Forging Performance Art From Shards of Actors’ Rough and Tumble Lives

When Rhodessa Jones was 26, she worked as a nude dancer to support her infant daughter. More than 20 years later, the San Francisco performance artist incorporates elements of that experience into a theatrical sketch called “The Legend of Lily Overstreet.”

Lily, a street-smart woman who starts “The Church of Creative Survival” to cope with her degrading job, is just one of the characters that Jones and her partner/boyfriend Idris Ackamoor will perform when their cabaret show, “Cultural Odyssey Live at Club Reality,” rolls into Cal State Northridge for one night Sunday.

“Club Reality” draws on such diverse sources as experimental Eastern European theater, be-bop jazz and black cultural icons. Tall and lithe, the duo provoke and entertain, melding personal experience with political themes in stylized sketches that combine elements of theater, music, song and dance.

“We have a beat to what we’re doing,” said Ackamoor, who became enamored with theater after a 1972 trip through Morocco, Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia to collect and catalogue native musical instruments. “In Africa, the main thing I learned is that a performance wasn’t limited to music. There’d be a poet and a dancer and an actress, with pantomime and masks integrated into the whole performance.”

Ackamoor and Jones formed Cultural Odyssey in the early 1980s and subtitled their duo “A Thousand and One Ideas.” Many of those ideas reach into the past--Chicago’s South Side tenements, the rural American South, the heady heyday of cool jazz at Birdland in Manhattan. The CSUN performance, Ackamoor said, is their contribution to Black History Month.

In one sketch, “She B. Lightfoot,” Jones plays a homeless street artist from New York’s Lower East Side who holds forth on her life and dreams while Ackamoor conjures up such jazz greats as Lester Young and Charlie Parker playing a saxophone on the sidelines.

A spoof of the 1960s singing duo Ike and Tina Turner features a mythical meeting in which Jones stalks the stage in a black miniskirt and spiky blonde wig while her erstwhile mentor tries to wheedle cash from her.

In “My Mother’s Tears,” a contemporary gospel number, Jones alternatively belts out verses such as “Go tell Mr. Botha/In Soweto/The people want to be free” and then challenges the audience with “There’s a storm/The winter rests over the land and the heart of our people/What are YOU doing?”

“It’s important as a black American to constantly be reminding people that the struggle continues everywhere,” Jones said.

“I identify with political oppression, with being invisible, with people who live in benign neglect.”

During the time she worked as a nude dancer, Jones chronicled her thoughts and dreams in a journal. Later, she pieced together an impressionistic portrait of the leering men, the voyeurism and the way the women rationalized their work.

“It was scary,” she said of the response that she and Ackamoor drew in San Francisco when they premiered “Lily.” The sketch features Jones in heels, a fur stole and a G-string going through the old dances while singing a trenchant commentary about what men like. Ackamoor plays a shadowy, titillated customer.

“Politically I was criticized a lot by the feminist community for making a piece that was celebratory, that showed I grew up and learned, that I didn’t end up on the floor hating men,” Jones said. At the CSUN show, she will premiere “Lily at 40.”

The performers move with the fluidity of longtime partners, which they are. They met eight years ago in San Francisco’s avant-garde theater scene when Ackamoor auditioned Jones for a multimedia, jazz-infused quartet that he started.

He wanted someone who could sing, and he got an actress and dancer in the bargain.

“She was a very outrageous and experimental artist,” said Ackamoor, who plays alto and tenor sax, keyboards, synthesizer and percussion as well as being a foil for Jones. The pair soon took off for Europe, where they found acclaim as a cabaret act. American tours followed.

The Village Voice called Ackamoor “an incredible one-man band” and the Chicago Reader pronounced Jones “a Josephine Baker for the ‘80s.” Along the way came grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the San Francisco Foundation.

Despite the serious subject matter, there is a wry humor to such pieces as “Nappy Reality,” in which Jones dances through three generations of black experience in America in a white leotard, a white rag tied around her head. Twirling and swirling around the room in this 10-minute saga, she disobeys her father, is raped by a boyfriend, gives birth to a child and shortly thereafter sees her father slip away in death.

“As an artist, everything that comes to you is fodder, is material,” Jones said.

“This is a real lawless, dangerous time in America. . . . People don’t know what to believe in anymore. But art can save us all.”

“Cultural Odyssey” plays in the Student Union of CSUN, 18111 Nordhoff St., at 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $5 for the public; those with CSUN ID cards will be admitted free. For information, call (818) 885-3093.