Amidst yet another pendulum swing toward the right, this timely retrospective at Tate Modern should act as an inspiration. In February , I was in Mexico City tasked with writing a roundup of shows. I ran around town, trying to see everything I could in just a few days. Rountree had greeted me and walked me through a dimly lit room fitted out with a disco ball, colourful lights, white plastic chairs and tables set with green tablecloths. He explained a little bit about the history of the building and that he eventually wanted to do something there, but that it was packed with stuff.
We headed over together, but it was difficult to get inside because it was dark and the space was filled floor-to-ceiling with junk. Mateo shone his light toward the back corner and saw the stage. It took about 30 trips to the dump to clear out the space. There was so much stuff. Pretty soon after moving in, Billy suggested I invite PJ Rountree over to chat about doing something in the space. We had a few meetings and we created a vision for the project.
As she began to set up in her new studio, she invited me over and floated the idea of organizing some kind of live performance night. At the time, I was involved with several nightlife performers, and both Pia and I had always had creative practices centred on collaboration.
From January to July that year, we met several times to brainstorm how to structure the event. We discussed at length what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to avoid. Finally, on 24 August , we went for it. In terms of why we decided on hosting a cabaret night, Pia and I both have performance backgrounds.
I did a lot of acting in both elementary and high school, and I have often helped out with the technical side of theatre production as well. Both of us have always collaborated with other performers, so putting together live shows felt like an obvious thing to do. The space revealed itself to be a ready-made cabaret, so we were both very much inspired by our imaginations of what Cisne might have been.
