Interview with Sterling Houston, artistic director, company member

By Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy: I want to talk a little bit about the artistic work you have done here at Jump-Start. Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you?

Sterling Houston: Most of what I do is historically based. It has some grounding in history or myth. I don’t differentiate much between the two. History is mythology, mythology is history in my way of thinking. 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.

KH: When you are making work, do you have a target audience or do you start more with the genesis of the piece and then see who comes?

SH: Well, it depends. Some work, like "La Frontera," was a commissioned piece. I presented the idea, wouldn’t it be nice if such a work existed? I talked about the intersection of African-American and Mexican-American culture and our histories. I had no idea exactly how that would happen, but I did know I wanted to involve music. So, I wrote a couple of commissioning grants. One to Mid-America Arts Alliance and one to Meet the Composer and got both of them. Then, I created the piece. It grew out of that. So, the audience was obviously in both of those communities and it was locally set. Most things that I write are specific to a place. Often it is San Antonio, but beyond that a specific place in San Antonio. I think I am probably one of the first writers to do that. Not to have it just like Anywhere, U.S.A., or the world, or some unknown fantasyland. I think this place is very resonate and real specific. The names and all that stuff. It has a river. "High Yellow Rose," of course, being about Texas history, was set literally in San Antonio and where the Sam Houston fought and won Texan independence. It is real specific and into all these names and stuff. When we travel, like when we go to Dallas, people are always like, "Oh, are you going to change? Are you going to talk about the ghetto in Dallas?" No. I am not. They get it. They know what you are talking about when you talk about Alamo Heights or the West Side.

KH: As soon as you say Heights.

SH: Yeah, you get it. The Hills is usually where the white folks live, and it is usually the North Side. Why is that? It tends to be. And east and west side are usually specific, too. The east side is usually the ghetto. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with the setting sun or something. There are things like that. The east and west side are always intersected by the tracks. One side of the tracks has its property value and the other side has this value and who lives there is determined by that.

KH: Talk with me a bit about the process of how you go from an idea to the rest of Jump-Start getting involved.

SH: Well, my process usually involves research, and months of research before I even start writing dialogue or writing a script. If I don’t know a subject, I really want to know as much about it as possible and get really grounded, be influenced by what I read. Sometimes that can be two or three books, but sometimes it can be hundreds — well, not literally, but lots of books and interviews and things like that. I, like most of the people that generate work here, usually have people in mind that I want to work with. I just pull those people. Very seldom — a piece I did last year was one of the first times I auditioned. I hate auditions. I usually can cast from the people I know, or have seen and somebody else knows them. Usually they will do it because we pay and we have a certain track record and whatnot. We usually can readily get folks. Usually it is really specific. Even to the point where certain speeches are written for a specific actress.

KH: How does it become a company piece?

SH: The easiest way to explain that is that it becomes a company piece when it is created by a company member. A lot of times it can have no company members in it. I consider it a company piece if Shimi wrote it, or I wrote it, whoever the generator of the piece is. I used to feel guilty about not using company. In fact, I created some smaller pieces in ’94 or ’95 to include the company, because I wasn’t including them in my major work. That was wrong. The pieces turned out great. They were a lot of fun and people still talk about them. I did a piece called "Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins" that I cranked out in a weekend.

KH: Talk to me about what was wrong about it, or why you wouldn’t do it again.

SH: Well, it wasn’t wrong. But if the goal, in fact, was to include the company and make them feel good again about working together it did not do that. They whined even more about not working together. It was like a little tease. It really was my work. What they really wanted was to go back how it was when Steve was creating work and allowing us to create our own parts.

KH: More of a collaborative thing.

SH: That will never happen again. It is like the Beatles are not going to get back together again. You want to be who you were when they were together, that is what the nostalgia is for. If, in fact, we had that format again, it wouldn’t be satisfying. I have the wisdom to see that, but it is really hard to convince folks of that.

KH: They wanted a group theater experiment.

SH: Yeah. So, I felt it wasn’t appreciated, my effort to make solidarity. But it was my misunderstanding of the need. But after that, I did see, and I could explain. They are all just nostalgic for when we were 25 and 30. Those days are gone. We can’t recapture that.

KH: But don’t you think there is a place here for some of the newer members to do a group experiment or a collaborative piece?

SH: Sure, but it wasn’t the newer members who were whining about that. It was the old core group that was missing that. The company had totally evolved. To use the analogy of the Beatles, after you have created your own solo work, you have moved beyond "Sergeant Pepper." That was a great moment but you don’t go back and do that...

KH: After the White Album.

SH: Thank you. After the White Album. You’ve kind of evolved into your own separate things that have their own strength. It is such a sacrifice to say, "Forget about that and we will go back to this old way to satisfy you." That was the mistake. That is wrong to give into that impulse.

KH: There are a couple of projects I would like you to talk about, both the mural and the San Antonio Theater Project.

SH: The mural came out of working with the education program. It came out of working with Frederick Douglass. If there is such a thing as a Historically Black High School this would be it. It would be an HBS. They have Historically Black Colleges. It was founded at the turn of the century. It is the oldest continuous school in San Antonio. It was built as the black high school on the east side. My personal experience was that integration was in ’54 and I started school in ’50. I went to a segregated elementary school and by the time I got to junior high integration was happening. Douglass still existed as the black junior high. As they built a black high school, it became a middle school, which it was for many years. Then when they built a middle school, it became an elementary school, which it is now. The black high school vanished and got swallowed up because there was no population anymore. I was part of a movement, five years ago when I was teaching there with the education program, that got the building designated historic. It is now a National Historic Site because of its history. They can’t tear it down. It is very valuable property. It is right across from the Dome. That would make so much money in parking. So, we could see the handwriting on the wall and we headed that off. We voted a bond issue to improve this school, and the fine print was that we were going to tear it down and build another school on another site. Oh no, no, no, this was not going to happen. The community stood up as one and said, "You will not be doing this, this is not the agreement that we made." So, that is the background.

This is the school that already has a tradition of activism. For years during segregation this was one of two places in the community where events happened like graduations and ceremonies of various kinds, and also performances. My mom told me stories of Cab Calloway playing there and what a scandal it was because he was wearing riding boots and jodhpurs. The old folks were appalled that he would dress that way in front of the kids, the music notwithstanding. It has that history as well.

Across the street from Douglass is the house of John Inman. He was president of the NAACP here for this incredible amount of time. He had a barbershop on the front of the house. Everybody went by John’s to talk about whatever it was. If Jesse Jackson was in town, you stopped by there to get a sense of what was up. It was the center. When he died, it fell into disrepair and ruin. It got sold for taxes. The original idea I had was to buy this building and to have it as a site for a civil-rights archive, social history, photos and everything. Well, that fell through because we couldn’t get the house for various reasons. Meanwhile, we had raised money. We had raised $6,000 or so to do this project, which now doesn’t exist because we don’t have the house. We quickly switched to doing one aspect of it, to doing the mural, because we had always wanted a mural on the side of the house.

So, I got the artist and talked with this neighborhood group called Neighborhoods Acting Together, which is a coalition of neighborhood associations and other community-minded people living on the east side that do safe houses and various conservation-type work. They had partnered with Via, the bus company, to save this site called Ellis Alley. That has been all renovated. Now Via has bought the property that is adjacent to that called Ellis Alley. Ellis Alley is what remains of the very early black enclave. From like the 1890s up through the ’20s, that was the place blacks lived. Now there are like five houses and one building left. That is all. They were going to tear those down. Neighborhoods Acting Together did an intervention, Save the Neighborhood, and got Via folded into not only making sure those houses weren’t torn down, but also doing a historically accurate renovation of the neighborhood, street lights, landscaping, blah, blah, blah. The landscaping was to be a walk from the Park and Ride to St. Paul’s Square to the Sunset Station, which used to be the train station and is now a yuppie-fied little festival market place, to the Dome. It was a major traffic view.

At the same time, the city is doing this thing, an idea they got from Chicago, where each neighborhood becomes a cultural tourist site. This folded into that. They had a wall, a freestanding wall on the walkway that they had no image for. Well, I had the image. It was to commemorate founding mothers. I narrowed it down to three black women who would be commemorated on this wall. Jackie Dorsey made the images, which are there with my kids from Douglass doing the backgrounds. They did the flowers and everything on tiles. Everything was done on tiles that will be glazed and fired and permanently there for everyone to see. The neighborhood is changing so fast, if we don’t claim some part of that history it won’t happen. When I am gone, when this generation is gone, no one will give a shit. This won’t happen. Time is of the essence. One of the buildings in Ellis Alley will eventually be the African-American History Museum, but that is five or six years down the line. We decided to take this bird-in-hand and do this project. We just had a big community meeting last week for updating on it. It is all happening. Via has a new president and he gets it. He is all sense-of-place oriented.

San Antonio is one of America’s unique cities and this is going to be part of that. They have never had anything representing the African-American community. As I explained yesterday, it is very small. Not rallied, but activists. A lot of things happen. That is how that happened. Not only that, but one of the most satisfying things about this is that there is huge resistance here to public art. All this review, and we went totally behind the back door...

KH: And yet I went by these like 40 foot high cowboy boots yesterday.

SH: Yeah, well, that happened before any of the ordinances. That happened 25 years ago.

KH: They are actually beautiful.

SH: They are incredible. So, yeah. Downtown is bereft of public art. Ain’t nothing except for a few Civil War statues and the Alamo stuff. There is nothing. It has been, but it either gets torn down or voted down. It gets approved by one aspect and another one rejects it. So, this is going to be public art. I mean, they don’t have the nerve to fight these black old ladies, which would probably happen. "You are against black old women?! You must be mad." We would have like 10,000 churches down there raising hell. It probably would have gone through. This way we didn’t even have to deal with that. Especially with Jump-Start, because Jump-Start has its own history of controversy with the city in terms of funding.

KH: How much of the mural has a Jump-Start tag as a part of the many communities that are making it?

SH: It is led by Jump-Start. We are the ones who pulled everybody together to make this happen. Jump-Start’s name will be on it, but Jump-Start will not be the only name on it. It is my impulse, my concept to do it. I chose the women to be on it. There were only like five or six to choose from and I narrowed it to these three to make it simple.

KH: Let’s jump. Talk to me about—

SH: SATCO?

KH: Yeah, SATCO.

SH: This is another way that Steve and I work together. I was publicist for Jump-Start and I was doing a lot of work on the calendar, like programming. It got very frustrating to plan stuff and someone else has got two or three shows opening on the same date. I made the mistake of saying aloud, "Wouldn’t it be nice if we all met in some kind of way to compare notes so this doesn’t happen?" And Steve said, "Well, Sterling, you know you can do that, just make that happen." So I did. The first meeting, 35 people showed up in that little office up there. It was overwhelming. It was an idea whose time had come. The theater community had evolved at that point to have enough companies that were having the same problem as I was having in terms of scheduling and other issues. We just needed some kind of conduit, some kind of clearinghouse for information. The mission statement that I came up with had to do with promoting the theater community here in San Antonio. It was very vague, very general. And so it all fits. Here we are five or six years later. It has grown huge. It started off as being producers. All of those names were for the most part producers at the college level, or the community level, or the professional level. Only three at the professional level. That happened. We opened it up to yearly members at a lesser fee. I don’t know how many tons of individual members. We have two Web pages, an e-mail service, an audition line, all auditions come out all together once a week. Also information about what every theater is doing all over town. It is maintained by someone who took it on. Out of the meetings, someone said, "We need this," and I asked, "Can you do that?" and yes, he could do that. It is all community, it is all grassroots. There are individuals who do it.

KH: Is it a position that is paid?

SH: No. The only position that is paid is the secretary at SATCO. The monies we have raised — we do a gala every other year that I call the San Antonio Theater Coalition Living Legends Awards. We tribute to elders, people in the community who have made really conspicuous contributions. And charge $50 to do it, or $150. It is in a big fancy hotel, black tie, all that stuff. The money that generates goes into a scholarship fund. The monies we make doesn’t go back to us, it goes out. This year we are doing a technical scholarship. Before it has all been performance, but we are doing a techie scholarship. It is so cool. That didn’t come from me. They aren’t huge. They are like $500 or $700, added onto whatever else is in the pot for that student. That is how that happened.

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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Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
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