Interview with Felice Garcia, technical director, company member

By Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy: How long have you been at Jump-Start and what is mostly your job?

Felice Garcia: I’ve been here for five years as a staff member. I am the technical director. That kind of entails everything technical, from purchasing refrigerators to fixing them, plumbing, lighting, sound, maintenance of the building, purchasing concession and keeping track of that inventory and that kind of stuff.

KH: It is a pretty widespread version of tech director, not just shows. It is the whole plant.

FG: It is. I wear many hats.

KH: Why do you stick with Jump-Start? Why here? Why do you stay here?

FG: I have to tell you that I worked for another organization here in San Antonio starting in 1984, and the other organization was very political, very stressful, there was a lot of power struggle. It was not a fun place to work, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. When I came to Jump-Start, I found it was a different world, because even though there is some political stuff that goes on here, it isn’t half the stress. We are not fighting with personalities and this male power struggle that I did at the other place that I worked for. It is a lot more open here. I feel like I can say what I want to say and express my feelings and not feel stifled or threatened to do so. Since I grew up in ensemble theater, this is the place to be. If I wanted to do just one thing I would have joined the union.

KH: Tell me more about what that means, growing up in ensemble theater. Who did you work with before? What were your first experiences?

FG: Well, in college at the University of New Mexico, we actually toured for the last three years that I was in college. One of the directors there wrote this play. He was also my theater instructor and what have you. We toured this show that he wrote. It was kind of like Bread and Puppet Theater. We toured it throughout New Mexico, Texas and Mexico while we were in school. I was the stage manager, but I was also on stage. When we toured, I also did the lights and sound. The actors did a lot of things like, well, they had to be in charge of the props, repairing the puppets. It wasn’t like anyone wore just one hat. They did it all. That is what I mean by growing up in theater.

KH: Talk to me about the art that gets made at Jump-Start. Where do the ideas come from? Is it made for people in particular? How do you see it?

FG: I feel like the art at Jump-Start gets made out of individual people’s ideas. They can do what they want with it, whether it is for them, or for someone else, or they had a dream one night and decided to make a show out of it. It is just like that, I think. In my experience, here it is not particularly to make a political statement, although it can be. It doesn’t leave that out, but it doesn’t have to be. That is what is nice about it. It is very open. It encompasses anyone and anything. We are not limited to a certain culture, we are not limited to a certain sex. We cover all of it in many ways, more than one. We are not frightened of homophobia, although I mean it is a frightening thing, but we don’t have to worry about that. We are very open about that part of our lives and that part of everybody else’s lives if they want to be a part of it. We are not frightened about what we wear, or what we don’t wear. That happens to be a big part of it too. Every place else I have ever worked you can’t have anybody nude on stage. To be able to express nudity here is exciting. It truly is. You don’t have to worry about the repercussions of that. "We are not going to be funded because of this." Although people have threatened us, and that threat is very real. The fact that we don’t have to be frightened of it is a great feeling! You say, well, if people don’t like it they don’t have to come. There are enemies out there that would like to have us defunded, to censor us per se, but we also have a very tight patronage. We have a following. People know that they can come here and have a good time. We are very open.

KH: A lot of people have come here and stayed five years, ten years. What do you think is the glue that keeps it together? Obviously the aesthetics are really eclectic and people are really different. What do you see as the reason to stay around? What inspires people or is feeding people here?

FG: Honesty. Just the open honesty of everyone here. The fact that we say you can do it means that you can. It is not like we are going to get you in here and then tell you you can’t do it. You can. The imagination. You are open to use your imagination. Nothing is censored, nothing is closed off, there are no caps on anything. Money. That is always the thing you don’t have enough of, but everything else is in abundance.

KH: It is the amazing thing how many people say "Money, I guess that would be the only problem."

FG: Yeah, and we always tend to find a way around that. In a lot of ways it makes us more creative. If you don’t have money you have to use your imagination elsewhere.

KH: Talk to me about who is in charge here. How do you see how the decisions get made or do you feel like you work for people? How is it that the group feeds it? Anything about leadership.

FG: I guess it depends on what. I am in charge of certain things... When it comes to asking questions I always feel like in some ways I am intimidated and I have to ask questions just because it is important for me to get everybody’s ideas before I make a decision. I know that if I am pressured into making a decision and nobody is around, I know that I can make that decision. There’s not going to be repercussions later. Like I made the wrong decision and I shouldn’t have made that decision on my own. That is never the case, although I feel like I should ask people. I think that is a big part of it. We ask each other. Not necessarily if I can do it, but what do you think if I do this? It all basically comes back down to Steve. That is my vision of it. That may not be true, and he may not think it is. But he is the leadership and I think we go to him a lot and look for leadership in him. And also in Sterling, and different things, too. Founders of the group. Kim Corbin is a founder and I go to her a lot of times. I look to her for guidance. Founders. They’ve been here the longest. They tend to know what the organization is about.

KH: Have there been any big changes or challenges to the group since you’ve been here?

FG: Growth. That has been a big change and a big challenge, too. I found, when I came on board five years ago, a big growing spurt. Now, even moreso, we are going into this Millennium Project, which is a three-year project of growth. We are growing out of our own skin. We are growing out of our building. We are trying to keep up with the growth of our audience. That again takes money, time and man power. The thing I think we all like the best is that we are part-time employees so we have time to do our art. That may be doing our art here. But I think we have avoided going full-time as long as we’ve been here. We’ve been asked if we want to go full time and we all deny it, even though we probably work many full-time hours here.

KH: I actually love that part of the organization. What do you think that you do best? What makes this a unique place?

FG: Communication. I would have to say that we communicate well with each other, and we are good trouble shooters. If we come to what might be an impasse we work through it. Problems that come up in any organization I’m sure. But it doesn’t put us at a standstill. We tend to work through it. We don’t give up very easily.

KH: What have been your top projects?

FG: For me it is the ones where I get to create. Those would be ones where I am doing the lighting design. I don’t usually do set designs, but I do some building. I love to build things.

KH: Tell me about a project that was a really good one for you.

FG: There are just so many. I can’t think. I would have to say that some of the funnest ones I worked on, or ones I enjoyed the most are Sterling’s shows because I get to act in them. Well, one of them, anyhow. He did another one that was called successful. I’d that was an alien show and I got to build the set for it and part of the set was a big space ship. So, that was fun to do, to make the special effect work and yet still make it kind of campy. I love working on Sterling’s shows. They are always full of music and laughter and fun things like spaceships.

KH: Talk to me about the influence you think that Jump-Start has beyond the theater, or beyond the artists that come in and out of here? What communities do they touch? Or what partnerships do they seem to feed in?

FG: Well, I guess this goes back to me. When I first heard about Jump-Start I was nominated for a Globe Award for lighting design I had done for this other organization I worked for. I went to the Globe Awards and I kept noticing that every other Globe award was for something at Jump-Start. I kept going, "Wow." I had heard about Jump-Start, but I hadn’t really known their impact until this awards ceremony. These people kept going up and I kept hearing Jump-Start over, and over, and over. I felt a little, I have to say, envious because I wanted to know more about them. I remember one of the awards was for diversity in the community or something like that, maybe having to do with homophobia or making strides in that area. It might have been having to do with minorities. I remember thinking, "What a neat place." At this point, they probably weren’t more than three years old. I remember this very clearly. This was what they were known for at the time. That was one of my first impressions of what Jump-Start does in the community.

Today, I see people coming from all over. There are very eccentric people. People come from Austin, from Houston. The very first time I worked here it was a contract for a festival called Libre Enganche, which I had never been to before. I worked on this festival all summer and I saw all these people coming from Mexico. Just the camaraderie going on between the working partners was very exciting. Every summer that we get to work on that festival it is very exciting. You know that there are going to be this group of people coming from another country to work here. Even though the language barrier is there, there isn’t really any other kind of barrier. And the language is not even really considered a barrier because we all tend to communicate very well. Art is kind of an overall language. We can get our ideas across when it comes down to the art.

KH: Could you say something about the effect you think Jump-Start has on other communities in San Antonio? What kind of role do they play in a larger picture?

FG: They play the role of a mediator. They open your eyes to different cultures, to bigotry. They kind of educate you towards homophobia, the different sexes and whatever goes on there. To me I think kids growing up and coming into one of these education programs that Jump-Start does, they learn a lot through the arts. They don’t have to learn it out on the streets...I think Jump-Start educates and that is a big part of what goes on here. Not just towards the arts but community relations, towards understanding there is a world of different people out there and it is okay to be different. That is a big part of the education. So many people grow up being prejudiced towards differences. I think Jump-Start is really good about educating. Whether it educates that it is out there, or it educates that it shouldn’t be done that it is not okay to be prejudiced for those reasons.

KH: That is pretty awesome. Imagining that a lot of people that are going to be experiencing this research have never been to San Antonio and are never going to come to Jump-Start, what is it you would want them to know about Jump-Start? How would you like them to see Jump-Start as a model for projects elsewhere?

FG: That is a hard one. I guess I would want Jump-Start to be known as an organization that doesn’t have to beat around the bush. We don’t have to be careful about what we say or do because we might lose our funding. We don’t have to worry about whose toes we are going to step on because we do this or that. So many arts organizations that I can see have to say, "Oh, no, we can’t do that. We’ll get picketed." Actually I think we kind of look for picketers. Nobody ever pickets us. I’m sure there are people out there that don’t want us here, I know for a fact there are. Yeah. That is the way I would like Jump-Start to be known. We are not frightened of eccentricity. I guess that is the way to put it.

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.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
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