Feature: FUSION FORUM: Cool Right Now

I still remember, when I was in high school, standing in a circle in the parking lot of the Cell, waiting for our friends' band to come on. Leaning against the chain-link fence bordering the train tracks while my friends smoked cigarettes, I haven't felt so cool since.

Yet today, ten years after that concert, as I park my bike in that same parking lot and survey the old brick "Home of Glorieta Beer" building behind the fence, an old feeling stirs in my belly, something I thought I'd lost: Coolness? Couldn't be! Surely, it's only a memory-phantom. . .but, what if? What if something cool really is happening, right now?

That's the question I've come here to ask. Although, as I last-minute scribble my interview questions into my notebook, I rephrase the inquiry--like this: What is the FUSION Forum?

****

Upon entering the Cell's cozy living-room-like lobby, the changes of ten years are obvious-couches, concessions, a desk. They don't host many rock concerts now--though there's still a scene: Over half a dozen theater, dance, and music organizations revolve around this venue. And, the Cell is the home of FUSION, New Mexico's longest-running professional theater company.

In the center of the lobby, a muscular motorcycle leans on its kickstand. Incongruous among the lavender-and-blue palate of the decor, this chopper is yellow and black like a hornet on steroids.

"Those are my wheels," says a man's voice.

I look beyond the far end of the lobby, at the top of the stairs: A giant man (literally resembling fairytale giants, with a long ponytail under a red baseball cap, barrel-like body, and a commanding smile) descends, and introduces himself-unnecessarily; I already know this is Dennis Gromelski, Executive Director for FUSION, my interviewee.

I, on the other hand, need a little more introduction: "I recently returned to Albuquerque, my hometown, and now I'm trying to find my way as a writer," I say.

"And how do you sustain yourself in the meantime?"

"I don't know."

"That's the issue we're trying to address here," he says, sitting on the couch, sinking in. "We want artists to get paid. When we-me, Laurie Thomas, and Jacqueline Reid-first opened this joint, it was purely to find a home for professional actors and directors." He gestures across the couch. "Sit down!"

I sit, but unlike him, perch on the edge of the cushion. I remove my notebook and flip through to find the page where I wrote my notes.

He keeps talking. "We've been around for sixteen years and now we're nationally recognized, members of this community, confident in the relationships we've built through what we've done . . ."

I scramble for my pen to write-but it's dry!

"We've grown a dedicated base of subscribers. Now, we think not only about the growth of our business, but also how that growth is going to affect our patronage. Increasing the availability to economic advancement: That's the underlying mechanization of what we do-which just so happens to be fueled by art."

I give up on the pen, and fiddle with my phone for the record. I ask, "Do you mind if I-"

He shrugs.

I press the red button; the recording begins. Now I can relax. Finally, I sink into the cushions-

"Want to see the theater?" He asks, standing.

I hop up. "Sure!"

****

Climbing the stairs, we step into a fully furnished country house-the set of FUSION's next show, The Country House. Dennis introduces me to a man who is hammering the baseboards. "Dave has been with us four years," he says, explaining that some of the crew has been with FUSION for ten years--unique, because stage technicians are typically nomadic. "We bring in directors and actors from D.C., Chicago, New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Portland--and when they go back to their home cities, they are in withdrawal from the kind of artistic home that we're able to provide for people here."

It may be home, but it's a small one: A narrow rectangle. The stage spans one half; riser, with seats, span the other.

"People love the intimacy," Dennis says, "but to have just sixty seats, and then pay the actors. . . that's completely unsustainable, as the backers always tell us." To make more money, FUSION performs in larger houses throughout the state: The Lensic in Santa Fe, Albuquerque's KiMo, Las Cruces' Rio Grande Theatre, and soon in the Taos Center for the Arts. Even so, income is hard-won . . .

I follow him through the back door of The Country House, and into a cramped backstage. "We want to make our artists comfortable," he says.

Squeezed within the narrow walkway, I'm about to ask, How?

But he continues down a flight of stairs, into a dark basement. He flips on the light, and invites me down.

I descend into an expansive lounge-with a bar, pool table, and groovy sectional sofas. A speakeasy? No, there are also dressing rooms, props closets, monitors: This is the green room.

"We're an Equity theater," he reminds me, "so our actors are our employees. We treat them well, pay a living wage, and offer health insurance."

But this place isn't only for actors. "A whole bunch of organizations use this space as a performance and office hub. Our schedule--our entire next year and even beyond that--is completely jammed."

****

We cross the speakeasy and climb another set of stairs. Memorabilia from previous shows hangs along the walls. We go past the stage and out the lobby, outside to the front fenced-in patio-a bare concrete corral.

Dennis steps into the middle of this corral and gestures up, then down the street: "Arts organizations are usually the first to recognize and afford a building in a run-down neighborhood. We were the first in this area. Now, we've got Warehouse 508, Youth Development, Inc. running the Wool Warehouse, an international-award-winning brewery across the street. . . "

As he talks, I flip through my notebook again, and find my list of interview questions. I haven't asked a single one-

"Now we've come to this critical mass, where an opportunity has presented itself to organically grow. Our neighbors to the north had been renting that building since 1967." He points to the adjacent building, which is separated by a parking lot. "They've now moved out. We've been quietly inhabiting the space for the last year. Now we're coming out of the closet with this project: Something we're calling, the FUSION Forum. We're in the midst of our pseudo-quiet capital campaign. . ."

I'm so busy scribbling belated notes, I hardly realize that he's just answered my core question: What is the FUSION Forum? I open my mouth to ask for more, but he's already describing plans for a cafe:

"33,000 people commute into downtown during the day. To capitalize on that daytime energy, we're going to open a cafe in the lobby, which will spill out to this patio. There will be businesspeople here, arts people, government people, busking performers and musicians--a wonderful cross-pollination of people. And then, over there--" He strides toward their new building to the north, sweeping his hands before the parking lot, saying something about an outdoor music venue.

Shutting my notebook again, I hurry after, extending my phone-if I'm too slow to take notes, at least I'll catch him on the microphone.

****

I'm out of breath when I catch up with him, at the top of the loading dock of the north-neighbor building-

"This place was built in 1910, two years before New Mexico statehood," Dennis tells me, "It's built like a tank." He explains that this used to be the produce warehouse for the city: 'Fruit Street' once led straight to the parking lot. Now Dennis has plans to expand the loading dock, and turn the end of Fruit Street into an outdoor bar. The other end of the parking lot will be a stage. He flings his arms wide, as if drawing the blinds on reality, in order to reveal his vision: "Imagine, drinking a beer fifty feet away from your favorite performer, a gorgeous view of the sunset, the Wells Fargo bank lit up in green . . . and we've been playing with doing projections on that historic Glorieta Beer building!" He turns, and asks me, "how do we turn an area of town into a twenty-four-hour place?"

I stutter-am I supposed to answer? I'm still processing his vision . . .

He turns again, to the door, unlocks it, and goes inside . . . but I'm too stunned to follow.

****

I hear him talking inside the building, giving the tour without me. He's rattling off the specifications of a co-op office space: A central hallway, 8 offices, each office 120 square feet, fiber optic internet, a common conference room, hangout space, and discounted rates for use of three venues. All the offices on the south side have a window, all on the north have skylights. "And I finally get my corner office!"

At last I turn and follow him inside--but he has already shown the co-op offices, and now he's crossing from the west side of the building to the east. He stops in front of me and places his hand on my shoulder, wearing a big grin.

"I've been calling this place a cultural collider," He says, "'Collisions' is the big catchphrase for entrepreneurial incubator-type programs--what collisions means is, people running into each other throughout the day. That's why we want several organizations in one building. Density is a good thing: It creates a viable scene. We don't want an ice cream factory that only makes vanilla. We want pistachio, coffee, guava--wow, that's cool! That creates an energetic community that keeps its youth."

"By creating this subculture here, we want to make a home for young folk who want to stay in Albuquerque. Like Studio Playhaus-have you heard of them?"

"Yes," I say, "They're all my age." Actually, they're younger. I was in shows with them when they were still students of UNM.

"When they graduated," Dennis says, "they were going to just bolt and go to Portland or L.A. or wherever. Instead, they came together, and said 'we're going to give a go at this.' FUSION is providing mentorship, and a place for them to hang their shingle. They'll have one of these offices."

Wait-what did he say? People my age, in the arts, in a real office? The room begins to spin; I'm blacking out; I fall-

****

Dennis catches me and carries me to a restaurant booth. He keeps talking. "I got these booths from a restaurant that was going under. I had said, 'this is what we're going to do, we're going to have a dining space in here. If you're an up-and-coming restaurant and you want to practice what it means to work a full kitchen, you can rent this space for a week.' People had a hard time visualizing that. See, I like plans and all, but people need to see what I'm talking about. So I put these booths here. All of a sudden, people were like, 'oh, yeah!'"

I'd like to see this restaurant also, but my vision still fails me: The world is a blur, and I can't see past my own nose. Is something wrong with my brain? A concussion? All these ideas hitting me at once-they are all so cool, I can't measure them against my experience, the image I have of this city. The force of this contradiction seems to have busted my cultural cognition. Until now, I've only thought of Albuquerque in diminutive terms--theater here thrives on heart, but never flourishes as business: Isn't that a rule? This Forum-promoting economy with art--may as well have switched my right brain with my left!

****

Though I'm incapacitated, Dennis drags my limp body across the restaurant floor, up a ramp. I'm not heavy, and he's strong; so he's not winded at all and he continues his monologue without pause: "There's so much happening and about to happen downtown, a lot of development; we're about to come into a really explosive place of growth. The last thing I want to happen is for the arts to get screwed out of that. These buildings in the wrong hands could get torn down and turned into a parking garage!"

Dennis stops, and lays me down with a thud onto a coarse wood floor. "This is the piéce de résistance!" he says, his voice thunderously resonant within the space. I can't see, but I know I'm in a large room; Dennis clomps a wide circle around my body. And, the air feels thinner here-expansive, like I were on the peak of a mountain.

I imagine this, that I'm laying atop the peak of the Sandia mountains. Dennis allows a short silence; in the quiet, my mind clarifies this imagination, looking over Albuquerque a mile below. So when Dennis speaks up again I can't help but frame his descriptions with the limitless New Mexico sky, the vital grid of a sprawling city, and the rust-brown plateau of the West Mesa spreading toward the gentle curve of the horizon. "This room is about 2,600 square feet, with higher ceilings than in the Cell. Cool ass doors; cool ass windows. A basement for props, costumes, and sets."

Dennis' footsteps clomp toward me. "And see this:" he pulls me up and softly slaps my face several times until I open my eyes. Then, pointing across my blurry line of sight, he draws a rectangle. "This is the size of the Cell," he says, "our current, sixty-person space."

I'm still looking through my mind's eye, from Sandia Peak, so I see his rectangle as a small section in the city's grid: The Central Corridor-from Old Town, through Downtown, and beyond the University-the place that's been slated by the city, the schools, and the private sector for massive redevelopment within the next five years.

Then, Dennis drags me around one-eighty degrees. Finally, I come out of my daydream and see: This is not a mountain; it's a stage-roomy, rustic, embracing. "See how much extra space there is in here," he says, "340-person capacity for concerts, 200 for theater performances. Now we can perform in the round, thrust, proscenium. We're not losing the intimacy-only adding additional design possibilities."

Possibilities indeed-for, no sooner have I returned from my mountain-peak, that this stage sets my imagination aglow again, and this time I go further. I break through Albuquerque's Central Corridor, cross over the West Mesa horizon, and soar into a million places and times, a million characters old and new: I become an Anasazi priest, a Las Vegas mobster, a Russian aristocrat, an Israeli astronaut, Attila the Hun...

Could such a stage could stand, and expand, on this city's dry soil? Just considering the potential, I have fainted, and fallen-as this city has also fallen, many times before, trying to make a scene like the big cities have. It cannot be, we seem to have learned, this high desert cannot grow like the rest of the world!

Yet this place lasts. This is the heartland of Pueblos, outpost of Old Mexico, older than the States. We've seniority over most start-up, so-called 'up-and-coming' cities, both east and west-we don't have to be like them. Why don't we take the lead?

****

Eventually, somehow, I regain control over my body. It is night by the time this happens, and Dennis has gone home.

I find my own way off the future stage, past the future restaurant, through the future co-op offices, down the future bar, across the future outdoor music venue, past the future cafe, and back to the parking lot, my bike. I look at the shadow of the old Glorieta Beer building through the fence, and imagine the cool projections that could illuminate the side--

Cool--there it is again! Not to describe a past concert, but a future illumination. And what about the present moment? That was my core question: Is there something cool happening right now? But I never found my answer.

A homeless woman approaches from behind the Glorieta Beer building and reaches through the fence, asking for a cigarette. I pull out my pockets; I've nothing to give her--except a notebook full of questions (I hide my phone).

I watch her wander away, and then I put my ear buds in and listen to the recording, skipping to the end so I can catch the last of Dennis' monologue-what he said after I got swallowed by my imagination and stopped listening.

"I think it's damn high time that people realize that the arts are economic development." As he talks, I hop on my bike and ride toward Central. "Right now, FUSION is an outpost of professional theatre. When we enter into contracts with the union, we do so alone. We can't collectively bargain." Dennis' forceful voice cuts though the traffic roaring past me, the chrome low riders with their booming bass. "There are fifteen to thirty theater companies in this town. If three or four of those were able go pro, then we would be able to negotiate a deal where more union actors would be able to work more regularly." I swerve onto the sidewalk, passing the nightlife: dispossessed drifters, club-hoppers, families at the movies...but in a minute I've biked past them all and I'm racing through the darkness, alone again, as Dennis continues, "We want to provide the leadership, to help any company who wants to make this step: Who's going to come in and build this scene?"

I bike further up the old road, looking for a home. Not my home-I don't have one. As the reader can surely tell, I'm not making any money off writing. No, I'm looking for my dad's place so I can crash on his futon; how cool.

Photo credits: Harrison Sim, Devon Hoffman

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