Jesse Bliss from Brooklyn & Boyle, MAy 2011.
JESSE BLISS
As told to Mike the PoeT
Jesse Bliss is an actress, writer, director, producer, poetess and MC engaged deeply in the community. After growing up in Sacramento, she performed in New York City and the Bay Area before landing in Los Angeles. CASA 0101 on East First Street is where she’s staged performances in You Don’t Know Me, Hoop Girls, Heart on a Wire and Between Fingertips. She’s hosted the CASA 0101 Poetry Slam, performed in the Vagina Monologues and is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Roots and Wings Project. She is also an Arts Education veteran, with years of experience teaching Theater and Creative Writing to at-risk and incarcerated youth. She started writing her own plays after being disappointed by the quality of theater work that existed for women. Through the course of a few conversations and emails, she filled me in on the details of her groundbreaking journey. The words below are hers.
I came out the womb an artist. My first memories are of spending endless hours creating scenes—-this was all I did. I would both emulate and create my own scenarios, character physicality and accents inspired by what I saw on television or at the movies. Then at 6, my mother’s best friend Fran came to my school with the play “Montana Molly and the Peppermint Kid”. I sat in the front row in utter awe. It was the first time I’d ever seen a play. Until then I didn’t know plays existed. Between my fascination with the craft of acting, knowing the lead actress and discovering plays for the first time… in that moment I fell deeply in love with theater and knew why I was alive.
Things were tumultuous growing up. Acting and writing brought me solace. Then it went from solace to savior. I was caught up in seriously unhealthy living as a teenager as a way of trying to cope. I knew if I didn’t leave Sacramento it would be no time before I was pregnant, married and Lord knows what else.
Up until then, I’d written and directed plays at my elementary school, kept mad journals and notebooks. Spent a childhood writing stories and imagining scenarios. But at 18, I knew I needed to leave that city and go to San Francisco, to follow my passion and purpose. I knew it would make life make sense, bring me joy and give me a way to channel emotions that were impossible to deal with otherwise.
Linda Lowry, my acting teacher, had a profound impact on my work. She was hard on me in a good way and knew how to guide me toward making brave choices and breaking boundaries, continuously putting me out of my comfort zone. She saw the musicality in me and applied it in the way she coached me. It was under her direction that I began to write, feeling very frustrated and bored with the work that existed for women.
I met Linda walking up the street. Had just moved to The Tenderloin. For those that don’t know the city, it’s drug infested and far from safe, not an ideal place for 2 twenty-year old women to land, but damn we had fun! I knew it was important to find a teacher and theater-company upon my arrival in the city. There she was standing outside of what was then The Phoenix Theater Company. After inquiring about the theater Linda simply said to me, “Come inside, it’s cold out here”. Then and there was the beginning of my formal training.
I was studying quite intensely with Linda while simultaneously deeply moved by the underground hip-hop scene, Future Primitive Sound being an enormous part. At that time, in the late 90s, so many artists that have now become prominent forces in music where then underground. There were Future Primitive parties all over the city and on boats where we’d dance until morning. The energy was electric.
The inspiration of the culture, music and movement informed my work as an actress. I would feel scenes and monologues musically and find the notes. I’d listen to records for hours, staring at San Francisco while music spoke to me in scenes. I remember working on “Othello” and clearly hearing the Opera “Carmina Burana” for the death scene, note for note. Acting was my passion and the music and culture of the San Francisco hip-hop underground, the muse.
I toured for 4 years with The Angry Jellow Bubbles, an all-female troupe out of New York City. We wrote and performed all of our shows including gigs at the United Nations and Edinburgh Festival. That’s how I ended up in Los Angeles. Our show kept getting runs in Los Angeles so 9 of us moved here together, living with many of us crammed into one apartment! In that context, I learned to work collaboratively and the crucial importance of expressing the truth as a woman.
The Bubble show supported that sentiment and it came out in all sorts of ways from comedy to spoken word. It was women being real about things that we’ve historically been told to silence and stifle. Writing and performing in New York was a thrill. I adored New York and it brought out the beast in me creatively.
My play ROOTS AND WINGS was an extraordinary experience. The cast was ridiculously talented. Takeema Davis, the lead actress, and I got on like nobody’s business, our lives mirroring each other in so many ways. I took the piece to San Francisco and acted in it with Matthew Tondag. The Vagina Monologues experience also stands out. We were sold out at 1500 folks. I had the chills the whole time, feeling the power of the work — What an important show.
I studied playwriting with Leon Martell in Los Angeles. Leon is a very gifted actor/writer. He understands the visceral nature of writing and elicits freedom from the writers he works with. Leon teaches writers great lessons in getting out the way and allowing the story to tell itself. I learned about letting what is raw and pure come right out and at the same time how to place it all in a structure.
The back and forth between the Bay and LA has been a real blessing. There is such incredibly deep perspective and healing that takes place in the Bay. The more quiet way of life allows me a needed incubation and solace. The artistic offerings and humanitarian nature of the Bay really fill my cup. In Los Angeles, I can stretch infinitely as an artist and be constantly inspired and pushed. There are so many people out here breaking boundaries.
Los Angeles cradles innovation and there is a strong alliance of other female artists here. Both cities run deep in my blood and bones. This year, I taught Honors Poetry at Oakland Tech High. Having taught for so many years in youth prisons, I was able to hook them up with writing and tools that encapsulate grit and grime, allowing them to get free. Witnessing this journey taught me so much about becoming freer myself as an artist and human being.
I also taught poetry in Hunter’s Point, a notoriously under served community forced to live amidst a dangerous landfill. The principal at the school was from that same community and grew up in a family riddled with crack, poverty and prison. She was there at this school guiding people in a right direction.
These 8-year-old kids had lived so hard and seen so much and it would reflect in their writing. Some teachers would sadly be unable to access their highest learning and would be in shock over the fact that not only were they extremely motivated to write, but they’d create deeply intelligent works exploring serious matters of humanity.
I’ve been writing music my whole life, have recorded songs and sung live in plays on many occasions. Music reoccurs in all my plays not in the form of “musical theater”, but as another character: straight plays with an enormous musical influence that guides and sets the mood for the story. Hip-Hop oozes out not just in the music, but somehow in the writing as well. There are notebooks full of songs hungry to be laid down… Melodies and lyrics particularly.
Since the beginnings of writing my play TREE OF FIRE, music flooded my mind. It started with a song I wrote with my dear friend Fanny Franklin, whose artistry I respect enormously. Our song ELECTRIC SEED, was something we both felt strong about. We also worked on another cut for the score that is currently being finished. I knew I needed a very special someone to come on as Musical Director and help me birth the rest of the score.
Fanny suggested Double G as the perfect cat for it. He and I worked together before when I wrote a play called BETWEEN FINGERTIPS. He understands the story and has a passion for it. Because of that, and his extraordinary talent, we are able to be vulnerable together and work very well in creating this music. We are deep in the process right now as we prepare for the Roots and Wings Project fundraiser IGNITE.
Bay Area artist Audio Angel is coming to Los Angeles to perform live with Fanny Franklin and Double G at IGNITE. Audio Angel and I have been friends since back in the Future Primitive days in San Francisco. She is an extraordinary artist and healing force.
After The Roots and Wings Project raises money to produce TREE OF FIRE at our upcoming event IGNITE at S.P.A.R.C. in Venice on April 2, 2011, I want to see it up in site-specific locations— abandoned prisons—-around the country.
I have a deep connection to the Eastside Art Movement. Upon my arrival in Los Angeles in 2004, I began studying screen writing with Josefina Lopez. Years later, I showed up to her writing group to work on a specific piece and ended up reading a character from a play called YOU DON’T KNOW ME by Patricia Zamorano. Patricia was incarcerated at Central Juvenile Hall where I have been teaching for several years. They made an effort to find me to play the lead in Patricia’s play. It was a healing and cathartic experience to play that role. Since, I’ve done several plays there including my own. Josefina has become not only a supporter of my work, but a dear friend. CASA 0101 is truly family to me. Honored to say CASA 0101, is now the fiscal sponsor of my theater company, The Roots and Wings Project.
What is happening in the Eastside artistically and culturally is revolutionary. It is the one place in Los Angeles that we can count on to produce work that explores and represents the truth of humanity. That neighborhood is a cross-cultural intersection and the Eastside Art coming up out of there reflects that richly. Boyle Heights represents the power we have to rise above oppression, to create something out of nothing. My deepest respect and gratitude to the Eastside community and all its’ allowed me to experience as an artist and human being.
I got a show in May at the Symphony Hall in San Francisco. I want to continue creating and being a part of work that elicits thought, emotion and transformation. As Rhodessa Jones, a pioneer artist of theater with incarcerated women says, “It’s a delicious time to be alive”.
