many discourses and social arrangements. Exchange These varieties make the question of intended audience and impact a very complex one that comes up many places in the interviews. For example, when Hennessy asks Steve Bailey to talk about how Jump-Start tries to affect the community, the answer is typically complex: "I don’t even like that terminology. There is a way to make an exchange with the community. And for me that is what it is about, because we are learning as much as we are teaching." Bailey analyzes the liberal notion that artists and educators are supposed
to bring the uneducated, nonartists to the table or to the theater so that they
can be the objects of the production:
Bailey’s remarks come from his own painful learning about racial and ethnic dynamics. His "not caring" is about refusing to perform a racial transaction that validates him as an artist while appearing to help a community with less privilege than his own. I have seen him publicly acknowledge his own race privilege and ask others to do so as well. He recognizes that an organization consciously constructing multiple identities can not be represented by any single person. Bailey is impatient with unchallenged ideas of how borders are crossed, and the too frequent assumption that if people come to see a show about a particular community that they will necessarily be changed by it. Sounding like an artistic director and grant writer who has often been called on to connect the number of audience members to "impact," he comments:
Bailey’s wall metaphor is consistent with Jump-Start’s realpolitik – tumble a brick, make a peep hole — get vision and deconstruction a little at a time. And he understands that change is long-term and slow, and involves going to the community more than bringing audiences in. "Cross-over" may be a totalizing term, insisting on separation, or borders that a dominant culture needs to keep intact. Bailey’s remarks imply, on the other hand, that learning and change are probably not the amalgamation of audiences at a theater, but in schools and curricula that build performances and long-term relationships with educators and children. This way the attendance at a given event becomes a sign and result of conditions already present in the community. Spectators and Spectacle In "The Feminist Spectator as Critic," Jill Dolan argues that the way we think about audiences is constructed and therefore also limited by the same arrangements that mark social institutions. She argues that feminist theater (or I would add queer theater or another kind of performance that is marginal to mainstream culture) requires taking apart many assumptions about how the concept of audience is constructed. Our imagination of audience, for example, is often monolithic, and if not monocultural, it at least assumes a virtue in unity, in the bringing together. By imagining that spectators can or should be in one audience and should all come, perhaps we suggesting a monodirectional gaze of the performance itself? Bailey underscores the difference between real impact on very small and specific audiences through sustained work, and the kind of proposed idealistic paradigm shift that is explicitly if not implicitly demanded by so much social-change work. It is neither successful nor desirable to imagine that the separate cultural identities of the groups will blend somehow into one joyous entity of the audience. Sterling Houston, answers the question of impact differently, but with a similar sense of how the theater can shift or change thinking:
Many other pieces produced by the organization, past and present, are deliberately edgy, especially as they "cross over" in unexpected ways. I think that the ability to address what children need in schools without the overlay of a particular politics is balanced with the radicality of work often produced in the theater. Houston’s description of his early work with the company offers a glimpse of the importance of satire and humor in the work he makes for the company and the community. Because of my background and my racial and sexual orientation, I have a certain view of conventional history that really affects how I interpret it and how theatrically it is presented. I would never think of myself as a gay writer or a black writer, but certainly my being gay and being black totally affect the way my work is presented and envisioned. That is tough for some people. It is like splitting hairs. But it isn’t for me, it is very clear.
School Programs In 1991, Jump-Start created Historias y Cuentas in a number of public schools, and since that time, Houston remarks that in some schools they have worked with kids from third grade to graduation. They have cultivated programs with schools in their own neighborhoods. Teachers speak with deep enthusiasm about what Jump-Start has given, about their artistry and their warmth, and, tellingly, the company members speak about they have learned. Their education projects involve training for the teachers and for the theater artists, conversations about how kids learn, training about challenges children might be facing, and explorations about what kinds of materials art projects can use successfully. In practical ways, Jump-Start artists have learned not to assume that their status as artists specifically equips them for the work of community exchange. Rather, they seek training and work with partner artists and educators to sustain community work. Alva Ibarra describes the affection and depth of Jump-Start’s relationship with her school: They are part of our family now here at Kelly. The kids see them and they know them. We want that. We want them to be able to just come in here. They are part of our staff. Everybody accepts them and we are just happy to have them here. Finally, Ibarra and other teachers and school administrators have come to understand and appreciate that art making involves very specific skills, and that those skills have an important place in the education of young people. Bailey’s notion of exchange is born out in the long-term hard work of these residencies The Festival de Libra Enganche, the Young Tongues Program and the Healing Arts Program, as their names suggest, reach out to particular communities, bring in the voices of artists around the country, and focus on particular issues or community needs. Their work in education tends to be about the foundational process of using the imagination rather than about transmitting a particular cultural analysis, although the analysis may be operating on a tacit level. This foundational work, I believe, is the first level of advocacy, because it locates power, or inspiration, in the process of art making, which is individual, collaborative, and public. Alva Ibarra, principal at Kelly Elementary School, describes a school project at Kelly that typifies how these partnerships work:
Work in education has become increasingly important in Jump-Start’s focus and time investment. Bailey says he is really "jazzed" about education work, and there is a sense that this shift takes time and energy that might have previously been spent in creating ensemble performances. Jobs in schools are important sources of income and clearly in line with the mission, but they do require huge amounts of time in planning, teaching, and assessing. Solo Performance Work Jump-Start has encouraged new writing and solo performance work that is extremely diverse. An analysis of the aesthetics and politics of a few pieces illustrates Jump-Start’s community orientation in less obvious ways than the education and large ensemble and festival projects. S.T. Shimi's "Southern Discomfort," for example, explicitly blends a harsh critique of all religion with stories of Shimi’s young life as a woman of color who was born in Singapore of Indian parents and educated in New England in a conservative Christian church. She weaves her text with Middle Eastern belly dancing, a form which explicitly celebrates and exposes female sexuality. The shock of seeing an enactment of sexual identity in a culture not "her own" but easily conflated with hers via racial stereotyping is certainly the visual foreground, but the text also offers a feminist critique of religion, specifically Christianity, that "tried to drive the devil out of me. They drove out God instead." "Southern Discomfort" is designed to produce just that. She deliberately messes with the stereotypical, and gendered/racialized identity, giving the lie to monocultural identity. Dianne Monroe’s "Comfort," offered in production with Shimi’s piece, historicizes a moment of cultural resistance from a history that is not part of her particular identity but which clearly relates to her present politics and the complex dynamics of San Antonio’s cultures. Monroe’s piece is based on a moment in the history of Comfort, Texas, when a group of German immigrants who were Freethinkers, resisted slavery. Hennessy saw both performances during his visit and offers a cogent commentary on them. Among those interviewed after the show were people invovled in developing the Comfort piece. Most interesting were interviews with teen audience members and volunteers who obviously had never seen anything like either of the pieces, but who were clearly intrigued and very open to Shimi’s probing of religion and Monroe’s presentation of antislavery commitment in a remote historical period. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s work has similar qualities. "Memory’s Caretaker," as I saw it performed at the FOCAS meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, in May 2002, politically connects the deeply private and intimate experience of "care-giving and -taking" with the isolation and conflicts of several cultural identities. Bonin-Rodriguez embodies and queries many identities: as a young gay man, an assimilated Chicano, a member of a dysfunctional Southern Christian family, an artist and a caregiver. The performance’s gestural phrasing suggests the invisible and the visible, working movement phrases that evoke the presence of the (now dead) grandmother in the present moment. Memory and politics ghost each other. The effect is moving, humorous and analytical in its use of feminist perspectives, queer theory and multiple visible and invisible racial and ethnic identification. Bailey’s direction enhances the complexity of the pieces, just as Jump-Start leadership combines very open acceptance and encouragement with pointed political analysis of its art and its organizational practices. Bailey’s articulation of his own role expresses the coherence of politics and practice:
What matters here is a dynamic that I see repeated between and among many Jump-Start artists — the understanding that "helping" is an artistic function that involves making one’s expertise available to another without seeking control or its own vision. Process and Parties Helping make others’ visions manifest is a mode of operation that insures conversation. The conversation becomes a fertile ground for ideas, which, as Lisa Suarez describes, just "pop up."
The mysterious, the "cosmic" of dreams notably requires guts and risk and hard work. Again, magic glue. Shimi says, "Our passion is formal, but how we celebrate it is not," marking the combination of tremendously open and flexible social and organizational structures with the practiced and rigorous formalities of making performance. A great example is Jump-Start’s performance parties, a yearly celebratory event that is a marathon of work, both curated and wide open, as Houston describes it. WIP or Wednesdays in Performance is also cited as a blend of the social and the formal, coordinated by Shimi. A wonderful exchange between Houston and Bailey describes the pride and chagrin and overwhelming sense of community at the events:
Leadership Many joke about the sign on the wall that says, "Be careful what you ask for" because you will probably find yourself doing it. Lisa Suarez describes "meetings, meetings, meetings" and an action cited by more than one person -- Steve Bailey pulling out the calendar. There is both opportunity and challenge in this moment, a belief in potential and practice and the best learning ground. And resources go to the project, resources that include the collective labor of the group and the mechanisms of the organization. Repeatedly company members describe getting a start at something they always wanted to do and finding resources and encouragement in the group. Jump-Start uses Liz Lerman’s "critical response process" so skillfully that several members have become facilitators of the process. They use it in their meetings and retreats and following their own productions. Leadership is not accidental or by default. Virtually all members, when asked, rather wryly but clearly say that Steve Bailey is the core leader, much the way Carpetbag members indicate Linda Parris-Bailey’s leadership. There is also shared responsibility arrived at in difficult and frequent group processes, their annual retreat and a great deal of conscious processing. A signal moment in the interviews describes a turning point in the organization and a difficult leadership decision: An exchange between Bailey and Hennessy contains some of the most important insights to emerge from these pages, as the two pinpoint an organizational crux that challenges so many groups trying to have democratic procedures and nonhierarchical structures where power distribution is damaging or limiting.
Company members report having voice and the oppportunity to argue and be listened to by others. They operate on consensus, but when a tough decision needs to be made, Bailey makes it, usually with the close participation of Sterling Houston. It is remarkable that most company members not only describe being part of decision making, but that they can see the leadership process in others, in the visible struggles with issues and practices. Again Suarez gives a good picture of the dynamic of shared power within a clear structure:
A final very revealing example of this combination of participation and visible leadership is the decision, widely discussed and definitively presented by Bailey and Houston, was to declare that new members of the company would be people of color.
A Sense of Beauty In his conversation with Hennessy, Bailey talks about his excitement for visual design, and about his own evolution as an artist and political thinker. Talks about having this sense of beauty, of a return to art making as infused and necessary, rather than direct action:
It seems deeply important that this sense of beauty is infused with the pleasure of spectacle. This quality marks much of the work I have seen of Jump-Start’s, no matter how diverse the style or subject whether the medium is visual imagery, words, movement or music. The pleasure seems connected to the space and time dedicated to talking about the work. A sense of the efficacy of the beautiful and the pleasurable underlies the politics, not the other way around. Challenges Jump-Start is growing and evolving in multiple directions. Like all the ensembles, they face the constant issue of funding and of their place in local and state arts funding. They have been deeply involved with arts politics in San Antonio, especially in their fight with the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center over that company’s defunding because of rampant and organized homophobia. In this regard, as in others, their diverse income base is a strength, as is the employment artists find in school programs. The struggle is not only to survive, but also to continue to find time to create. As I write this, artists Monroe and Bonin-Rodriguez have left the company to concentrate on writing and performing their own work. The crux is how the ensemble creates as an ensemble, and will continue to develop. Shimi describes it this way:
I like these words because they convey how much glue is evident in the willingness to acknowledge the truth of the present situation, a willingness to move on, an openness to change and a sense of value that comes from experience. I’ll conclude with one of Hennessy’s best interview moments, where he poses this question to Suarez:
Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues. Kilkelly also served as a site visitor for Roadside Theater for "Performing Communities." References All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project." Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1929. Original CAN/API publication: November 2002 CommentsPost a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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