‘Sylvester, the Mighty Real’

by Jim Gladstone

When you hear the name Sylvester, does your mind go to a Puddy Tat or to a bussy tap?

If it’s the former, get ready to be schooled. If it’s the latter, prepare for a thought-provoking dance down memory lane and into the future.

On Friday, August 11, local theater company EyeZen Presents will debut “Sylvester: The Mighty Real,” a performance-walking tour that celebrates the life and cultural impact of Sylvester James, Jr., the San Francisco-based dance music diva who boldly demonstrated that flamer and trailblazer are in no way mutually exclusive terms.

“Over the past year,” said producer Seth Eisen in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, “90 percent of the times I’ve told people that we were making a show about Sylvester, I’ve gotten a blank stare. A large majority of the straight community don’t know him. Among younger queers, there are some people who’ve heard of him, but if I delve into it and ask them to name a song? Usually they can’t.”

Yet Sylvester’s biggest hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” a queer anthem released in 1978, is one of only 625 “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” audio recordings now included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry (25 are added annually).

In an essay published by the Library in conjunction with the song’s addition to the registry, Joshua Gamson –a University of San Francisco professor and author of the authoritative 2005 biography “The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The ’70s in San Francisco”– wrote:

“Disco was, at its roots, as Black and gay as you could possibly get… the collective experience of the dance floor were bodily reminders of freedom: the individual and collective throwing off of stigma, the devotional embrace of strangeness, joy, and queer pleasure, the making of the fantasy self into an actual being. ‘Mighty Real’… was the sound of disco preaching.”

Not a conventional biography Sylvester, born in Watts, Los Angeles, was a campaign ally of Harvey Milk; a staple performer at the Castro Street Fair and San Francisco Pride parades; an unapologetically gay guest on national television talk shows; and an early, steadfast activist for AIDS patients who went on to speak frankly with the press about his own diagnosis at a time when most queer celebrities remained deeply closeted.

“There’s no way to tell all of Sylvester’s story in a one-hour and fifteenminute show,” said Eisen. “Maybe it could be done as a television series. But our show was never intended to feel like a biopic.”

Working from a script by local writer and theologian Marvin K. White and directed by Michael French, each performance of “Mighty Real” features two guide characters who will lead audiences of no more than 35 people on a walk along several blocks of Haight Street where Sylvester lived and spent time beginning in 1970, when he first came to the city and moved into the communal house shared by gay avantgarde theater troupe, The Cockettes.

Among other touchstone locations along the tour are the sites of long-gone gay bars and clubs that once lent Haight Street a sense of queer community very different from that of the Castro.

Monday 8am (last seating 9:45pm)

Tuesday 8am (last seating 9:45pm)

Wednesday 8am (last seating 9:45pm)

Thursday 8am Open 24 Hours

Friday

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Saturday

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Sunday 7am (last seating 9:45pm)

Open Daily! New Adjusted Hours

After Torrens presented a 20-minute version of the show at school, a professor who was familiar with the San Francisco Fringe Festival, suggested Torrens apply for a spot. She did, then promptly forgot about it.

Like many Fringe festivals in North America, the San Francisco iteration operates without curation. Would-be participants pay a small fee to enter a

With the San Francisco presentation of “Howdy, Stranger,” Torrens says hello to new audiences and a bold new sense of self. It’s not just a Western, it’s a coming-of-stage tale.t

“Howdy Stranger” is one of 15 works being presented at the Exit Theatre in the 2023 San Francisco Fringe Festival. “Howdy Stranger,” Aug. 13, 16 and 17. $14-$20. Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor St. www.theexit.org

Immersive theater experience tells fab tales

Proudly serving the community since 1977.

3991-A 17th Street, Market & Castro 415-864-9795

Between stops, audience members will wear radio-controlled headsets and a carefully curated soundtrack, including snippets of interviews with friends and colleagues of Sylvester who spent time with him on the very blocks that the tour traverses.

Bridging past and present

“The show isn’t about nostalgia,” said Eisen. “It’s about connecting the past to the present and hopefully helping make a path to a better future. Sylvester arrived in San Francisco at a moment when the counter culture and queer community were very strong. It was a time where there was a lot of race- and gender- and classconsciousness.

“When you think about what’s happening in our country now, there are a lot of connections. People wanting to be who they are, dress how they want to. What was it like for Sylvester as an out, Black genderqueer person to come here and try to figure out, ‘Who is my community here? Who are the people who are going to back me in bringing my vision to life?’

“We want audiences to feel like they are following in Sylvester’s footsteps and to think about some of the things he might have been thinking about. The show isn’t about trying to recreate Sylvester. It’s about conjuring his spirit in his absence and considering how to honor him in this particular space and time.”

Eisen hopes that audience members will come out of the show with a sense of today’s Haight Street as a palimpsest through which both past and present can be considered from fresh perspectives. And while reluctant to reveal some of the show’s surprises, he says that he thinks attendees will find themselves eager to re-listen to Sylvester’s albums or to delve into his music for the first time.

Along with the ticketed tour, EyeZen has partnered with the San Francisco Heritage organization to mount a visual exhibition celebrating of Sylvester’s creativity and style at the Doolan-Larsen Building on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, which will be open to the public, free of charge, on weekdays through September.t

‘Out of Site: Sylvester, the Mighty Real,’ Fridays-Sundays, Aug. 11-Sept 29. Tour begins at 1035 Haight St. Sliding scale, $15-$125. www.eyezen.org

<< Jerron Herman

From page 13

A few prominent disabledinclusive dance companies like AXIS Dance in Oakland and Candoco in London have expanded opportunities, but there are still few. What was your introduction to dance?

It was actually a very out-of-theblue invitation from another choreographer, Sean Curran. He and Heidi Latsky –hers was my first company that I was with– were both early Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dancers. They’re very good friends, and I was an education apprentice at the New Victory Theater during college. I was assigned to be his assistant for one of his workshops. And he was like, “No, I don’t need an assistant. Be a participant.”

And over the course of a week, he was interested in my movement and introduced me to his company and the concept of modern dance. And then finally, he brokered an audition for me with Heidi’s company. I auditioned for her, and I was with her for eight years.

With Heidi’s company, the preeminent physically-integrated dance company in New York City, but I think that her having her lineages and her legacy and practice in Modern dance really spoke to how my body already moved. And so there was a kind of simpatico or a bit of mirroring with respect to the form and then how my body worked, how my body moved already.

It became a lot about translating what I already do or how my body expresses. We were both very surprised with how there were some things that fell in line with typical line or typical of athleticism and some things that really had to be modified. So it was a journey in her company of piecemealing or thinking about the variety of ways that I was either exhibiting some elements of Modern dance already and ways that I was able of being taught. I really learned on the job. That was a trial by fire and one of the most exciting art moments of my life because it was so unexpected.

I’m curious about your inspiration for the specificity of the da Vinci ‘perfect man,’ which he used as a geometric sign to show the human form.

I’ve always been a big art history nerd, and I’ve always had a fascination with antiquity as a source of maybe some hidden truths, some ideas that we can assimilate to in modernity. One of my biggest barriers to that realm is its lionizing of symmetry, and for me being quite asymmetrical, I found incongruity.

I just didn’t fit. What do you expect? I’m a Black, disabled, twenty-first-century man. I wouldn’t be Hercules if I tried, but nevertheless, there was this thing around the idea; how do you get to an image? How do you get to enflesh or embody something? That journey was really exciting to me. And I come from the theater world, so I thought about what could my story ballet be if I were to create a world and create a narrative?

And the Vitruvian Man was oddly so present in my life, just this idea of constantly being, if not explicitly, then definitely implicitly always matched up with this idea of using all four of your limbs, using your faculties as best as possible.

My childhood in the Bay Area and at the storied Kaiser Permanente was littered with Physical Therapy sessions that were all about me utilizing my body to an extent of sociality and to efficiency. And in my work, solos have always had this bridge of the past and present that is a personal history of, say, my experiences with cerebral palsy and that being quite misunderstood, my use of athleticism not being clocked as legitimate because they have been underneath the time clock. But so this kind of falls into the same vein where I’m going back into the history and finding ways that I do match and fit into the image.

Did you know of AXIS or other companies or even spaces that would welcome you?

My parents were always very adamant about me finding my community when I was growing up, getting entrenched, understanding disability for myself when I was in adolescence. I was quite into being a maverick and doing it all myself and independent. I do remember, though, because I grew up in Alameda, so the Alice Arts Center, which was the Malonga Casquelourd Center back in the day, was in downtown Oakland.

I went there for one class, I think it was a contemporary hip hop class, and we did a combination to Justin Timberlake’s “Senorita,” but I didn’t realize that that was the holding house for AXIS. And so it was as though I had just missed them and missed an opportunity of understanding that. But I think about that often. I went to New York to find my community and that’s been kind of strange for me, knowing that the Bay Area is the birthplace of the modern disability rights movement. And I had to go all the way to New York to figure that out? That’s really funny to me. But what I realized is that my journey was about it being authentic, so I definitely couldn’t do what my parents told me to do, so I rebelled.

That’s why coming to ODC this summer is impactful and important, because it’s a true homecoming. I’m bringing this piece back to the roots of not only my childhood and how I was reared, but also kind of offering to disability rights and just disability justice legacies. I’m bringing what I’ve learned away from them back to the environment that really spurred it on without any of my help.

The empirical nature of traditional modern dance and ballet is that the height of perfection is a goal, but not anymore, and not for many choreographers.

A step’s being perfect is definitely an internal goal, or that the performance itself could lend or exhibit the intentions of the choreographer or the idea person; that’s always forefront. Excellence and rigor won’t be relaxed, but what will be is a sense of shame, I guess.

When we think about accommodating disabled people in spaces and in society, it’s not that we can’t do the rigorous things the whole time. It’s that we might have bursts that are in the pocket and then others that aren’t, or that we might need more accommodation before we get to the thing and then on and then off, more accommodation.

It’s temporal, and I think that that’s one of the things around disability that people still feel awkward about. It’s like they now expect a yes or a no.

It’s more malleable. And there’s something around it that is quite germane to a dance practice.

Do you find opportunities within “Vitruvian” that are improvised?

There are definitely moments of improvisation. There are still places to respond to the environment where the improvisation happens within structured places. There’s a section that’s literally called “Break,” and that is both for the audience, for myself, for the ancestors of all the people I talk to. It’s an eight-minute section. It will be shortened for ODC because the whole piece is 45 minutes, but I’m doing a 30-minute section.

Allowing an audience and myself to sit for eight minutes proved to be challenging to folks, but also really helped them to assess their speed and time, because before that, I’m ripping and raring for a good ten minutes. They’re with me in this energy, and then we slow it down. It definitely changes the room.

My Baltimore concert was particularly interesting because there was a new community of disabled artists that I had met that really came to the show; we came for each other. It was like I was just the context that they got to have their time, so that was kind of fun. I was like, great, you’re not even coming for me. You’re coming for your friends. I loved it, because they, in terms of spaces, got to be together for something that is about them. They have those moments that aren’t theatricalized, so to have someone register it as a theatrical moment was really special. And so, yeah, that’s what I do. If I’m making an improv moment, it’s to serve the story, and it’s also to serve the response, how I can respond to real time.t

‘State of Play’ at ODC Theater

August 3-13, $10-$30 (Jerron Herman Aug. 10 & 12, 6pm). For some shows, ASL interpretation available, and facemasks required. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St. www.odc.dance/stateofplay www.jerronherman.com