The Tucson Border-Crossing Chronicles
Day 1: Wednesday, August, 2007
The Like of it Begins
Welcome to my road trip. It's 3 pm, August 1, 2007.
I'm driving east on Highway 8 out of San Diego. My destination
is Tucson, Arizona where I’'ll be participating
in a ten-day intensive performance art boot camp directed
by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and members of his La Pocha
Nostra collective.
One hundred miles out of San Diego, the highway is
empty and I have time to reflect on what I am about
to get myself into. I‘ve heard performers build
trust by doing exercises like closing their eyes and
falling backwards so others can catch them before they
hit the ground. And that's the easy part! It’'s
about letting go of your fears and hang-ups. As a studio
artist, I’'m used to working alone. I wonder how
I'm going to react to having other people’'s personal
spaces overlapping with mine? I have no answer for myself...yet.
The farther east I go, the more the storm clouds begin
to gather. The forecast calls for stormy weather and
flash flooding. It’'s monsoon season in Arizona
and as the sun begins to set, flashes of lightening
illuminate the clouds in the far distance.
As I look out my window I can see the first lonely
ocotillos and saguaro cacti along the road. The saguaros
are a symbol of the American southwest. They grow very
slowly, perhaps an inch a year. There stems reach straight
up into the sky. The ones that grow arms look like bizarre
life forms, part human, part alien. They are an apt
symbol for the Gomez-Pena method of crossing multiple
borders and creating new hybrid forms of expression
and I'm glad to see them.
After a long hot drive, I finally pull into Tucson
at 9:45 pm. I’'m looking for the Surly Wench Pub
(is Tucson a college town?) to meet the rest of the
troupe. I make first contact with Laura, an artist from
Tucson who dieted and changed her appearance to look
like Paris Hilton for a series of performances. There
is Nina from Mexico City. She does a kind of Mexican-style
burlesque show. She has long dark hair with beautiful
bangs that make her look slightly sad and gothic and
it’'s a challenge to picture her up on the stage
working her mojo in such an extroverted way. Larry,
from Berkeley, is a “radical Clown” and
a professor of Theater at UC Davis. Other faces come
and go until it’'s time for Larry and I to head
to the place where we’'ll bunk for the next ten
days.
Charlotte Lowe Bailey, is a writer and poet who has
kindly offered to let us stay at her house. She has
a beautiful home on the outskirts of town that’'s
full of paintings, antiques and artifacts she has collected
over the years. Outside, dozens of metal sculptures,
welded together by her late husband, are placed around
the backyard….and there is a swimming pool! She’'s
a marvelous hostess, intelligent and witty. She, Larry
and I talk for half an hour or so before we finally
go to bed. It’'s 1:30 am.
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