Re: Group/No homeland: A Post-9/11 Intercultural Poltergeist

I

One of the many side effects of September 11 was the sudden tearing apart of multiracial communities, facilitated by the overnight imposition of new and resurrected borders, enemies, and abysmal ethical contradictions. The San Francisco performance art community, already devastated by the rabid gentrification generated by the 1997 to 2000 cyber-gold rush, was no exception.

In late September of 2001, the San Francisco-based performance troupe La Pocha Nostra put out a word-of-mouth convocation to the dismembered Bay Area performance art community: "In the face of so much political confusion and spiritual despair, we badly need to re-group and compare notes regarding the new culture of fear, paranoia, censorship, and superficial jingoism permeating every corner of society." The crucial questions were: "What is our role in this extremely scary new era? Where do we stand in Bush's war against terror? Are artists part of the 'us' or the 'them'?"

Fifteen performance artists showed up for the first gathering. Though we came from diverse professional and ethnic backgrounds, we had one thing in common: we saw ourselves as partial outsiders and rebels within our own ethnic, gender, and professional communities. We were all extremely discontented with the pervading silence and implied censorship regarding the euphemistic terrain of "9/11" and the growing panic-culture designed by Washington's cartel of powerful backlashers, corporate bandits, and religious fanatics. Amid so much confusion, one thing was clear to us: the art world was tiptoeing around the crucial issues, and we needed to "break the silence"—among ourselves, to begin with.

After a series of informal discussions, we realized we didn't want to form another performance troupe, nor did we want to jump-start yet another collaborative project. We merely wanted to be together in a temporary safe environment where we could gather two or three times a month for the sole purpose of jamming and creating the artwork we couldn't create in the paranoid and binary post-9/11 world forced upon us by the media and the political class. The goal was to create a space of tolerance and reflection, and ultimately to rebuild our frail community of rebels and critical artists. We were neither an ensemble nor a troupe. We were more of a "laboratory," for lack of a better term; a loose horizontal association of like-minded artists thinking together, exchanging ideas, fears, and aspirations, in a dangerous time.

But something was extremely unusual about this new "laboratory" of performance art. Without prescribing it, and without the pressures of grant deadlines (as of June 2003, we still haven't written one grant, which has been extremely liberating), it so happened that "El Lab" was truly multiethnic, multigender, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary. Why? Perhaps it was an expression of the times paired with the very nature of San Francisco. We don't know.

The ages of the fluctuating members ranged from the early 20s to the late 50s. There were Mexicans, Chicanos, Iranians, Colombians, Filipinos, Koreans, Anglos, Cuban-Hawaiians, Franco-Canadians, and hybrids in between. Participants were coming from the visual arts, theatre, dance, and music—and at least half were gay or self-defined "poly-sexual." A second circle of "guests" from out of town included performance artists from Los Angeles, Arizona, Portland, and Mexico City. A third circle included occasional visitors and friends who were too busy to be permanent members but couldn't resist an occasional visit to our mad jamming sessions in search of inspiration and energy.

II

During the first year, the structure for our gatherings was quite informal: we met twice a month in the early evening at different locations in the city, mainly SomArts, the Lab, and Galeria de la Raza. We ate, drank wine, stretched, and jammed for hours, sometimes up to six. We developed an open ritual structure for jamming, loosely based on Pocha Nostra's original methodologies (three original members of Re:Group were also members of Pocha Nostra) and exercises filtered through the artistic praxes of each...