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Interviews with Mazzon and Jose Chapa, community artistsInterview with Mazzon, conceptual artist, at cast party for "Southern Discomfort" by S.T. Shimi Mazzon: I’m a student of theater, and it’s my observation that fast paced lifestyles don’t allow time for character development and long, boring plays, and modern audience really prefer nonsequential, raw shows. So, performance art and new-wave nightclub acts have kind of filled in that gap. And I do believe it is a rehearsal for a more exciting extravaganza theater in the future. Right now, though, in this interim, this performance art that Jump-Start sponsors is fabulous. Jump-Start goes a step further than either of coasts do – New York and L.A. – because it is political, it’s timely, it’s multicultural. Keith Hennessy: How would you like to see Jump-Start affect the larger community in a different way? How would you like to see Jump-Start get out into the world? M: Rather than this anachronistic WPA federal budget-review approach of an oral history, I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I actually have a Latino-English language television station right now that would include a lot of Jump-Start which is multicultural. I personally would like to produce the shows which were all documented with stationary cameras. I have beyond-MTV special effects that would make it interesting and we’ve got over 20 years of material with Jump-Start and similar local cultural centers that I think could finally make this the third-coast equal to New York and L.A., because our content is so far beyond pornography, gangsters and monsters
Interview with Jose Chapa, friend of Jump-Start and co-host of cast party for "Southern Discomfort" by S.T. Shimi KH: Tell me your name and what you think is interesting or powerful about Jump-Start? Jose Chapa: My name is Jose Chapa, and I have lived in San Antonio for the last four years. I lived in Mexico before here. I was born in Chicago. I am bicultural, and I’m going into a little lead about why I am going to express what I am going to express. Everyone is just really down to earth and is working on something that involves people of all different backgrounds. That is important to me because I come from a Hispanic, Mexican — truly from Mexico — background, but at the same time I was born in the U.S. and spent a lot of my formative years here. Kind of have grown up around people from different income levels and just backgrounds in general. That’s what they do very much. They are all-inclusive when it comes to their performances, they don’t discriminate. That’s why I really enjoy working with Jump-Start. KH: If you were going to tell someone about Jump-Start who had never been to San Antonio, what would you tell them? Or even, how would you identify what happens there? JC: To identify what happens there I can use a few words: genuine, there is truly a genuine spirit there. And when I say spirit, I mean people giving you what is inside of them. Sharing it with you, sharing something positive with you and doing it through performance. People who haven’t been exposed to performance art, and performance in itself, really sometimes don’t get it. But if someone were coming to Jump-Start, if I could share something or say to them, "This is going to perhaps spark an interest in your mind that you haven’t really been thinking about. So give it a chance." That’s how I would sum it up. 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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