Shiela Bishop
December Satellite/Theater-Profile
By Shamrock McShane
This profile first appeared in Satellite Magazine (December 4, 2002
* Vol. 1, Issue 4)
Sheila Bishop’s life journey has described an arabesque thus far, fancifully
looping Hogtown and San Francisco, aesthetically, politically, and geographically.
And so, like Gaul and the dialectic, it can be divided into three parts.
There is the early Gainesville period that sees Sheila molding herself,
separating from the masses at Duval Elementary and heading for Westwood
Middle School instead of Howard Bishop, then working herself into the academically
elite.
Now in her late twenties, Sheila grew up in a working class neighborhood
in northeast Gainesville, but while at Westwood the realization dawned
on her that her working class roots might tether her to a predictable outcome,
economically predetermined and intellectually vapid, unless she struggled
against it. Thus Sheila’s life has come to mirror the class struggle.
Recognizing Sheila’s talent as a writer, language arts teacher Cathy
Berg pushed to put her precocious student in the "gifted" program at Westwood,
where Kren Kurts’s humanities curriculum put her in touch with the western
canon.
"When I was in the seventh grade," Sheila remembers, "my dad told me
there was no money for college, so if I wanted to go I’d have to get scholarships.
So I set my eyes on the prize of I.B. as a way to get scholarship money
– which I did get."
The International Baccalaureate Program at Eastside High School became
Sheila’s proving ground. But Sheila’s is not a Horatio Alger story. Never
interested merely in pulling herself up by her own bootstraps, Sheila’s
reading revealed a class struggle far beyond her own.
The theater was something else. It was only a matter of time before
the diva who would inspire a cult of Sheilaphiliacs found her way to the
stage. Traversing a path to the avant-garde through the conventional, Sheila
slogged through Wizard of Oz and Li’l Abner in high school, until bursting
through on the other side with an appearance in the Bill Perry Orchestra
at the Hard Back Café in downtown Gainesville in 1990.
Following the bliss of her art into experimentation, Sheila studied
and worked in Sarasota with the Asolo, and began creating original pieces,
developing a writer’s and performer’s voice, evolving a persona, with such
stageworks as Queen in the Corner and Isabella the Multinational Sex Goddess.
Then came the continental divide. In 1996 Sheila struck out for California.
In San Francisco Sheila learned her craft methodically and eclectically,
studying directing, Shakespearean acting, masks, and performance art, while
actively engaging in Bay area theater with the Working Women’s Festival.
Part three of the Sheila triptych is the passionate return to Gainesville
at the end of the millennium to energize the Civic Media Center (the counter-culture
alternative to mainstream media in these parts, where Sheila is coordinator),
and, not coincidentally, to positively revolutionize theater.
By shifting the focus of local theater away from the traditional stages
and into venues inhabited by a vibrant, aware, educated, young audience,
Sheila changed the nature of theater in Gainesville. Now theater is something
that springs from grassroots and addresses immediate interests.
Thus, the Crookedletter Cabaret Series, which has seen a coalition of
local artists assemble such collaborative works as Spoken Sex Words, Work
Words, Gender is a Drag, Talking About a Revolution, Women Righting, and
Wherever People Ain’t Free.
As if that wasn’t prolific enough, last spring Sheila presented a masterwork,
the operatic opus Lick, which she wrote, directed, and performed to sold-out
houses.
Sheila’s political activism and her art spring from the same source
and are inextricably joined. Art is meant to do more than entertain, even
more than entertain and teach, as Aristotle would have it. Art is meant
to rock the boat. Art is meant to move mountains.
And now comes Sheila’s Bishop’s Holiday Special. (Actually, you just
missed it. It was Monday night, December 2 at Common Grounds.) She’s turned
herself into a brand name without becoming a commodity.
This is nothing like the Bob Hope Holiday Special, but, rather, performers
are enjoined to
"re-invent, subvert and generally fuck with any or all of the winter
holidays and their songs, rituals, and consumerist mantras."
Now that’s the spirit!
Sheila subtitles the show, which is another Crookedletter production,
Seasons Grievings and Visions of Sugar Plums. It is the latest in Sheila’s
ground-breaking, long-running cabaret series, which dates back to November,
2001.
As has become her heroic cabaret custom, Sheila produced the show as
a benefit for the Civic Media Center.
If you did miss The Sheila Bishop Holiday Special, don’t sweat it; there’s
more Sheila right around the corner.
The cabaret series will continue with a freaky folk tale fest in February
of 2003 and, in May, a cabaret titled mysteriously Medusa. Perhaps, as
the poet put it, "Everybody must get stoned."
There’s also Kate Will Not Kiss You, Sheila’s twist on The Taming of
the Shrew.
"I’ll probably gut that script and use it as source material," Sheila
confides, "for The Villainous Virago. I'm also working on a piece about
the prison industrial complex that right now has a working title of Disney
Jails."
Be afraid, Mickey. Be very afraid. |
