Interview with Steve Bailey, executive director, company member

By Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy: How many people are in the company?

Steve Bailey: There are about 20 right now.

KH: As I understand it, everyone who is on staff is in the company, so about how many people have staff positions?

SB: Salaried staff position is about six.

KH: How many of those are full-time?

SB: No one is full-time. We have nobody on staff full-time. We have done it that way on purpose cause we kind of consider the salaried staff work to be the administrative work, although a lot of it is art-related. No one is on more than 25 hours a week, which allows them time also to do their art work. Every one who is on salaried staff does not get paid to do their art work. They’re paid like everybody else, which is on a fee basis to do any of the projects.

KH: Say if you are the lead artist in a project or you are directing someone else’s project, is there a set amount that you get paid for every show or is it every project has its different ways?

SB: Every project has a different budget because some are funded outside. Some artists hustle and get themselves extra money. Some raise money from individuals. Some write up grants, other different kinds of things. Also it depends on how many weekends we run.

KH: Then is it up to the lead artist, when they have raised their money, how they are going to spend it?

SB: Some. They will be in consultation with me. Mostly just to make sure that it is fair and we aren’t paying someone $50 and someone $1,000. We really fight this inequity of funding. In San Antonio, actors are often not paid or paid incredibly small amounts, where designers, or technicians or directors might be paid a lot. We really fight that. Usually we pay an actor the same as a director. Even though a director may put in a little more time than an actor. Actors put in all that time memorizing lines, doing extra work. We try to be more equitable about that stuff.

KH: Are there people that get paid hourly around the shows, like the box office?

SB: No one gets paid hourly around the shows. The education staff gets paid, and there are a few administrative positions, the financial director and like Shimi, who manages the WIP. That varies from month to month.

KH: And the WIP is the Works In Progress shows?

SB: Uh-huh. Typically the education staff gets paid $25/hour for teaching time and $20/hour for multiple workshops where you have the same curriculum in the same place, and $15/hour for planning and meeting time. We try to do administrative salaries, they vary, from around $12 and $15/hour. There is not a huge gap. I am not making much more money than anybody else. What we do is that we have a system. It is probably a little difficult to codify, but I’ll try. Seniority gets you more time off during the year so you have more time to do your own projects. So, if you have worked five years — I forget all the bitter details but it is written down somewhere we can check later. It is something like: If you get five years, you get a month off, of paid time. If you’ve worked ten years, you get six weeks, and if you’ve worked 15 years you get two months or something like that. Those who have seniority get that by having paid leave. It is kind of based on the model of the Arkansas Women’s Project, where they pay everybody across the board the same and then they do seniority through time off. There is not a lot of inequity. There is not even a lot of difference between what we pay the apprentices and what we pay— apprentices are $8/hour, which is not a bad, most apprentice or intern programs, that isn’t a bad amount. It is certainly above minimum wage.

KH: The staff meets how often?

SB: Weekly meetings.

KH: And the board meets monthly.

SB: Those are board and company meetings combined. Sometimes the company has separate meetings right afterwards. Those are done as needed. Sometimes there is company business like new members or certain kinds of artistic concerns or those kind of things.

KH: And you call them as you need them.

SB: Yes. Sometimes they are right after the board meetings, but sometimes we are really tired and we have to call them at another time. Then we do these yearly retreats.

KH: Yes, and I think I heard of two retreats. There is one administrative that you do every August?

SB: Yeah, and I like to call it organizational because it is not just administrative. We go through a lot of art, like we critique what has happened the season before, and that includes artistic, audience, financial, everything.

KH: And who is invited to that meeting?

SB: Board and company. And advisory board.

KH: And how many people actually show up?

SB: Twenty-five or 30.

KH: How long do you go for?

SB: Two days. Two nights. Out in the hill country in Junction, Texas.

KH: I heard there was an artistic retreat.

SB: We just instigated that. We just had our first one last year. That was only company members. It was something we wanted actually for a long, long time. We finally just buckled down and did it. We did it in an open-space model. We did not preplan. We went in there and did it.

KH: Beautiful. I wanted to talk to you just personally about art making. I know that you’ve written and directed pieces, you’ve directed other people’s work, you’ve taken time off from creating work, you also like being a lighting designer. All that is kind of out on the floor, but when you start thinking about making work what motivates you? How do you get the impulse to make work?

SB: I’m highly visual. I come from a really visual background. Even as a director. I am not a writer. I wouldn’t say "written and directed by" I would say "created and directed by"... I am an image maker. I create through a rehearsal process if it is an original work. My stuff is usually visual. I have a notebook. I keep a notebook when I am working on a project, I don’t necessarily keep one all the time. It is usually highly visual. Images come first and then text. I see things through usually object imagery, sometimes people imagery. Usually things.

KH: And in terms of content, do you usually have content sort of emerge from a group process? Or content in advance?

SB: No, content in advance. Either with a collaborator or certain collaborators. Sometimes it is broad. This new piece we are working on is broad. Then it will narrow. The idea of funneling down.

KH: So, let’s use this as an example. How broad? What is this piece about?

SB: It is called "Illusions." Sandy Dunn and I are collaborating on it. Currently we call the subtheme the hypocrisy of democracy and the illusion of freedom in the United States. That is the general theme. We are using literal magic, magic tricks not spiritual magic, as a metaphor for the hidden things that are not told or not done around democracy or freedom. Our basis or our three major areas of research are magic tricks, arcane and little known U.S. historical documents, and visual images that we know we want in the piece. The Sandy/Steve list. Like we know that we want floating body parts. We know we want dancing top hats. There is a list of things, we don’t know where they are coming from. They may not make it in there, but we know we want to play with those. It is interesting, because we are pulling in Dianne. She is very interested in these arcane, little-known historical documents and stuff like that. She is going to be a dramaturge and research all of that. Sandy and I are learning all these magic things. We are going to Las Vegas and doing this other stuff. Neither of us have ever done magic. We are talking with this magicians group here. So, it will be a kind of short rehearsal process. We are thinking of this as a work in progress. These original pieces I do over periods of many years. Like "Out of a Time of Plague" was probably the last major one I did that wasn’t scripted ahead of time. That one was probably done over a period of two years. Before we got to the final product, we did a 15-minute version, then we did a 45-minute version, and then we finally did the full version.

KH: I know it has probably changed over the years, but do you make your work for an audience? For example, "Illusions," is there already an audience in mind or is it more of an audience that you have developed here?

SB: Probably a little bit of both. I would think it was people who were interested in the politic. We are interested in the recent election stuff, but we don’t want to be topical about it. So, this really came, was influenced by this whole stretch of voting irregularities and the electoral college. The hypocrisy of all of that. That was kind of the germ of all of it, but we don’t want to talk about George W. Bush, we don’t want to talk about Gore. We don’t want to get into any of that topical stuff, but rather explore the underpinnings of all of it. People who are interested in that hopefully will be interested in this in a secondary way, but not in a primary way. That is kind of what we are doing. "Plague" really came out of this whole thing during AIDS, this fear of physical intimacy. That is where it came from for me. Just exploring that.

KH: I actually was watching on video and was really amazed with all the qualities of touch and how far you went. When I saw the beginning of the piece I thought, "Oh, it is going to be like this", and then half way through the piece it was actually a lot more intense and a lot more edgy. I imagined different versions of people it was probably difficult to watch. If it is targeted to a gay audience, it is different. I’m sure a lot of gay people came to that show, more than anyone else. Did you make that show thinking you were making it for the gay community?

SB: I thought there would be a big gay audience. But you know who have talked to me about being most affected by it? I just had someone come up to me the other day and say that they thought it was one of their most favorite pieces that they ever saw — were straight women. There was a certain elegance to it. People could actually come into the intimacy who might be a little off-put by it usually. I don’t think I was really Queer-Nation-in-your-face about it. It was very classical. I think. It was meant to be very classical. Dionna did the set and Johnny. They are very classically minded artists. Those kind of busts, the draping.

KH: Right, the draping. But even the lighting was very stylized. It wasn’t...there was a lot of beauty. Intentional.

SB: That is kind of my style. I really like, I mean I am not shy about aesthetic values. I love to see work that is gritty, edgy, dirty. Those works send me through the roof, but that is not the work I do. For me, I really have this...I like this sense of beauty.

KH: Would you go so far as to say there is a politic in the making of beauty? Or is it just more personal where that comes from? Do you even separate?

SB: I don’t know. To me aesthetics are politics, and politics are aesthetics so I don’t think I would separate it. There is this wonderful artist in Austin. The most political artist I know, I mean that is her job. She is in politics. The whole Bosnian thing, the anti-nuclear-waste, she is all over the map. This wonderful woman from England who is half -Indian and half-, well, she doesn’t know her father because she was the child of a rape. Radical feminist, all this kind of stuff. She makes these incredibly gorgeous pieces, these classical pieces. Actually, for me, they have some content because I know Sally, but I could see for 90 or 80% of the audience they probably have no content. They really can not see content in it. I think it is political. For Sally to put that on stage it is political. Her driven thing to do these beautiful pieces. I just really admire that. What I love is that I know her and I know that she hasn’t given up her politic. It is not like this is devoid of politics. She has allowed me to reclaim that again. After "Plague" I quit making work. I was very dissatisfied with the reaction — from personal reactions. I don’t talk about this too much.

KH: Can you say anything more about that? What was you personal reaction? What was it that you didn’t want to happen again?

SB: I felt like I wasn’t really affecting anything. That for me was a point where I was becoming way politically activist. I kind of did that full swing over, too. So I gave up making work completely. I would design lights every once and a while. I was doing all this activist work. Direct action, not through art.

KH: No symbols.

SB: No symbols. Not that the aesthetic ever goes away, you use it in whatever you do. In the action that you create or the way you speak in front of a group or all those kinds of things. I didn’t do it through a performance mode. It wasn’t in a theater. I just went through that cycle and now I am coming back to that art making.

KH: That is exciting though. I always think that the best dancers are the ones that have quit.

SB: And then come back?

KH: Yeah.

SB: Well, I know that it has made my lighting better. I don’t know about my directing, we’ll have to see about that.

KH: I would be interested in trying to get at a little more. I mean, it is obvious that you have a vision, and it is mixed with your aesthetic vision and all of that. You have stuck in with this company for so long. I am interested in what drives you and supports you to keep doing that on an ongoing basis. What continues to drive you and inspire you?

SB: These people. These people in this company. I do this all the time and I thought I was just being humble or something. People would say "Oh you are Jump-Start" and I would say no I couldn’t do this without these people around me. This is my mantra, right? That mantra is absolutely true. I couldn’t do this work without both these long-term and short-term people. You can tell, you see the commitment. These are not jobs for these people.

KH: It is clear.

SB: These people have a commitment to this vision. And I am talking about the company and the board, even audiences in a certain way. There is a commitment to that. I see a solo artist like Paul, and I see his frustration. Even though he is a part of the company and he gets support from that,, he still has to book himself and do all these things. That solo journey, that is not my journey. I am a group person. I need a group of people around me to do this work. I am not driven to go paint by myself. It is really these people around that have allowed me to do it. And it is also because the company isn’t static. We keep people a long time, but we have this joke about not being able to kick people out the door. People have left because they have moved or they have really changed careers, but they have never left in a huff. It takes so long to become a company member that by the time that they join they are kind of committed.

KH: Also, what I see is that there is also space in the company to not engage with people that you don’t fully jibe with. You don’t need to be in their project and there is still plenty to do.

SB: Yes, and Lisa, for example, is taking a year off. She is a visual artist, she is teaching incredibly and she said, "I just need a year." Because when you are a company member, you have a feeling of responsibility and there is guilt around it. You’ve got to show up to those meetings, you’ve got to help people do their work, you’ve got to come volunteer, you’ve got to show up for performances. There is all of that responsibility. So, people can let go of that.

KH: What do you think you do best, and also what makes Jump-Start unique to you? You’ve traveled around, you’ve seen other groups, you clearly haven’t seen something so good that you’ve said, "Hey, I want to go work with those people," and left Jump-Start. What is unique about this group in this location in this time?

SB: One thing is that we have found a way to function that allows for individuality as well as group process. I think a lot of groups find one thing or the other, they don’t find both. We struggle with it all the time, but that allowance of variant views, variant styles, and variant life rhythms is probably the most important thing. I think that if I want to, I can do different things. Kitty is like just dying for me to collaborate with her in a performance. She wants me on stage with her. I don’t want to do that. I don’t like performing, it is not something I want to do. But if I want to do that, I know Kitty will be there by my side. Or if I want to design lights, or if I want to do something else like that. Probably around the early ’90s I also struggled with this administrator versus artist. I finally let that go and decided that, okay, the administration is as much a part of the art as the art itself. So, once I kind of let that settle in my soul, I felt a lot better about doing all of that. That was a real struggle for me for a long time. I kind of wanted to fling my hands up. I’m tired of writing grants. I’m tired of being here until ten o’clock at night working on books.

KH: Did part of that shift because you are no longer here alone?

SB: Yes. With staff. It doesn’t mean I have less work. I probably work harder than I did before.

KH: No, no, no, but you are just not alone in the office. You are not the only person who isn’t being an artist full time. I think what is beautiful here, because it is partly my vision that we get into this whole weird thing about being a "full-time artist," and really, it seems to me that everyone here is creating as much as they want to. Even if they are the people who are writing grants for 20 hours a week.

SB: Or it is the myth that you can be a full time artist without the means or the underpinnings for that. It is inextricably linked to the art you do. You have to have the administrative support. This theater can’t run by itself, both as an organization and as a space. So, we all have to chip in. Hopefully we all chip in enough so that no one person has to take that on. I think that is good. You asked what I do best, and one of the things I think I do best is as a kind of facilitator. A kind of mixer of things. I think that is something that I’ve talked about before. I think I am real helpful with that. A funny thing about encouraging people, I don’t even remember doing — all those stories that I don’t even remember doing. "Just do it, just do it ,we can have the space." I think that is probably one of my greatest assets. Sometimes in a challenging way, but I encourage things.

KH: It is also interesting to me that you don’t feel a turf thing — like if other people are doing their work you can’t. It seems to me that you are still getting to make the work that you want to, and then when you didn’t want to you didn’t.

SB: I went through a little period with the whole administrative thing where I was at the computer and I said, "I can’t be an artist," I’m screaming at the computer. But that was short-lived and I kind of settled into it.

KH: But that wasn’t because other people were doing work. That was because you were typing on a computer. Some people feel like if other people are doing work they are being the artists.

SB: I am telling people "no" around here as an artist. You know what I am saying? As a director, people are asking me to do shows. I don’t know what happened, but in the last few years this blossom of all this work happening, people wanting me to be involved in that work as an artist and not as an administrator. I am having to start saying no. I was crazy last spring and this one is worse. I am having to say, "No I can’t do that."

KH: Do you have a sense of doing things partly because you want to be known for them? Are you doing anything for posterity yet?

SB: No.

KH: Do you feel like you will?

SB: No. Is that weird. Is that false humility? I see it in Sterling. I see it in Paul. They want to get their work around and they want other people to be doing it. I think I had that in the ’80s at some point. I wanted to be in New York, make a name. I went to New York. But I want Jump-Start to be known, I don’t want Steve Bailey to be known.

KH: And what do you want Jump-Start to be known for?

SB: I want Jump-Start to be known for its uniqueness. Both for its artistry and also for its methodology. Maybe its different models for finding a way for artists to come together and work in an environment that is fairly isolated, like you talked about. That goes back to your other question. I think part of Jump-Start’s uniqueness is that we come together around an isolation mentality. This town is hard to support work, period, let alone the kind of work we do politically, let alone it is all original work. Every time we send out a flyer it is not like people recognize those names of the titles of pieces. These are not pieces people know. "Southern Discomfort." what does that mean to them?

KH: No. But if anything you have to build an audience around the space, or around the artists, or around the performers.

SB: For a long time, and we have caught up a little bit now, but for a long time in the mid ’90s, we felt like we were way more recognized around the country than we were in our own town. We used to complain about that a lot. Now we feel like there has been a lot more recognition of Jump-Start within the context of our own city. The city government loves us. We get decent funding from the city government.

KH: Have there been any big disasters here? Giant fights? Even if you don’t want to talk about the people personally, what have the biggest fights been about?

SB: The thing I can think of we talked about this afternoon.

KH: When you said any new people are going to be people of color.

SB: That was probably the hardest time, the most tense. The time I thought people might leave. Other than that, there have been personalities. I’ve worked other places and for me it is not like any other place I have worked. I think almost everyone here says the same thing. That there is nowhere near the contention. That does not mean there is no contention, but I just don’t think it is contention on that deeper level. Where you feel like these people are never going to figure out how to do this together. I have been in so many situations like that. Where there is no way they are going to learn how to work together. It doesn’t matter how many retreats they do, how many consultants come in, or how many times they sit in a room by themselves it is just not going to work. I don’t feel that around here. I think people need to have their own space and all of that. One of the things that we are not talking about is this whole pressure from the outside. The whole Esperanza stuff and how Jump-Start was a part of that, and the whole radical right and how they were attacking us, and these gay men attacking. That is such a huge part of our history and I am just realizing that we are not talking about it at all.

KH: So let’s just go straight there. Pressures from the outside. The biggest place I have heard about pressures from the outside in talking with people is that when I say what is the biggest challenge facing Jump-Start the number of people who say money, or a certain kind of lack in cultural recognition of the importance of original art.

SB: In our situation in San Antonio what happened was Esperanza was the real lead and Jump-Start was its closest ally in playing this thing about politics and art, and queerness and art. It was a liberationist politic we kind of call it. What happened first was conservative, gay, white men within our own community started attacking us. They owned the newspaper and they started writing, every month, attacks on Esperanza, attacks on us. Then they went to city council and started getting letter writing. Then they aligned themselves with the radical right. A couple of ones who were really kind of wild, very different, very libertarian, they kind of aligned themselves around certain other issues. Like no government funding for the arts. These guys got the local government involved and they got the Esperanza defunded. We were right behind. We were part of that whole thing. They called us the something "five." It was us, the Guadalupe, Esperanza, a couple other; those three were the ones who were mostly attacked. It was the local arts board here, the city council. "Plague" was in this big controversy because it was a mayoral candidate. I have a whole book. We were cartoons, and editorials and the whole mayoral candidacy. That was different. That was an isolated incident around that particular piece. This was a real consorted effort around that particular piece by conservative gay men to really destabilize progressive institutions in the community.

They got furious that Esperanza bought a building and then weren’t responsible to anyone else for that building. We’ve just had this lawsuit. Esperanza has sued the city because they defunded them. And they used the NEA for Supreme Court decision because within that Supreme Court decision there is a clause that says you can not discriminate based on political view and blah, blah, blah. They have lifted that out and said this is what we are. They are using that. The National ACLU was involved. I was there for everyday of the trial. It was the best theater I’ve seen in years! It was fabulous. The whole mayor and city council were up there on the stands and they got to ask them questions. Ask them why they did it. It was like this litany. This beautiful, ritualistic litany of questions. Their lawyers are brilliant. All women. White women and women of color. The judge said it was the best case he had ever trial in Federal court that he has ever seen. He meant the Esperanza lawyers. The city lawyers sucked big time. They would go, "Have you ever been in the Esperanza? No. Have you seen their programs? No. Did you read their grant proposal? No." This is the city council and the mayor. It was just this litany. They did it to every one of them. Eleven of them, one after another up on that stage. "Why did you defund them?" "Because we didn’t have money." "Why did you defund them and not someone else? "Because they are not an arts institution." It was this great spiral into getting them caught in their own web.

KH: So, what was the outcome?

SB: They haven’t decided yet. But the judge at the end was really cool. He is a liberal judge, democratic, and we feel he will side with Esperanza on at least two of the four points. We are hopeful.

KH: What was the internal situation at Jump-Start when you were feeling like you were being attacked?

SB: We felt beleaguered, tired, insulted. We had nowhere near the danger. I mean Esperanza got broken into, there was feces spread on the building, their cars were being attacked, people were being followed. We were getting phone calls. I would come into the office, something would be happening and I would never get to the work of the organization. Not that this wasn’t the work of the organization, too, but it would become this whole spiral during the day of dealing with the press, dealing with these incidents, of calling politicians, of calling my mole at the city council and getting information. That became the huge overriding cloud over everything we did. It became a real siege mentality.

KH: How long did that siege last?

SB: Two to three years. Not continuously. It would be up and down, come in cycles. It was a pretty intense time. At the beginning of that I was very active in the political queer community here too. So, it was not just that. I would leave here to go to these huge fighting, screaming meetings. They de-stabilized not only us, but the San Antonio Lesbian and Gay Assembly. They got them to fold. They attacked them so much and just beleaguered them until they went through different people. It was intense.

KH: Well, I’m really glad we got that story on here.

Keith Hennessy is a Canadian-born, interdisciplinary artist choreographer and community arts organizer living in community in San Francisco. Hennessy's solo work has been produced throughout the U.S., in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, including several gay and lesbian performance festivals. Since 1998, he has performed with Cahin-Caha, cirque bâtard, a French/American, mongrel circus based in France. Hennessy was a member of the performance collective Core and was a founding member and principle collaborator in Contraband, a San Francisco-based performance company. Hennessy co-directs 848 Community Space. He is a member of Alternate ROOTS, a service organization for community-based artists, and serves radical cultural agendas as a consultant, director, teacher, curator and agitator.

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