One pleasure of covering the arts in Santa Barbara comes from glimpsing the talent operating behind the scenes, in particular in the area of programming. For every interesting show you see in town, there’s a brilliant person — often a team of brilliant people — hard at work finding the artist, matching the performance to the venue, and hustling to raise the resources required to make it happen. And while the majority of these programming heroes are familiar faces — Celesta Billeci, Moss Jacobs, Roman Baratiak, Patrick Posey, David Asbell, Jonathan Fox … the list goes on — occasionally someone new pops up who shows that same knack for creating essential nights of performing art.
Heather Jeno Silva, the director of Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Santa Barbara’s upcoming On Edge Festival, is a classic example. A veteran staffer at UCSB Arts & Lectures, she learned the fine points of the business of booking from the best. As a side project, Silva began working with Miki Garcia of MCA Santa Barbara on a monthly performance-art series that went by the unassuming title of Forum Lounge.
Forum Lounge was Silva’s DIY idea for invigorating the younger division of the city’s arts community with some decidedly strange performances on Thursday evenings in the gallery space at Paseo Nuevo. Word spread quickly, and soon these Thursday-night happenings were the place to be, almost regardless of what the performance was. Dance, puppets, comedy, technology, autobiography, provocation — all the tools in the performance art box got taken out at Forum Lounge and tossed around, often by rising stars who would wind up playing much bigger venues and cities within months or even weeks of their appearances at MCA.