RUSE Does Trick for Avant-Garde Artists in S.D. : Music: Downtown San Diego gallery fills a vacuum, provides a rare outlet for progressive composers and performance art.

When it comes to the avant garde in music, performance art, dance and theater, San Diegans don’t have many options. Sushi Gallery presents performance art pieces, but other progressive works have been without another regular venue for years.

So it was something of a breakthrough when a group of artists took over an affordable storefront on 5th Avenue last year, called it RUSE Performance Gallery and began presenting original performances, mostly music.

Manuel Mancillas, a jazz clarinetist and RUSE’s coordinator, said the idea for an organization like RUSE was actually born in the late ‘70s with the India Street Poets Theatre, led by poet David Banks.

Banks imagined a place where poets, musicians and performance artists could work, rehearse and perform, and he located the high-ceilinged space which now houses RUSE.

But Banks died in July of 1980, before he could start his dream. Fellow artist Gary Ghirardi stepped in and rented the hall. The first presentation was a wake for Banks.

“He was a Southern man,” said Mancillas, known among his artist friends as Zopilote, an Indian word for condor. “So we gave him a New Orleans wake, with dirges and everything.”

Through the ‘80s, the space housed a

variety of arts uses including Installation Gallery, founded by Ghirardi and his wife, Carol Roskos, before Installation moved and Ghirardi decided that experimental art, especially music, needed a home. With Ghirardi’s help, RUSE took over the space in July 1988.

To name the gallery, the artists played Scrabble with a pile of neon letters donated by the local Save Our Neon Organization. According to Mancillas, “RUSE” seemed to suit what the artists were after: a ruse, a ploy, a way to present experimental art.

Mancillas, experimental musician Brad Dow and several other artists who use RUSE as a home base have tried to build a culturally diverse coalition.

No alcohol is served at performances, and the artists want to keep it that way. They hope to create an atmosphere of serious attention, not a casual night club.

With a 1989 budget of $10,000, including a $4,500 grant from the city of San Diego’s mission for Arts and Culture, RUSE has presented about 80 performances involving about 150 artists, according to Mancillas.

Among the highlights of RUSE’s first two years have been ‘Experimental Continuum,” a series of nine concerts and one performance art piece in October of 1988; “The Leaden Eye,” a performance-and-sound “deconstruction” of Vachel Lindsay’s poem; a recent series of original jazz by Turiya and the Immediate Freedom Band; and “Nobody Knows How to Treat a Woman,” a feminist musical by singer Isabel Tercero.

On a recent afternoon, Mancillas mopped the concrete floor of the hall on 5th Avenue in the Gaslamp Quarter before talking about RUSE and the tough times artists have had downtown.

In 1977, an organization known as Community Arts was started with money from city, state and federal government sources. A group of local artists including Mancillas and RUSE-mate Turiya, a jazz musician, took over the Knights of Pythias building at 3rd Avenue and E Street as a complex for living and working. The synergy generated by the concentration of creative people was amazing, Mancillas said.

But then came redevelopment, and the building was demolished to make way for the Horton Plaza shopping mall.

“The city promised a new Community Arts space, but the talk died down,” Mancillas said. “Since Community Arts, things have regressed in terms of an artists’ community. These days, everyone is in their own little fiefdom, protecting their own organization--galleries, theaters, whatever.”

RUSE first competed for city arts commission money in 1988, but this year’s $4,500 was its first allocation. The group has also applied for a three-year, $6,000 grant from the California Arts Commission, which would finance a spring RUSE festival and improvements to the space. It is expecting an answer by the end of the year.

Sweat equity is an important resource. Many of the artists donate labor or, if they have full-time jobs, money. RUSE is run as a collective; those most in need are the first to receive when donations come.

“For me, it’s just been a real personal gift,” said multi-instrumentalist and composer Turiya, who received part of the city grant to compose original jazz. “I’m so grateful to Zopilote and all the guys down there for giving me the opportunity to develop my music. I don’t know where else I could have done it.

“I’ve known Zopilote since the Community Arts days. I went to New York and got really far off into the avant garde. When I got back, the culture shock here almost killed me.”

Using the city arts grant, RUSE commissioned Turiya and San Diego pianist Glenn Horiuchi to write original music for RUSE FEST ‘89, a series of performances.

They presented their works in late October at the San Diego City College Theater, and the response was indicative of the uphill battle RUSE faces. Only 30 or so people attended Horiuchi’s critically acclaimed “Burning Embers.”

“Sometimes, we’ll get a full house without knowing how it happened,” Mancillas said. “The next week, it’ll be five or 10 people, and the next day it’ll be 30. We’re not having constant crowds. With Turiya, we were able to develop a good audience during the summer that carried into good attendance at her RUSE FEST performance.”

The festival, which started Oct. 20, will finish this month with two original plays by San Diego Repertory Theatre founder and RUSE mainstay Christopher R.

“Cocaine and Able,” based on the hellish life of a drug dealer, debuted last weekend and will continue today, Friday and Saturday. “Ko-wa-bunga Kommies,” a tribute to the Soviet Arts Festival, was performed at 6th Avenue and Island Street last Saturday.

RUSE hopes to keep the momentum going with its first organized fund-raising campaign. Representatives of the gallery will be calling on local businesses in the weeks ahead, seeking financial support.

RUSE also goes south of the border, and exchanging art and artists with Tijuana is a priority, especially for Mancillas, whose family is scattered on both sides.

Turiya, who often plays in Tijuana, said, “I like the grass-roots level of RUSE. I like Mexico, and that’s why I like it. It’s down, it’s real. A lot of stuff in our country is so on-the-surface.”

Mancillas observed that San Diego has not had a place for avant-garde jazz musicians and other progressive artists to perform when they tour the West Coast. He hopes RUSE will fill that niche as well.

In December, RUSE plans to present regular weekly musical performances, plus a special Christmas show. For more information, call the gallery at 236-1347 .