January’s always been an important month for Jump-Start Performance Co., the San Antonio experimental theater company that’s presented more than 500 original works since its 1985 inception.
“Jump-Start started having an annual Performance Party when it started having a physical space, which was in 1987,” retired co-founder Steve Bailey told the Current from his home in Slovenia. “Since they occurred in January, they were a welcome to the new year — and a way to celebrate Jump-Start’s anniversary. Equally important, they were a way to showcase the diverse performance scene of San Antonio. Sometimes there were over 40 short performances stretching long into the night. This showed that Jump-Start not only presented its own work but was also a community space where a broad range of original work was presented.”
Delightfully unpredictable and often fast-paced, this beloved Jump-Start tradition is set to take over the Pearl’s Stable Hall on Saturday, Jan. 11, with Performance Party XXXX: Sangre Vital.
In addition to eclectic offerings from company members and collaborators, the 40th anniversary celebration promises performances by esteemed San Antonio poet Naomi Shihab Nye, author Amalia Ortiz’s queer Xicanx feminist punk band Las Hijas de la Madre and special guests Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez of the “live art laboratory and border research institute” La Pocha Nostra. Based in Mexico City and San Francisco, California, the transdisciplinary troupe has curated a “Pocha Power Hour” combining short works by San Antonio-based theater artist Marisela Barrera, accordionist Nicolas Valdez, fashion designer Fabian Diaz and drag kings Xiomara Bazaldua and Jess Hawkins, among others.
Origin story
Curiously, Jump-Start’s initial spark can be traced all the way to South America circa 1984.
“I had gone to Peru for a cultural exchange and worked with a theater company there called Teatro del Sol,” Bailey told dancer, choreographer and longtime collaborator Sandy Dunn in a video she shot in the fall of 2024. “I was working with this amazing theater company that did amazing work and did not compromise. They had no money, they had no resources and they were not compromising their art. And I was just saying, ‘If they can do it in Peru, we should be able to do this in the United States.’”
Upon his return to San Antonio, Bailey, a Trinity University alum, contacted Dunn about the concept he hoped to launch.
“I called Sandy Dunn on the phone and said, ‘Hey, do you want to start a performance theater company? And we’re not gonna compromise! We’re just gonna do what we want and we’re gonna make it work,” Bailey recounted. “And Sandy said, ‘Sure, let’s do this!’ We had a meeting in my living room, and we went around the circle and asked everyone, ‘Why are you here?’ And a woman named Susan Taylor said, ‘You know what? I feel like a dead battery. I need a jump-start.’ And that was how the name came up.”
With Bailey, Dunn and artist-activist Dennis Poplin as co-founders and theater artists Chuck Squier and Kim Corbin as founding company members, Jump-Start evolved and grew consistently — setting up shop in an empty building on the corner of Commerce and South Presa streets in 1986. It relocated in 1988, becoming an early resident of the Blue Star Arts Complex.
That same year, influential gay Black playwright and performer Sterling Houston joined the company and invigorated Jump-Start until his death in 2006. In 1989, Jump-Start relocated to a now-demolished building on South Alamo Street before returning in 1994 to the Blue Star space now occupied by Brick (1994-2014). In 2014, the company relocated to its present Beacon Hill space on Fredericksburg Road.
Jump-Start reflections
In anticipation of Performance Party XXXX: Sangre Vital, we quizzed Jump-Start co-founders and company members about cherished memories, performance highlights and what’s kept the motor running all these years.
Steve Bailey
The largest Performance Party by far was when Jump-Start opened its space in Blue Star in the ’90s. There were over 1,000 people at the event — you could not move.
Everywhere was packed — the theater, the lobby, outside the building. People were sitting on the stage and there was only a 20-foot-diameter circle for the performances. I remember technical director Max Parrilla had to go to the second-floor office and watch from the window.
One time I was being shadowed by a college student [who wanted] to see what a producing director did in a day. They came early and found me on my knees cleaning the toilet because we had an event that evening. I stood up — toilet brush in hand — and said, “Welcome to the glamorous life of an artist-run company. We do what we have to do, and everything is part of it.” Jump-Start has always been about its company and other artists, whether creating a new show, presenting a community artist or cleaning a commode.
Sandy Dunn
Steve was quite an artistic force and the reason I wanted to be a part of Jump-Start. … The first pieces we did [together] were the company-developed piece Fish Dance; Macbeth in Flames by Steve Bailey and Angstrom: She Is Taller Than I by Steve Bailey and Mark Blakeney. Any rumor that Steve and I were gold naked aliens in that performance is true.
I must mention two extraordinary people who worked with Jump-Start. Sterling Houston — playwright, actor, musician, prose writer, artist extraordinaire — was with Jump-Start from 1988 until his death in 2006. Sterling wrote at least 15 plays, most of which were produced at Jump-Start. I also loved working with [late San Antonio artist] S.T. Shimi. … She joined our company and stayed for 20 years. Shimi wrote and performed many solo works at Jump-Start, and together we produced a series of performances around the element of water, including Watermark and Watermark 1.5.
Kim Korbin
I saw an announcement for a modern dance workshop in the Express-News Weekender. Donna Gardner, a guest artist, was conducting the workshop, and I met several new people there — Catherine Cisneros from URBAN-15, Sandy Dunn, Steve Bailey and really just a bunch of cool artists, architects and dancers. Steve was working under Ric Slocum at [Our Lady of the Lake University’s] 24th Street Experiment and he invited me to audition for a show there. That’s where I met Chuck Squier, who was also working at 24th Street. After a while, Steve and Sandy and Dennis Poplin decided to start a new theater company that would present all original work, and I attended the living-room discussion about launching Jump-Start. Sandy, Chuck and I are still company members.
I think my first performance there was Fish Dance — a collaboration between the company and three visual artists who provided exquisite props and costumes of handmade paper and clay. It was presented in a tight little upstart gallery in Los Angeles Heights. We didn’t have our own space and in the early years rehearsed in a borrowed living room and a vacant space on Presa above the River Walk until we rented a space in the fledgling Blue Star Arts Complex. … Unable to stay at Blue Star because our rear exit would have dumped people onto the railroad tracks in an emergency, our second theater was in an old auto-repair garage on South Alamo. I was onstage there one night with Gertrude Baker in a scene from Sterling Houston’s High Yello Rose when the lights suddenly went out — we had no electricity. Someone pulled up the garage door and asked the audience member who was parked in front to turn on their headlights. Other audience members went to their cars to get flashlights. The show went on — thanks to the community folks who jumped in to help.
Chuck Squier
When I first got to San Antonio in the early ’8os, I scouted out the theaters in town and was impressed with the work I saw at the 24th Street Experiment at OLLU. Their work was bright, energetic, innovative and noteworthy. I began volunteering and working with Steve Bailey and others.
We became disillusioned with the restrictions placed on our work by the university. Steve and Sandy called a meeting at Steve’s house one afternoon. Maybe 20 of us showed up to discuss what we wanted to do. … I think my first project with Jump-Start was called Fish Dance with Sandy and Steve leading. … The collaborative artists who were showing at the space helped us with costumes by painting T-shirts with ocean and fish motifs, and they created fish masks out of palm tree fronds that had recently been pruned. The gallery was packed with folks for the opening. It was all so exciting and invigorating.
While I have hundreds of specific memories of the past four decades — I could bore a person to tears! — for me what is most resonant is the thought of all the hundreds of artists who have created and shared work on the Jump-Start stage.
Lisa Suarez
I’ve been involved with Jump-Start since the early ’90s. … It was like no other company I ever encountered. It was and still is non-traditional and all-inclusive and pushes the boundaries of performance, theater and the creation of original works. Jump-Start was doing stuff other theaters wouldn’t even think of doing or were even afraid to try.
I became not just an actor at Jump-Start but a multi-media performing artist, singer, songwriter and playwright. I wrote and premiered I’ll Remember for You: An Alzheimer’s Story, which will always be my favorite accomplishment at Jump-Start because it was about my caring for my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.
I’ve done things and acquired skills at Jump-Start that I don’t believe I would have ever done anywhere else. Our original productions encouraged us to always think outside the box and tap into unknown skills and talents. For me that included climbing ropes, stilt-walking, dancing on ice and eating fire.
I’m excited about this upcoming celebration of Jump-Start turning 40. It’s great that we are highlighting Guillermo Gómez Peña, who honored us back in the early 2000s with his incredible productions — in which I had the pleasure of being involved. They were the Museum of Fetishized Identities (2002) and Epcot: El Alamall (2004). These were my introduction and training in “performance art” like no other.
Giving voice to the voiceless and advocating for tolerance and acceptance of the “other” will always be my main reason for valuing Jump-Start as we continue into the next 40 years.
Free-$40, 8-11 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 11, Stable Hall, 307 Pearl Parkway, (210) 227-5867, jump-start.org.
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This article appears in Jan 8-21, 2025.