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Interview with Chuck Squier board member, company memberChuck Squier: My name is Chuck Squier and I am a founding member of Jump-Start, so that is about 16 years. In those 16 years I’ve done just about everything. Currently, I am just a board member, although we alternate on and off the board. I am directing now, but I stage manage and design and perform on occasion, too. Keith Hennessy: What makes Jump-Start special to you? Why do you stick around? Why are you a part of this organization as opposed to others? CS: One, I don’t know of any other organization quite like this. KH: What makes it unique when you say that? CS: I don’t know. I guess we bonded early and in talking about Jump-Start with friends and family I say that Jump-Start is my artistic family. Being with a group of people for 16 years is really valuable. I think most of the other theater companies or things of the sort in town have people wandering in and out all the time. Our longevity allows us to have a shared vocabulary of experience and all kinds of stuff. That is the reason that I stay. KH: What do you think are the big changes or evolutions that the company has gone through from the beginning to now? CS: Well, when we first started out I believe we did mostly company-produced shows. So, it was a change to get other touring shows and guest artists in. Certainly our moves physically were big deals. KH: Talk about that. I don’t think anyone else has. CS: We started out before it was Jump-Start many of us worked at the 24th Street Experiment at Our Lady of the Lake University. We had butted heads with the university several times because they were wanting to censor us. I don’t know what the straw was, but, at any rate, we got together off the university campus — I think it was in Steve’s living room — and several of us sat around talking about what did we want, what did we envision. It was at that meeting that someone said, "I just want to jump start the art community," that stuck. Although I lobbied against Jump-Start as a name from day one. From living rooms we rented a room in one of these big old King William homes. Just a living room, we practiced and met there for a year. It must have been 20 x 30 feet big. That was where we were located. Up the street at 1031, where the bed and breakfast was, we had an old battery shop, refrigeration shop, was the first place we had. I take that back. Before that we were here at Blue Star and we had the space that is now the UTSA art gallery. Then, in each move, there were skeptics and we were all nervous about how we were going to be able to make that rent. Each time, we have made it. I think that is, in large part, due to Steve Bailey and the backing that the company gives him. Certainly, without Steve I can’t imagine Jump-Start being here. KH: Talk about the changes on other levels. CS: Well, administratively we have gone from an office with Steve volunteering his time and energy and actually floating the company for several years, I believe, and now we have staff with a few full time employees and several part time employees. I don’t even know how many we’ve got now. That is a big change. Another big change was: Steve has always been a good grantsman, seeking grants and so forth. It was only five or six years ago that we broke into the NEA. Even as they have cut back we have been funded at even higher levels. Modestly, but I think that is real significant. We have three different periods focusing on AIDS activism, arts activism. Just recently I had one of my former students come into town. He was asking about the play "Comfort". He said "Ya’ll are doing a play about white people? At Jump-Start?" That was funny. KH: To see that you are now being seen as people who produce works about people of color? CS: Yes. Or gay and lesbian stuff, or other— KH: As opposed to, you would do just a straight-up Texan history piece. Although, of course, "Comfort" is just capturing another minority community, in many ways. CS: Absolutely, but the headline news is that it is about white people. KH: How did you decide to participate in this project? How do you decide which project to get involved with? CS: Actually, those decisions are made by the director or the lead artist in the show. Because this was Dianne’s script she was to select. I think Steve has directed her previous shows. He was too busy and could not. I got into it kind of by default. Steve put it in a way like, "There is nobody else who can do it like you can." It being a new script and there were some community members whose names got tossed around, but them not having worked with new scripts and stuff like that— 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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