SKYWATCHERS
San francisco, ca
Over two weekends in spring 2019, intimate audiences walked the hallways, mounted the narrow staircase, and rode the cramped and creaking elevator of Hotel Iroquois, a single room occupancy hotel (SRO) in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood that’s home to eleven families and 63 individuals. Audiences were guided by Skywatchers Ensemble members who sang, read poetry, and shared their first-person stories of home- and place-making, isolation, poor living conditions, and community-building (place attachement). Together they wove the layered experiences of living in this form of supportive housing into a tapestry of connective stories (place attachment- sense of belonging).
This was in many ways the riskiest work the Skywatchers Ensemble had yet attempted.
Inside Hotel Iroquois
was the performance that brought audiences directly into the SROs in which most ensemble members live, centering resident stories within the intimate context of their homes (place attachement). Those performances closed in the Iroquois common room, with audiences engaging in reflective dialogue with residents. Audience members—who included political activists, artists, government staff, and other Tenderloin residents—were sometimes moved to tears reflecting on what they had just witnessed and the range of emotions the performance conjured (mindset- connecting people across differences).
In spring 2021 Skywatchers celebrated ten years of making radical, community-driven art in the Tenderloin.
Over the last decade we have:
- Created a thriving community arts ensemble of professional artists working in close collaboration with Tenderloin residents cultivating collective agency and taking neighborhood leadership(civic engagement).
- Grown from a single-site project into an enduring, multi-disciplinary, mixed-ability ensemble using the arts to engage our civic imagination (collective efficacy).
- Built a repertoire of works deeply rooted in the histories, talents, and urgent concerns of ensemble members, artists with anywhere from one to forty years of experience making art (social capital- bonding; relationships, sense of belonging).
A short history of the Tenderloin neighborhood
San Francisco’s Tenderloin district (TL) is a dense neighborhood with a rich history of culture, resistance, and poverty. Its residents bear significant burdens of social and health inequities. With a median household income of $23,513 compared to $88,643 citywide, the TL exposes San Francisco’s growing economic disparities. TL residents are more racially diverse, older, and have higher rates of disability. Many have experienced housing insecurity and live in single-resident occupancy hotels (SROs) like the Iroquois. By 2019, 46% of San Francisco’s 8,035 homeless persons were living in the TL and adjacent areas, in encampments that grew four-fold during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite these challenges the neighborhood has been home to each and every progressive social movement for which San Francisco is known; it has often been a decade or more ahead of prevailing social mores. Whether around women’s rights, queer and trans rights, harm reduction, or
affordable housing, the Tenderloin has most often been on the forefront of inclusive social change.
The Origins & Methodology of Skywatchers
Skywatchers began in the tenant lounge of the historic Senator Hotel—a Tenderloin supportive housing residence—when founding Artistic Director Anne Bluethenthal sat down for informal conversations about residents’ lives and conditions in the SROs and the neighborhood more broadly. Relationship-driven and non-prescriptive, Skywatchers’ methodology focuses on collective creative process over artistic product by emphasizing an original values-driven Relational, Durational, Conversational, and Structural methodology. Anchored by these values rather than an aesthetic or narrative agenda, the artistic products can manifest as formal performance, arts-based organizing, or creative advocacy. The practice can be responsive to community needs while also offering long-term scaffolding for collaborations among Tenderloin residents, artists, service providers, and community organizers (social capital- relationships, bridging). Sustained partnerships with over 15 Tenderloin-based organizations position the arts as integral to community building and advocacy (social cohesion).
In the last decade, Skywatchers’ ensemble members—most subject to conditions of housing insecurity and many dealing with social isolation and chronic illness—have co-created more than 60+ events and 40 works. Together Skywatchers has addressed the slow violence of systemic oppression, disenfranchisement, generational trauma, lack of essential services, and their corrosive impacts on the well-being and vitality of neighborhood residents (civic engagement- orientation toward the common good).
Place-based arts and cultural strategies: COVID-19
The radical challenges of COVID-19 disproportionately affected low-income communities of color nationwide. Our community in the Tenderloin was particularly hard hit by the crisis: TL residents were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 due to pre-existing health conditions, poverty, and high-density housing.
Throughout the crisis, the staff and ensemble worked together to nourish community and sustain interpersonal communications while amplifying stories that made visible the particular experience of the pandemic through new expressive forms (social capital- bonding). We employed strategies such as weekly phone conversations, physically distant gatherings outdoors, audio interviews, and regular zoom meetings and workshops. We also created a public health poster series, narrative videos, virtual open-mics, temporary public art, and an online writing group (civic engagement, collective action). As part of this effort, we procured devices for ensemble members living in SROs and assisted with troubleshooting unpredictable WiFi connections.
Our current project, Towards Opulence, grows out of the deepening awareness COVID fostered of the role healthcare inequities play in civic life and communal well-being. It is also rooted in the recognition that when people’s basic needs are not met, we can’t afford the luxury of imagination (civic capacity for structural policy change- collective efficacy). Because quality healthcare is a basic need which for many Tenderloin residents is still out of reach, we are engaging the arts as a tool to tackle inequitable access to healthcare. We are doing this in partnership with one of the most powerful medical institutions in the Bay Area: University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
In 2021 we developed a series of poetic, lm-based works that center the voices of Tenderloin residents who have experienced medical racism, trauma, and other barriers to care (self determination of shared values, creative responses to trauma and racism). The lms will simultaneously be used as a teaching tool for Community Grand Rounds, a professional development setting for UCSF staff and students. The accompanying curriculum—created by these Tenderloin residents in partnership with clinicians and academics from within the UCSF system—will support the values of anti-racism and equity (social capital- bridging).
For years we’ve paired sustained interrogation of systemic oppression with an exploration of Afrofuturism. In our upcoming series of performance works happening in concert with the UCSF partnership, we will claim a queer ecological discourse of interconnection and transformation in an ensemble that grapples daily with basic survival needs (self determination of shared values- discusses issues, collective action): We will explore the transgressive meanings of opulence. Moving ‘Towards’ a collective ‘Opulence’, we will claim the boldest expression of our humanity—one that demands we move beyond survival into thriving. We manifest the wisdom that we cannot create what we haven’t yet imagined.
Amplify the drivers of social cohesion
During those early weekly sessions a decade ago, Bluethenthal talked and shared a meal with residents, listening and amplifying gesture into dance phrases (social capital- bonding). Some residents brought instruments to the circle, and the sounds of drumming, word of mouth, and community open mics attracted increasing numbers of participants (celebration and preservation of culture). Bluethenthal quickly hired emerging artists as facilitators who showed up consistently each week, developing relationships and co-creating with residents, lending their craft to shaping residents’ stories which grew into community performances (social capital- bonding, mindset, collective action). Through this sustained presence and relationship-building, Skywatchers became an intergenerational arts ensemble the majority of which are BIPOC, with 75% identifying as Black/ African American, 5% Latino, 5% multi-ethnic, and 15% Caucasian. Close to a third identify as LGBTQ. Through the creative process participants linked their personal stories to those of their neighbors and to the larger
social fabric, amplifying and weaving together histories too often hidden (self determination of shared values- form connections).
Driven by the intertwined beliefs that connectivity and dialogue are essential to the creative process—that making visible the stories that make us who we are is both vitally important and humanizing—Skywatchers engages residents of the Tenderloin as storytellers, co-creators, performers, and audience members.
To increase equitable community well-being.
From a single conversation in the community room at the Senator with a handful of residents struggling with serious health and social inequities, Skywatchers has grown into an ensemble that has directly involved hundreds of participants and engaged thousands more in artworks of creative resistance and community celebration (civic engagement- co-creating). Co-creating works across signicant axes of difference requires skillful listening and consistency of presence. We claim this as integral to the art form. How can we create works that nourish empathy? How do we understand our personal histories in relation to those of others? And how can we forge a culture of care and sustained connection? Our process is our product. Skywatchers is structured on the belief that relationships are the first site of social change. This foundation asserts that larger-scale community and structural change begin with bonds formed by intimate, interpersonal exchange in which all stakeholders are changed.
