Jade-blue Eclipse, courtesy of Body Modifications.

Delivering Performance Art to the Masses at Yerba Buena Center

For the past four years, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has curated Bay Area Now, San Francisco’s largest and most high profile showcase of new works by San Francisco’s emerging local artists. As part of this year’s Bay Area Now 4, resident performing arts curators Executive Director Kenneth Foster and Angela Mattox commissioned four guest curators to dig up some of SF’s most compelling and provocative talent lurking at the fringes of SF’s performance art world.

Keith Hennessy of the circus troupe Circo Zero, Sean San Jose of Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo, musician Francis Wong, and Isabel Yrigoyen, who has worked for both Yerba Buena and Brava Theater Center, created the two-part Under the Radar performance exhibition. As one might imagine, these four prominent Bay Area fixtures brought Yerba Buena just what they wanted. The eclectic show mirrored an image that pridefully defines San Francisco for both many of its denizens and the outside world: diversity, politics, quirk, non-pretentious intelligence and unrestrained creativity—all mixed in with a heaping spoonful of queer sensibility.

According to curator Keith Hennessy, with Under the Radar, Ken Foster and Angela Mattox have driven performance art into a place of prominence not seen in previous years. In rounding up and uncovering this smattering of hot Bay Area talent, the curators also exposed some of the interesting dynamics between an established art institution and some of San Francisco’s artistic communities.

The show opened with John Carlos Perea Quartet and Revision Production Company’s somber tale in dance and song of Native-American identity being absorbed and erased in a brutal post-colonial America. In a stark shift of mood, Lynnee Breedlove struts out, assumes a lazy slouch in front of the microphone, and while donning a goofy grin begins hir monologue with a familiar anecdote: a guy asks Lynnee if they’re a man or a woman. Lynnee replies, “Does it look like I fuckin’ know?” Then comes the bombardment of hard-hitting one-liners and rhymes in hir signature “queer homohop punkrock sugarcoated feminist tranny theory standup comedy” act, all explaining (or confusing) hir own identity both to the audience and to shimself, where the vehicle of cheese-ball, uninhibited humor lends tender insight and perspective to a gender politics debate that often takes place in a fiercely contentious atmosphere. Oh yes, and Lynn took a chance to bear shis “breasticle” (For those who don’t know, “breasticle” is the chosen identity of the flesh coming from Lynnee’s chest).

Following Lynnee, the deep, hearty, and soulful voices of Jewlia Eisenberg’s Charming Hostess threesome revived agonizing and bittersweetly beautiful stories from war-torn countries and global diasporas with booming vocals, beatboxing, clapping, and breathy gasps. If Charming Hostess’ instruments were their own bodies, the next act, Toychestra, have located their voice within an anarchic mess of plastic noisemakers. Five women sat behind of a pile of miniature guitars and saxophones, xylophones, and other squeaky and rackety noisemakers that parents think twice about buying for their kids.

Sporting bright wigs and fake mustaches, this all-woman band layers hundreds of simplistic sounds, melodies, clicks, clacks and screeches from countless toys and trinkets into an intricately composed orchestra, serving up a severely de-phallicizing blow to the male-dominated technocracy that is the modern music industry.

Contortionist and hand-balancer Jade-Blue Ecclipse delivered an utterly personal piece about her own relationships with her performance, training, and body beginning, with the frank comment that she “doesn’t care anymore that her ass is fat and throws her off balance.” Her sexy writhes, twists and balances blur the lines of self-pleasure and self-loathing, making one think about the pain and masochism involved in training one’s body to manipulate itself into positions that, while beautiful to an audience, actually involves a great deal of torture for the performer.

Following Jade, Tommy Shepherd and Dan Wolf of the hip-hop collective Felonious delivered a performative interpretation of a James Brown song. In the final performance, Trannyshack superstars Glamamore, Fauxnique, and Miss Kiddie collaborated on a macabre operatic narrative. Their story of darkness, femininity, death, and agony with over-the-top outfits and theatrics succeeding in reminding us of the limits to which drag performance can be pushed.

The collision of such a diverse crew of performance artists in Under the Radar was exhilarating to say the least. Ken Foster says it exceeded his wildest dreams. The nature of projects such as Under the Radar, and many of Yerba Buena’s projects in general, provide much-needed exposure, funding, and community to emerging artists in San Francisco.

Keith Hennessy explains, “Yerba Buena came out of a moment of critique of the local arts funding that was basically mandated to serve local artists in a new way and not just be a touring space for high end arts communities.” He emphasizes, “Yerba Buena is not the Opera House.” Existing as an institution meant to serve artistic communities in ways not done by other establishments, Yerba Buena also begs us to question what it means when “fringe” performers coming from many different communities are brought into the same space and into an established spotlight from across huge cultural divides—a question not ignored by the curators

In organizing the event, Ken Foster questioned their own motives: “Is it even right for us to do something like this? Is it even appropriate to transplant [the performers] into this somewhat sterile space?” The purpose, though, isn’t to absorb them, he explains. “It’s more to say to a larger audience, ‘Here are some things that are going on.’”

The atmosphere at Under the Radar was deeply exciting with an underlying tension. Keith Hennessy explains that the performers are “coming from a really specific community where they have a very different expectations of the audience.” Keith remembers a gasp wafting throughout the crowd when Lynn Breedlove bared her “breasticle” to the audience in her unique brand of gender theory discourse. While many Bay Times readers know that Lynnee has breasticles, many Yerba Buena patrons may be very, very unfamiliar with breasticles and may not even know what it means to be “genderqueer” or “genderless.”

Similarly, I’ll admit that a familiar white-guilt nervousness filling my gut when Tommy Shepherd and Dan Wolf honestly asked the audience why they weren’t waving their hands and making noise during their hip hop performance. Most of us sitting in the bleachers at Yerba Buena are not part of hip hop communities, and there is a very real anxiety on part of myself and other white attendees that makes us question whether or not we are committing some heinous cultural appropriation crime when we wave our hands in the air for Felonious.

However, for Tommy Shepherd, my anxieties translate as an issue of consumption versus participation. Tommy explains that he’s totally excited for chances to perform in front of people who aren’t part of his community or who don’t necessarily have the experiences that allow them to relate to his work, because it gives people a chance to learn and receive good ideas about hip hop. “The way people see shows is just so stiff,” he laments, assuming a sense of nostalgia for “Elizabethan times when someone might throw a tomato at you if they didn’t like you.” “If the audience can’t communicate with you,” he continues, “no one is gonna come away with anything.”

Exposing the tensions between artistic communities, ticketholders, and well-funded art institutions are just as important as the art itself, because it gives us insight into ways in which art institutions like Yerba Buena can foster real relationships with artists. Ken Foster prefaced the performances by explaining that in order to facilitate a more realistic and all-inclusive presentation of San Francisco’s huge performance art scenes, the curators should come from the actual artists’ communities. According to Ken, this is a rare move for a Yerba Buena show. Even so, the tensions can remain thick when a mostly white crowd, most of whom don’t have breasticles, gaze down from some relatively expensive bleacher seats. Many people would contend that, perhaps, the cost of these events plays a big role in the level of consumption artists feel as opposed to a feeling of participation they deserve.

A few years ago I delightfully accepted one of many counterfeit tickets that someone found it necessary to forge for the opening of the 2001 Bay Area Now exhibition, without which myself and many other members of my community would probably have never seen the show. Keith Hennessy is also hopeful for a more affordable experience for the next Under the Radar, set for this coming March: “They charged $20 for this show, which is cheaper than any show that they do.” he explains. “I’m gonna push for the Spring show to be $15, because I think that would make a big difference in the audience.”

To be clear, the performers and curators were paid. As part of her performance, Jade told the audience that she was paid $300. Ken Foster would like for us to put the cost in to perspective, asking us to think about how much we might spend going out to a movie compared to a well-curated art show.
 We attend events like Under the Radar under a multitude of pretenses: education, participation in our communities, participation in the communities of others, inspiration, etc. We also go to consume. Things can be great when everyone in San Francisco learns what a breasticle looks like, and not so great if we just want to gobble up an imaginary multi-culti dreamland.

Under the Radar was an amazing show that really makes one feel the astounding depth and history that performance art has in San Francisco communities. In bringing together so many different people, shows like Under the Radar create a space where artists and their communities have the potential to learn from each other and to ask the questions necessary to build the provocative, participatory, supportive, well-financed, fierce, and flourishing arts movement that San Francisco needs.