A drag queen, dancer, filmmaker and cultural organizer walk into a bar — but they’re all Eric Garcia (artistic moniker Churro Nomi). Nearly 20 years ago, Garcia stepped foot on USF’s campus as a Performing Arts Social Justice (PASJ) student, now he is cultivating a performance with current PASJ students as part of their visiting artist residency at USF’s Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design.
The Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design was created in the memory of Ann Getty, an anthropologist, and supporter of all things related to design and art. Sara Fan, program director of the Institute said, “the goal of the Ann Getty Institute is to bring together the visual, performing, literary and media arts as well as architecture, design, art history and museum studies in an interdisciplinary way across the campus.” This is the first year of the program, and from this point forward, there will be three visiting artists in residency at the Institute every school year.
Garcia has been performing since 2007 and currently co-directs Detour Productions, a “San Francisco–based immersive dance-theater ensemble centering queer and POC communities through performance, film and education.” Detour Productions is committed to “queer maximalism,” and Garcia embraces this approach in their work by blending drag, dance, theater and film. They feel like a maximalist in their work because they “thrive in creating works that are visibly mashing up as much as possible. And in the same breath, as much of a maximalist as I am with all of the ingredients and people and aesthetics, I’m also pretty concise,” Garcia said. This is evident in the goals for his collaborative piece for PASJ’s 25th anniversary celebration, which is rooted in disability justice, queer futurism and community sanctuary.
Garcia is developing the performance with a diverse, intergenerational ensemble of 26 people with a range of different abilities and assistive devices. PASJ students and the ensemble as a whole act as co-creators with Garcia; he describes his role in the production as “the outside eye, helping shape it and sort of give that perspective to be like, ‘This is how this is landing, is this what you’re going for?’ And putting it all together.” The performance has 15 group scenes which are rouletted and decided right before they are going to perform to introduce an aspect of newness and excitement for each show.
Garcia says the performance stays rooted in disability justice by “creating a process that all folks in the room can feel centered and that nobody is an exception or nobody is someone or something to be modified or made to feel othered in any sort of way.” In terms of queer futurism in the piece, Garcia describes,
“creating something from nothing in a direction that feels hopeful, in a direction that feels like this might not exist yet, but we can create it through this performance, through this process, whilst very much acknowledging like, hey, this is real now, or like this is hard now, but we’re proposing this could also be true. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about performance, especially with a large ensemble.”
Garcia was excited to come back to USF as a visiting artist partly because of his belief in the PASJ mission statement, which is “creating artists, activists, folks that know how to work in community and not just focus on their own.” In regards to the performance, Garcia said, “I feel very proud of what they’ve created, and I feel like they feel proud too.”
There were four performances overall, starting on April 30 and ending on May 3. You can see Eric Garcia at a Detour Productions show or see them co-host “Clutch The Pearls,” a monthly drag cabaret at the Make Out Room in the Mission District. Made up of 26 performers, rotating scenes and a mix of styles, the piece carries that same sense of multiplicity and maximalism that defines Garcia’s art. At USF, that approach plays out collaboratively, with the performance shaped as much by the group as it is by Garcia.
