“As a 15-year-old, I was very affected by it,” says performance artist and dancer S.T. Shimi Subramaniam over a basket of tacos at Tito’s in Southtown (she subs whole-grain tortillas from Central Market) on a gorgeous September morning. “Several of the people who were arrested were theater artists, they were liberation theology. It was basically progressive activism on trial.”

Shimi is describing a 1980s crackdown on suspected Marxists in her homeland, Singapore, and the surreal broadcast “confessions” that followed.

“There were actually some key legal decisions that were made, because of these cases that had to do with habeas corpus, detention without trial,” she recalls. “Of course, the government sort of won out every time, but in order to do that, they would have to rewrite the law.”

The disturbing (and now eerily familiar) events became the inspiration for In the Garden, which she reworked and performed at Jump-Start Performance Co. following the terrorist attacks of 9-11 — “My way,” she says, “of trying to figure out why is it none of us felt like we could say anything.”

Sadly, and to our poor credit, history requires a sequel, which Shimi presents as On the Island next month at Jump-Start Performance Co. — where she also works as artistic director for company programming. While I munched breakfast and operated the recorder, Shimi’s tacos grew cold ...

It must have been both not surprising and alarming to you when [Congress] modified the Patriot Act after federal judges said “no go” to some of its provisions.

I felt very Cassandra-like, and even now, the conversation around the war, it kind of irritates me, because I’m thinking, those of us who said exactly all this stuff would happen, you were ready to run us out of town on a rail, but you still won’t go to that place, like that Senator, like to Joe McCarthy, “Have you no decency? Isn’t this enough?” That’s the psychic background to it. So at some point I started thinking about writing a sequel to the show, especially after Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. I thought if that first piece focused on the citizen as apathetic, confused bystander, am I ready to tackle something like this, which is a lot more about the prisoner-of-war, detention-without-trial issue?

I think through the piece there are echoes of a lot of things that will seem familiar to people — certainly Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, there’s certain visual images that will bring to mind that. To me the ending is actually from the Dirty War in Argentina — I’ll give that away — but I think there’s something still just very Asian about the visual of it, the music and all that stuff. It’s that kind of piece.

The other new element is that I’ve been playing with aerial dance. I would say that even though I used it in Watermark and with Sandy [Dunn] in Finding Love in Wartime — this is really my first attempt to explore it as a theatrical thing.

Steve and I were really interested in how do you use it as a style in itself to tell a story so things like: Can you hold this position long enough to talk? (No.) Can you talk while you’re going upside down and wrapping yourself? (Uh, huh.) Stuff like that. Considerations that you don’t have to think about when you’re just doing beautiful dance.

How is it at Jump-Start now? You guys are going to come up on a year without [playwright] Sterling [Houston].

I think it’s affecting different people in different ways. Actually in November our Day of the Dead exhibit at Jump-Start is going to be devoted pretty much entirely to him, because that’s the time to do it. So we’ll see how we all feel as we go through his things and play his music and all that stuff — it just strikes us at different times.

I think doing his piece last year, Hollywood and Time, was a healing, exciting thing, having his face in the man in the moon was a nice touch. At the same time, if you look at the season release, the last two years there are more and more names on that release than just Sterling, or just Paul [Bonin-Rodriguez], or even just me.

That’s really good, and for a little while it wasn’t like that. Every company kind of goes through those things. Sterling mentored many of us in many different ways, so his fingerprints are lightly on everything, and that’s the best tribute to him, actually, that we don’t just grind to a halt and do only his stuff, or are unable to move on. •

On the Island will show at Jump-Start October 12-21. October 19 will also feature The Windows, live installations addressing human-rights and social-justic issues. Check Jump-Start.org for details.