PATRICK'S CABARET IS AN INSTITUTION that
is wrapped inside a community that is enclosed
within an idea. That may sound complicated, but
the man behind that rainbow-festooned building on
27th and Lake Street is even more complicated-and
more interesting-than that.
Patrick Scully is the artistic director of what is now
Patrick's Cabaret, but it all started far more modestly
almost 22 years ago when, as Patrick says, he “called
people who were friends of mine ”to come and join him
in a single, eclectic night of performance presented
to the general public. Of his group of friends, Scully
says, “some were dancers, some were poets, some
were musicians, some were just colleagues in the
community...” Back in those days, “getting on stage
was more complicated” than it is today, he says, and
the idea of shaking up that status quo “came out of
what I would call a combination of a visionary and an
entrepreneurial spirit.”
Drawing on what he calls his “social capital” Scully lined up a space
(a gym at St. Stephen's school in South Minneapolis), some rudimentary
lighting, an eclectic group of performers, and an adventurous audience.
“For a long time”, he says, the phenomenon that is now known as Patrick’s
Cabaret “was just something that happened from time to time.”
The idea was not to create a ‘separatist’ space for queer artists, but
to make a stage accessible to any artist who needed a stage and had a
hard time getting access to one. Still, Scully says it was “obvious that gay
people were a part of it, because I was as out as I was.” And soon, he says,
the Cabaret became a place in the art world in the Twin Cities “that was
so gay-inclusive that it created a kind of space for queer arts in the Twin
Cities to flourish at a time in those early years when many arts organizations
in town would consciously deliberate about whether they wanted to
do something gay.”
From the early days, Scully recalls, “it was obvious that women didn't
have equal access to performing on stage, that people of color didn't have
equal access, that people with disabilities didn't have equal access...” The
result is that today's Patrick's Cabaret has a mission that says, in part, that
“The Cabaret's first commitment is to serve the needs of local performing
artists, specifically reaching out to artists of color, GLBT/queer-identified
artists and those with disabilities.”
Soon the periodic and unpredictable cabaret evenings were moved to a
storefront on 24th Street and Portland Avenue-Scully's residence at the
time-before moving to the current Cabaret building at 3010 Minnehaha Avenue.
The Longfellow Community Council “strongly encouraged”
the Cabaret to come into the neighborhood where Scully-a
student of biology-began to see it as “part of an economic
ecosystem... We were one of the first newly-arrived plants that
grew and thrived on Lake and Minnehaha,” a part of the city
where “there clearly has been a renaissance” in recent years. “We
have a reciprocal relationship,” he says, with “each of the five
unique restaurants within a stone's throw of us,” and our Cabaret
publicity encourages ticket-buyers to come early and patronize
those diverse businesses.
One of Patrick's innovative ideas is to invite guest curators
to program each Cabaret weekend. For many years, every
performer had to go through Scully to get to the Cabaret stage.
The guest curator system has opened new doors to the Cabaret's
stage. The community of the Cabaret “used to be like a circle,”
says Scully, with him at the center. “Now it's a web” serving an
ever-more diverse community.
Scully's, and the Cabaret's, vision goes far beyond providing
entertainment. “We, as a queer community,” Scully says, “need to
have arts organizations that reflect the reality of our lives. If you
never see your reality reflected in the culture around you, you
experience a kind of isolation that-at its most intense-could
probably drive people insane.”
No one will go insane if Patrick Scully and the ever-evolving
institution that he founded and directs have anything to say
about it. Scully and the Cabaret continue to evolve, integrated in
a web of historically-marginalized communities, and striving to
honor the idea that all of us need to see our reality represented,
artistically and with integrity, in the larger culture.
--Jeff Nygaard is a freelance writer, activist, educator, media critic,
and working-class public intellectural. More of his writing can be
seen on his blog: www.nygaardnotes.org.
