Interview with S.T. Shimi, arts-in-education instructor, WIP coordinator and company member

By Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy: How long have you been with Jump-Start and what do you do here?

S.T. Shimi: I’ve been at Jump-Start for seven years. I came here after I graduated from college to intern with them and stayed. They made me a company member. In that time, I have stage-managed productions, run tech, been in shows, gone on tour. I’m with the Arts in Education program. I’ve been with one school for six years, and I just started a project that I have always wanted to do at another school about two years ago. That is pretty cool. I also run the Work In Progress night at Jump-Start.

KH: Tell me about the project you’ve always wanted to do at Jump-Start.

STS: When I was working with Michael he started a tagger project at Poe Middle School to work with the boys. I was thinking that it would be nice to do something to work with the girls, and I was just thinking back to how feminist collaborative theater at college really changed my life. How I saw theater and what theater could be used for besides entertaining or moving people, you could use it to affect change and educate people. Even though I may swing back and forth about the merits of one technique versus another, I think it is really important and I wanted to see if something like that would work with a group of middle-school girls. Have them be able to talk about themselves and their bodies, build that kind of trust and see if that has any effect on their lives. I’d been kind of proposing it forlornly for a couple of years on and off. Last year we finally got enough money to start it and it has happened.

KH: How is it going? How many girls do you have?

STS: The way that it has worked out at Poe, and the way we did it last year...even though Lisa and I really hate getting up early in the morning...we go there for like their first two classes of the day. This year what we are doing that is new is that we are going to have an end-product of some kind at the end of the school year, whether that is a live performance or a video. I’m leaning more towards video. We are working with two groups of girls. Last year it was just sixth graders. This year we have a new group of sixth graders and a seventh grade group of girls, some of whom are girls from last year. You can see how a year of working together has changed them in some ways. Of course, it isn’t just us, but I can see a difference in some of the girls who wouldn’t sit down and didn’t want to talk to us and be ornery. This year they are all into to cooperating and trying stuff and being honest with us instead of just purely silly. I am very excited about coming up with something with Lisa. When I think back to some of the stuff we did in college, I just don’t know, how would it have changed me even more if I had gotten to do that at a younger age?

KH: Talk to me a little bit about why you are a big backer of WIP.

STS: Oh sure. I am a backer of WIP (Wednesdays in Performance/Works in Progress) because I have to run the program. That is the main thing. No, WIP started out several years ago. I think Paul was one of the people that kind of got it up and running with Dance Umbrella. Eventually we started to feel like we weren’t invested enough in WIP and Steve started talking about wanting to "take it back" from just purely Dance Umbrella. They used to book all the people and take care of everything and just use our space. So, Steve just felt like it could be better and could be more interesting. I have been at Jump-Start that long and, besides Paul and Sandy, I am really the only other person in the company who dances. I am always the forlorn voice asking can we have "New Moves III"? I know it didn’t make much money, but it was so much fun. I am one of three people who remember it and still think back fondly to it. They are all like, "No, dance doesn’t sell in San Antonio, no more dance programs." But there is WIP. One day, Steve asked me if I would please take it from the Jump-Start end and so I said okay. And then lastly they started paying me and that made it even better. You have to program the event, and then do the publicity, and I am responsible for facilitating the Critical Response. If you think that doing one detail thing at ROOTS is hard, it is even harder to go through a quicker version of the process with a whole bunch of people, three-quarters of them you know are only there because they wanted a place to perform and get a little money. They don’t give a shit what anyone says about their work because they are not invested in it.

KH: How many pieces are performed?

STS: Three to four generally. On a really bad night when someone cancels or we are really pathetic, there are only two groups. We really try not to do that. It is usually between three and four. In May we do a special dance month edition of WIP called WIP Cream and for that we plug in like seven to eight.

KH: Then you do a critical response with every group?

STS: Yes, but I always forget when it comes around to the May WIP. I think like three people go at once and then we do like a quick round for everybody. At that point, it is really about more finished work. We don’t ask people to perform new work or things that we have never seen. It is all people that have done some things at WIP before.

KH: I think some of the things are obvious about why to support works in progress, but do you want to talk a little bit about what you see are the merits of that? Even what is the outcome of it?

STS: For me a personal outcome of it was that Steve saw a WIP that I did three years ago for "Tourist Trap." I just did it because people had been asking me when I was going to do something. So, I just made something up. When people asked me what I thought the work was going to be, I lied, basically. I was thinking, "Yeah, this is over after tonight and no one will bother me again about it." Steve called me and said that he really liked it and wanted to direct it. Oh. Okay. So, for me, I feel like my solo work here has really come out of WIP. That is the personal testimony. A lot of the other stuff, some of it gets turned into complete work. I know that when I work with Caravan, whenever we perform something at Jump-Start, it is to prepare for something else. She wants to know about what she calls morphing, when she takes a regular piece of choreography and does parts of it, so you can show off lines of people or shapes or fun stuff. She always wants to know how those things work and the answers matter. There are also a lot of times when it is just a one-shot thing. I think that is okay. I think that is good. I like that sometimes it just gets people up on stage at all in the first place. Dancers who have always been a part of somebody else’s company, one of the solid reliable dancers, finally says, "I would like to do something." I think just to make that step is great, whether or not something else comes out of the work. It has been a real range of results that way.

KH: Talk to me a bit about the art that you have made since then. You’ve made a couple other solo pieces after that first piece. Where do you get your ideas? What are your pieces about? How do they involve other people? Who comes to them?

STS: I think once I started talking to Dianne more, when she moved here, we bonded right away, because she is a writer also and she is as political as I am. In some odd ways, we found a lot of things in common. So, we started talking. When Steve asked me if I wanted to do "Tourist Trap," she was not a company member at that time. He told her that if she would like to have this other play of hers produced, she should talk with me about having a double bill and force me to get on stage. We started talking then and sort of developed these broad themes. The first year it was about the politics of geography, then the next year it was about gender and race politics, this year it was about religion. Never let it be said that I try to do subtle work. On a smaller level, what inspires the work is a strong image of some kind. Like I have been thinking about place and journeying and being in exile. In a way I think all my work is about that. The journey is a different metaphor. Is it good to belong? Who cares if you belong? What does it really mean? All that stuff. For "Tourist Trap," what really gelled it for me was the mass slaying of tourists in Luxor. When I write or when I create, a lot of things free associate in my mind, so a lot of times people just follow me when I skip from one thing to another. Then I thought about the weirdness of learning belly dance in Texas. My teacher goes to Luxor to study sometimes. Then it was my uncle being an ambassador from Singapore to Egypt. He was in Luxor, too. So I started free associating and that is what made me write the piece.

KH: Those are three big coincidences of Luxor.

STS: Yeah. And to finally get to make fun of the whole tourist trap thing, Singapore being one, San Antonio being one. And then, because I dance a lot, I often make a solo dance that is like a stand-alone thing, and then I start to think about how to attach other things to it so it becomes a show, which happened with "Tourist Trap" and with "Lost in Translation." It didn’t happen this year. I actually had to make up everything for the show. Stressful.

KH: So, you didn’t start with a dance for "Southern Discomfort"?

STS: Actually I take that back. I guess I did. I made up the Moby dance first, knowing that it was going to be a part of the show. I didn’t do it for fun. One of the dances I came up with last year, I use it as a solo when I dance with Caravan. It is its own thing, I just turned it into something else when I put it in the show. It was already a solo dance that I could do.

KH: Talk to me about what your experience of the organization that is Jump-Start. The relationship of staff to non-staff, the relationship of Steve to staff to company to board.

STS: I think it has really, really grown. It feels weird to say "when I first came here," because I haven’t been here that long. But in the beginning, the education program was just two schools. Then it became one school for a long time and I just trailed after Michael and picked up after him. Now we have so many sites and regular meetings. Before it would just be at the end of a staff meeting, so what is going on with the education program— Now we have to have education meetings. Break-out meetings for your site.

We have really grown. I think a lot of it is us having stuck it out this long. And a lot of it is Dianne and all the grant-writing she has been doing. Just to have someone else to stay on top of that. The staff has expanded, not just numerically, but by how things get done in the office. It was a lot looser when I was interning. There just was not the need for as many people to do so many things. I think that, as staff, it always makes me feel strange when they say, "Oh, talk with staff about it". I feel so integrated into the rest of the Jump-Start community, I guess. If you are a company member, you are on the board as well, you volunteer at other people’s shows – or at least you should. You perform in other people’s work, you tech other people’s work. The division only comes when there is something that only a staff member is responsible for. Then you hit against that. For the most part, I feel like you don’t really even notice.

The board members who are really involved with the company, they come to everything and they help out so much. It is not like other boards, where it is all about money and like 60 people in a room asking questions about flow charts. It is not like that. It is weird because when I made that leap to decide to come to Jump-Start, all I knew was its mission statement in a handbook of arts internships. I had picked a couple of different places to look at. Jump-Start had its mission statement. It was all about giving voice to the marginalized and finding new ways of doing work. That is what all my work in college was about. I don’t know what I thought Jump-Start would be. I thought, "Oh, a theater in a city, there will be stuff happening every day and there will be people running in and out in costume." So when I first came, no. It seemed kind of slow. The more I got involved in it though the more stuff the amount I do became. Then just more stuff kept happening anyway. Four or five years ago we would be doing stuff very slowly in the office because we didn’t need to and now it is like productions every month. We turn stuff around so fast. My eternal disappointment is just that I wish that more people would come to the edgier political stuff that we do instead of some of the work that we do that is more...

KH: More pop.

STS: More pap than pop I would say honestly. I know the reality is that is what keeps us going. The fact that we do the kind of funky weird work at all is kind of cool and amazing.

KH: What do you think are the challenges that Jump-Start is facing now or what you see them facing in the next five or ten years?

STS: I think what it will take to make us bigger or more successful is going to be a problem for people in lots of different ways. Not just the having to be better organized or having to wake up earlier in the morning, but paper work and work in general. Compromises in terms of who we get money from and what kind of work we do. I hope that doesn’t happen, but I could see those as problems we will have to deal with.

KH: Do you think people will bring in professional staff?

STS: I don’t think so. That to me is just part of who we are. What that means to me though is that the company might grow and/or change. There will always be people who have an interest in protecting that and should be. Personally I have no interest in seeing the company grow much larger for right now. I think we are pretty big. Some of us hardly see each other anymore and some of us are not doing that much work. I don’t know that what we need to do is add and become bigger. Especially not when not everyone does work consistently. We kind of feel like we rotate in and out. It isn’t like the people that haven’t done work are done. I just don’t like working with big organizations.

KH: I don’t know what language you would use to describe Jump-Start, but some of the language of this project is grassroots theater, community-based theater. Do you see the work that you are making and also the work that Jump-Start is making as art that is rooted in community?

STS: I think it describes a lot of our work, but not necessarily all of it. I don’t know that the work that I do speaks to a specific community.

KH: It is interesting because I see your work as maybe not speaking to a specific community, especially if you are going to deal with your personal history and where you come from. There is no one else in town with the same background. But at the same time I think there is a group of people investigating personal history in relation to people of color, aspects of being female, how you give voice to your identity politic. There is a group of people involved in that process here. To me it is very evidently a grassroots theater project. It is about people telling their stories. I have a critique personally of often what is seen as community-based theater, or of often what is seen as not community-based theater because it is about pushing the bounds of what the community identifies itself as. At Jump-Start you get a really wide range of work. You only see what the project is if you see multiple aspects of it.

STS: I think that how we are involved in the community is very varied. So yes we have projects that are, in the very literal sense, tied to community. They are about researching or presenting to different parts of the community. We have work that just comes from different sections of the community, so it is giving voice to those.

KH: Name sections.

STS: Kitty’s new piece being about the history of the east side. Or Sterling’s work that has to do with Commerce Street rising, which to me speaks to the African-Americans in the city who have a really interesting history but not a lot of people think about much. That for example. Paul’s work crossing the border of queer and Latino. The work we do that is feminist in lots of ways. Then we have work that are community initiatives. Like our Arts in Education program. People don’t think of it as work that a theater does. Especially lately when a lot of our work has been about visually based art. Our presence is really strong in those schools. Like here, almost all in the kids in this neighborhood know who I am. They’ve never, nor should they, come see my theater work but they know who I am. I think that when I came to Jump-Start and I thought about grassroots theater I thought about, you know, San Francisco Mime Troupe or something. We’ll be out there picketing with the people and guerilla street theater and stuff. No, we don’t do that.

KH: Although I think "La Frontera" is very much a Mime Troupe-type piece. It is widely drawn characters, there is a really particular social message, it is a musical...

STS: Right. But this is a revival of a show that hasn’t been done in a long time. It is not the kind of stuff that we have been doing. It is this one moment in time. Then, the more I’ve worked with Jump-Start ,the more I’ve come to realize how we are this grassroots theater, just not in ways as maybe literal as I thought them to be in college. I came here based on a concept. The mission statement was a concept. And then to have seven years to put it into reality and see that it is really true.

KH: What do you think Jump-Start does best? What do you think makes them unique?

STS: I think that in a place that seems really unlikely we do work that is both about subject and form. When I think about really amazing Jump-Start work it isn’t usually about just the writing or just the acting. It is usually about how it looks. We have people who are interested in looking at things in new ways. I guess that there is a good vibe about us. You don’t walk in and feel that everyone is unhappy all the time because the world is horrible, but that just makes us make good art that we are happy to share with people and that we support each other. I think that the people who have been involved with other boards and then come to the Jump-Start board are just amazed with how hard-working everyone is and how committed we are to the work that we do. But we party, we bring great food to opening-night dinners. It is both informal and formal at the same time. Our passion is formal, but how we celebrate it is not.

KH: Do you have any stories about leadership? How do you see the organization and how do decisions get made? From this view point or questioning of what is an ensemble. Here it is like some givens are that there is this team of diverse artists who play different roles and work various hours, but somehow still make a team. How do you see that? What challenges are there in that?

STS: Let’s get the Steve thing out of the way first. Steve is like this amazing force. And sometimes he is overly aware of it, and sometimes he just doesn’t notice what he does. I think that all of our organization in some ways is just this negotiation of how much can we expect Steve to do. What will Steve let us do is sometimes how it feels. I really feel like the structure of the company, the structure of the staff is such that we all answer to each other. Because we are really strong people, combinations of certain people in the office when deadlines are due...it produces drama. But I have worked at another political leftist organization in town. Let me tell you, at some point I just dreaded getting on the bus and going there in the morning. It was just filled with the pain and the woe of the world. You know, and I am a leftist and I feel pain, and anger and annoyance with the things that bug me but it was just so un-fun to be there and Jump-Start is not like that. It is like at Dartmouth. You work hard and then you drink hard. At Jump-Start we work really, really hard, but then we play hard. We have fun. And we all have those personalities. We all do it. When we need to pull together we have always managed to do that. Some of that is just maturity and some of that is really sticking to this Critical Response method.

I think that probably the biggest challenge we face is being torn between wanting things to be the way that they were and hurtling forward towards a future that may not be all that it is cracked up to be. People looking back on wanting to do company ensemble shows...when I came to Jump-Start that really was something that I wanted to see. That is one of those things you think [about] political, grassroots companies — that everyone collaborates on company shows and then you take them out onto the streets. But when I came they were really sick of working with each other so we had a lot of solo work. Every once in a while people would ask very wistfully about company work. But the truth is that so many of us have just moved on. People have jobs teaching art in schools, or people are just tired of working together, they’ve said everything they want to say. We are never going to go back to the way things were. And it isn’t that where we are isn’t interesting and exciting.

There are some things about how we work that are great. I don’t want to ever charge for a performance party. I don’t want to ever do it two nights in a row. I want us to have dance at the theater. I’m still going to try and make a festival happen one day. There are some things I don’t want to leave behind because it makes more sense for us to do opera or something. I think that is a constant challenge, but a good one. As long as we are always thinking about what Jump-Start means to us and what we want it to be then it will always be a fun place to hang your hat.

KH: I would still say as an outsider, from the last few conversations that I’ve had, that it seems to me that if someone started a group-process-oriented piece and Steve or someone agreed to visit every third or fourth rehearsal just to guide the process, but that it was really generated from within a group of people and not over a five-month period, I actually think there would be a group of people that would respond to it. It might be some new people. It might be some old people. It is hanging around the edges enough that I keep hearing about it.

STS: It is. The reason that we didn’t come to ROOTS last year was because we had our artistic retreat for the first time at the same time. It was actually a really good thing. We are supposed to have our second one now, but I don’t think it is going to happen. We are at least going to do this once-a-year-type thing. It really got people excited about doing work again. I think it is going to happen. Whether it comes out of a weekly meeting thing, which we start and stop all the time, or it will come out of us doing our own version of ROOTS right here. There is always that need, because we wouldn’t be in the company if we didn’t like each other on some level some of the time and want to work together. The cross pollination of people writing for each other’s shows, or teching each other’s shows — I think we sort of take that for granted sometimes, but also it is fucking amazing.

KH: Any closing words about Jump-Start?

STS: Just that I didn’t think that I would be here this long. I thought I would be somewhere else. Every time I start thinking about doing something else I start thinking about what kinds of things it might mean that I would have to give up at Jump-Start. So, I am still here.

KH: Do you have an actual commitment or vision about your relationship to Jump-Start?

STS: I always want to make work with Jump-Start. I’ve always admired how Paul has managed to make a career for himself through Jump-Start and kind of parallel with it. I would like to not be lazy and actually do something with my work since I hurt myself physically to achieve it at Jump-Start. I envision being on this long leash. Wandering away, but coming back always. It is the closest thing to a home that I was not embarrassed to call a home without a sneer. Jump-Start is a home. I am generally sarcastic and cynical about stuff like that. Jump-Start is the first place I can say without irony is a home for me. That in itself just means a lot.

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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