Reality check
Cultural Odyssey has been taking it to the world for 25 years.

By J.H. Tompkins

'WE HIRED RHODESSA Jones to teach aerobics to inmates at the county jail." Sheriff Michael Hennessey is on the phone, talking about Cultural Odyssey's amazing Jones. "But it turned out that what the only part of aerobics the women really wanted to do was when they were sitting on the floor. Because they wanted to sit around and discuss their problems – which to Rhodessa sounded like Greek tragedy. She decided to try to get them to do aerobics using dance in such a way that she could create a theater project so that people could express their ideas in public and expose them to the energy and talent of people in the jails. But this involved taking women prisoners out of custody to perform, and that just isn't done. But of course she talked us into doing it. I didn't know her at all at that point, but she convinced some people on my staff that the women in the project were so devoted to her that there'd be no trouble. So I said yes. It's hard to say no to Rhodessa Jones."

Hennessey's observations work as an abridged chapter 1 of Cultural Odyssey's Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, the nationally renowned, ongoing collaboration between Jones and inmates at San Francisco's county jails. Part exorcism, part declaration of war, the project is built around bitter, painful truth-telling that climaxes as a line of women karate-kick themselves to the lip of the stage and claim their lives. There are moments when Jones appears as fierce as Medea, although I've seen Cultural Odyssey perform for some 18 of its 25 years, and I know that while she can lock down a stage and terrorize an audience with an unequivocating iron fist, there's so much more to her than that. I've also seen the flirtatious smile that lights up The Legend of Lily Overstreet, for instance, and heard the low-down blues of Private Dancer and the exhilarating funky rock of Rock of Edges, the band she and Idris Ackamoor formed in the late '80s.

Ackamoor is always there, and not just as Jones's cool, laid-back onstage foil. In the 1970s, while most musicians spent six days a week up in the clouds and the seventh frantically scratching for rent money, Ackamoor was standing on solid ground looking down the road past the Pyramids, the jazz group he brought with him to the Bay Area from Chicago, and dreaming up Cultural Odyssey – the all-purpose arts organization he founded in 1979. Three years later he met Jones, and in 1983 they joined forces to produce Lily Overstreet, a fabulous, infectious show based on Jones's experience as a dancer in one of San Francisco's infamous nudie bars.

Jones – a dancer and pioneering performance artist – had yet to meet Ackamoor when she created a sprawling epic with more characters than would fit backstage at most of San Francisco's small theaters. "I was a modern dancer with a child," she explains, "and I danced nude to pay the bills. Lots of girls did the same thing, but few would admit it. I found the whole experience so fascinating that I wanted to do something with it, so I created this character. That's what I was working on when Idris and I met. It was great when we got together; we were both so excited by the future and all the possibilities – we'd talk and talk."

The subsequent incarnation of Lily Overstreet – bearing only passing resemblance to the original – showed the signs of Ackamoor's ability to develop work that worked for them. Lily Overstreet was a sexy, butt-shaking duet with Jones as Overstreet and Ackamoor accompanying her on saxophone over taped music.

Performance art was coming into its own in the mid-'80s, led by an innovative, fearless new breed in New York City and San Francisco. Karen Finley, who first developed her work as a student at San Francisco Art Institute, was making headlines with her body; Helen Shumaker was packing in audiences for Philip-Dimitri Galas's Life of Mona Rogers; actors like Lily Tomlin and Geoff Hoyle were doing solo work; and the Blake Street Hawkeyes were bursting with talent. Audiences were ready for anything in those days – although no one expected to find performances like Lily Overstreet in the city's bars and nightclubs. "People were surprised, and they loved it," Ackamoor says, pointing to the bottom-line standard of success in the art world: "We never had to get day jobs."

Lily Overstreet was a coming-out party for Cultural Odyssey, a show that not only blew up in the Bay Area but was also a hit in Europe, where for years the duo worked up to six months a year. "Europe was incredibly important to us," Ackamoor continues. "For one thing, we'd go over there and come back with money to live on. More than that, it taught us to respect ourselves, to give us a sense of our own worth. In America, artists are treated like they don't matter, and they buy into it too. Sometimes that belief in ourselves that we got over there was all we had to hang on to."

Nearly 20 years later, Cultural Odyssey's value to the Bay Area is easy to see. Jones and Ackamoor have brought a rich, inclusive African American perspective to the audiences they found in the usual places and off the beaten track. They've performed at theaters, clubs, street fairs, and schools; they've delivered hundreds of lectures at colleges too numerous to remember; they've led workshops on campuses, in jails, and in communities. Although they live in a region whose existence is barely acknowledged by the self-satisfied New York art world, Jones and Ackamoor have managed to slip into the national spotlight. In 1993 they were invited to curate a program at the National Black Theatre Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., and have done so ever since, introducing artists like Californian Roger Guenveur Smith, a future stage and screen star, to East Coast audiences. Educator-writer Rena Fraden wrote Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women, a book that pored over every aspect of the Medea Project. Ackamoor, who for years had privileged his collaborations with Jones at the expense of his ambitions as a jazz musician, now has his own band, the Idris Ackamoor Ensemble, and is about to release his third album. These days he and Jones are bringing energy and imagination to the Western Addition Arts and Cultural Center, where their offices are located, and this month they're preparing for another installment of their constantly evolving Underground Jazz Cabaret.

You could say that together and by themselves, Ackamoor and Jones are 25 years into a nonstop conversation with audiences that is rich, deep, and full of imagination and life. Another way of putting it is that day after day, month after month, year after year, Cultural Odyssey has been working for a living.

Family affair

A jet-black baby grand piano sits in the living room of Ackamoor's Western Addition apartment, its finish so fine that the morning sun ricochets wildly through the room. An array of framed posters hangs next to it, including one designed by Keith Haring, and another of a riveting, minimally clad Jones announcing The Legend of Lily Overstreet. An old black-and-white photograph, framed, sits on a shelf – a picture, I am to find out, of Ackamoor's great-great-great grandmother, a slave brought to the United States from Africa in the 1840s, and her daughter, a pale-complexioned woman conceived en route when her mother was raped. The raised eight foot-by-eight foot parquet surface – Ackamoor has been studying tap dancing since he was a child – in the middle of the room makes you think about the tenants one flight up.

Fortunately, the upstairs audience is Ernest William Baker Jr., Ackamoor's older brother by three years. An inquiry about noise is trumped by an answer about the vent between floors and the pleasures of having a brother who's an excellent cook. It's clear after a few minutes of conversation that the pair are close friends, one strand in the web of warmth, safety, and inspiration that family can provide; this looms large in the lives of Ackamoor and Jones, although they're very different people: Ackamoor is patient and deliberate, while Jones is passionate and impulsive.

The Baker family, originally from Missouri, lived in Chicago when the boys were growing up. Dorris Baker taught school, and Ernest Baker Sr. worked for the United States Postal Service. I was looking for clues to Cultural Odyssey's longevity; 25 years is a stretch for any arts organization, much less one in which the principals were a couple and then, after seven years, split up.

Baker has his ideas about the influences that shaped his brother, and most come back to his parents. "We grew up during the 1960s," he explains, "which was a tense time in Chicago. My mother lost her job as a teacher for opposing segregated schools, and both my parents taught us that we were never to let anyone take our self-worth away. She believed that God believed in human rights, and that's what was preached in our community – and why we were baptized and confirmed Missouri Lutheran, evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian, disciples of Christ, and Roman Catholic; we went to the church where the minister was doing the most for human rights."

Baker also tells a story that sheds some light on his brother's work ethic – which, again, goes back to his family. His father, in addition to his job at the post office, had another cleaning a building early each morning. "When we were big enough," he remembers, "on weekends we'd get up early and help him work. We'd have a cup of coffee, and it felt good to be helping out."

By the bay

That upbringing endowed Ackamoor with a practical side that sets him apart from most musicians and in some ways is as important an asset as his musical ability. When he came to California in the mid-'70s with his band, the Pyramids, he was already eyeing the state's then-generous California Arts Council funding program, and in 1979 he formed Cultural Odyssey.

"I'd have starved if I'd depended on jazz," he says with a laugh. "But I saw that so much could be done with this kind of an organization. It might take years to build its reputation, but it would pay off."

The organization had its first real success with Lily Overstreet, which – with Ackamoor's keen eye – went from epic length and a few dozen performers to Ackamoor and his horn, Jones, and taped accompaniment. The result was a riveting piece of theater that went right into clubs.

"When I met Idris," Jones says, "he understood interdisciplinary, which set him apart. Performance art was just another word for new performance, and then we came along singing, dancing, and storytelling – and it had new meaning. I was able to explore all my fantasies: cabaret singer, comedienne, dancer. And who was doing theater in nightclubs? We've been connective tissue enhancing the African American part of performance art."

Lily Overstreet brought Jones and Ackamoor together, and they clicked overnight. Before that, the road Jones took was as circuitous as Ackamoor's was direct. "My parents were migrant workers on the East Coast," she says, going on to describe a family with 12 children and a lot of discipline and how – after getting pregnant at 16 – she wound up in San Francisco with a young white man. She was drawn to performance, particularly modern dance, and eventually got a job dancing nude to support her real love. Jones is passionate, imaginative, and absolutely unafraid of being the center of attention; that she turned the material from the strip clubs into a performance would surprise no one who knows her.

"I think California was perfect for Rhodessa," says Bill T. Jones, a renowned dancer-choreographer and cofounder of the Zanes-Jones Dance Company, who is also Jones's brother. "San Francisco, the shining city in the far West that's captured the imagination of so many people. It's got all that stuff about freedom and openness, and Rhodessa and Idris are in that grand tradition, and the name Cultural Odyssey fits. Culture is an ongoing journey. They've chosen to do this very personal work; it's spirited, generous, has a lot of anger at the status quo. Is that what Bay Area art stands for? Perhaps. The environment is more in tune with who they are and what they believe. We live in our bodies, what community is, the promise and lack of clear rules. They made the right decision for them.

"I think Lily Overstreet was an important work, for Rhodessa and for the community beyond. She was dealing with controversial issues in a new way – a really entertaining way. I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine, the Ike and Tina piece, was a wonderful look at how well the two of them can work together. And the Jazz Cabaret, at least the ones I've seen anyway – the quality of the whole evening, the array of talent, the mix of urban free culture and classic jazz, the clothes that Idris wears, his horn playing – it is a real original event of great quality that manages to feel as if it's just a heartbeat away from the community. And then there's the Medea Project – you know, I think that I recommended that she bring Medea to the women in jail; she might not agree with me, but that's a fact. That's an amazing piece of art and an amazing way of making art."

Give it to him, girls

In 1989 an aerobics class at the county jail was shy a teacher, and Jones stepped in as the instructor. What she found out – as Sheriff Hennessey pointed out – was that she was teaching women who'd returned to jail over and over, unable to break the cycle of drug habits, bad men, and self-abuse. It led – in 1992 – to The Medea Project: Reality Is Just Beyond the Window, the one-of-a-kind first incarnation of what was to be an ongoing, evolving project. It was certainly the most visible and arguably the most important work created by Cultural Odyssey. Writing with and directing female inmates, Jones created a kind of reclamation project, where women stepped up and grabbed the selves they'd lost, taking responsibility for past mistakes in the process.

The initial performances were simply electrifying – wrenching, liberating rituals that tore through scar tissue and left the audience and performers drenched in tears and sweat. Jones gave directions from her seat in front of the stage, and as her acolytes rushed forward delivering karate kicks and exhilarating shouts, you could hear her urging them on, "Give it to them, girls."

Jones's empathy with the women was so intense that as she became more and more consumed with the Medea Project, her appearance seemed to change – to me anyway – until she looked grim, maybe angry, physically imposing, and at times unfriendly. I was startled at the contrast when I looked at a video of their band playing at an outdoor festival on Webster Street in 1989, Jones – gorgeous and loaded with sexual and physical energy – seemed delighted to be onstage with a mic in her hand. The difference, beyond hair style and clothes, wasn't actual changes in her body but changes in the language her body spoke.

Asked about the transformations she was going through, Jones deflects the notion of enormous personal changes, pointing instead to efforts to win the trust of the women she'd met in jail and to pull their anger from them. Nevertheless, her relationship with Ackamoor began to crumble. "The Medea Project work was so engrossing," she explains, "that in some ways I neglected Idris. I was so involved in the work. To my credit, I really love Idris, I really do, but it was time for both of us to split up. He was in the Caribbean at a jazz festival, and I came back form the road, and I'd broken my wrist. He was having such a good time. He said, 'Well, you've got your family.' And I was so pissed, I couldn't believe it, and when he got home, I just said, 'It's time; you better go.' I told him I wasn't giving up the company or him. He was very warlike; I said, 'I'm not going to fight with you, we've got this company we've built. We're great together, I'm not giving into this pettiness.' "

"You know," Ackamoor adds, "when you get right down to it, we were too busy to even think about breaking up [Cultural Odyssey]. Which was fortunate, because we didn't want to. The first couple of years were very hard, but then things got better."

It takes two

For Jones and Ackamoor, getting "better" meant having an increasingly important presence at the annual National Black Theatre Festival, including the responsibility of curating the segment of the festival lineup that brings new, edgy talent to the stage. By using the sensibility that over the years in the Bay Area has put them together with talents like Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, Will Power, and Robert Henry Johnson, they introduced Guenveur Smith and his Huey P. Newton Story to the assembled at Winston-Salem. They've shared stages with leading contemporary artists like Ntozake Shange and Bill T. Jones and have amassed a large body of work, most prominently Big Butt Girls and Hard-Headed Women, I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine, and recently, The Underground Jazz Cabaret, their dazzling variety show. The values and interests the pair embrace found a future inside Ackamoor's family, as a quick conversation with Aomawa Baker, Ackamoor's daughter recently revealed. An MIT graduate in astronomy, she left the sciences behind when – with a focus that runs in the family – she dedicated herself to acting and developed her award-winning solo show, Goddess Divided.

The combined talents of Jones and Ackamoor – including his business sense and ability to focus on a goal – are paying off. "Some people I once considered peers seem to have run out of energy," Jones says. "But I feel as if we are right in the middle of things, that the best is still out there. All the groundwork that we've laid down is really paying off today." Today, along with the local presence that comes with his role as curator of the spring season at the Western Addition Cultural Center, the pair have trips, lectures, performances, and residencies lined up many months into the future. In 1998 he returned to his first love and released Portraits, a full-length album with his quartet, which he followed a year later with Centurion. The band's work on the latter was particularly outstanding, and both albums received good reviews. Next month he'll release Homage to Cuba, featuring his alto, from which he can pull a richness and depth that befits a musician with his experience and skill.

In Fraden's book about the Medea Project, Imagining Medea, the author quotes Jones remembering the words of friend and project collaborator Sean Reynolds. "All art is social work," she says, "And I think that social work is art." I'd have to say that Reynolds is right, but only if you stretch the definition as wide as you can. Still, it's one of those West Coast observations that make art – and life – different out here than what people find on the well-worn path elsewhere. Taken the right way, Reynolds's observation does a good job of mapping out a road that can't really be mapped. That's the road that leads Cultural Odyssey home.

'The Underground Jazz Cabaret,' hosted by Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones and featuring saxophone great Chico Freeman, runs Thurs/13-Sat/15, 8 p.m. (champagne reception with artists Sat/15), Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, S.F. $12-$25. (415) 292-1850, www.culturalodyssey.org/tickets.