Can art change a community?
This is the question that choreographer Anne Bluethenthal and other Tenderloin artists have been considering for the last 15 years.
It began when Bluethenthal, then a dancer interested in social change who was living outside the Tenderloin, had a conversation with fellow artists in the Senator Hotel on Ellis Street.
Like her, they wanted to use art to engage with city neglect, generational trauma, addiction and crime.
Bluethenthal began meeting these artists in the lobbies of single-room occupancy hotels, where many of them lived. Under the umbrella of Bluethenthal’s nonprofit, ABD Productions, they began to choreograph dances and design performance art. Dancers were paid, and decisions were made together.
The name Skywatchers comes from one of the first members of Bluethenthal’s circles, a Tenderloin resident named Janice Detroit, who lived in a top-floor apartment overlooking the neighborhood.
“She said, ‘I’m a skywatcher. I look out over the Tenderloin. I see all the children, and I take the children’s tears away,’” Bluethenthal said.
The group borrowed the name for an early piece and it stuck.
Meeting in the lobbies of SROs opened up a whole new community, namely the other residents. For years, the group would meet weekly in drum circles, reading poems and singing in between talks about their neighborhood and its living conditions. That’s how Joel Yates, a lead artist at Skywatchers, came to the group for the first time.
“It was a lot of people I knew, people from the building, people from this neighborhood. I was like, I didn’t know y’all drummed, I didn’t know y’all sang and did art,” Yates said. Over the next two years, Yates would run into the Skywatchers in buildings and around the neighborhood. “Me and Skywatchers have been acquainted for quite some time.”
Small meetings spawned conversations about the need for autonomy in the Tenderloin and a sense of desperation that many of its residents felt. The community was in survival mode, some of them said. They wanted to express that.
“I’m not going to take your story and turn it into my art,” said Bluethenthal, who is not a Tenderloin resident. “I’m going to take your story and help you perform your art.”
For example: In the past few months of weekly meetings, when artists were invited to express themselves through song and performance and share what issues have been weighing on them, Bluethenthal and Yates noticed a recurring theme of ancestry.
Specifically, attendees kept bringing up finding power from their family’s history, which gave them a sense of survival.
In collaboration, the group painted and sculpted the masks that loomed over one of their afternoon performances in the Tenderloin National Forest, an empty lot between two looming buildings that has been turned into a community garden.
Tree branches rustled in the wind. The Skywatchers gathered around a stone patio for an open mic, trading poems and songs.
The masks symbolize someone watching over them. Mounted on six-foot poles, the avatars’ abstract faces are pointed down at the group’s meetings, where they sing, play guitar and perform autobiographical spoken word pieces.
Another example: In 2022, filmmaker Irene Gustafson collaborated with the Skywatchers to create a short film about anti-homeless architecture in the Tenderloin, or elements of urban planning that are designed to make loitering or sleeping on the street uncomfortable.
In it, Yates clings to the rungs of a pointed fence and recites poetry. The Skywatchers chant songs and play instruments while poised around concrete bollards, a commentary on how a city might be designed against the needs of its residents, not for them.
These endeavors are then performed or available to the public for viewing, sometimes in galleries or during screenings, but often in public spaces. Dance and movement pieces are acted out on the street or the steps of City Hall. Once, the Skywatchers mounted portraits on bus stations up and down Market Street.
But artistic expression doesn’t allow the group to escape the conditions of the Tenderloin. Some of its members have been displaced from the neighborhood. Weekly meeting attendance can be unpredictable, and many of the artists work multiple jobs.
Tenderloin residents are pleading with the city for more resources and sustained attention: Last month, dozens of neighborhood denizens, including several Skywatchers members, asked city officials for a $4 million commitment to the neighborhood. The city’s $15.9 billion budget passed without that line item.
“It’s underresourced and overresourced at the same time,” Bluethenthal said of the Tenderloin. “There’s a pattern of, ‘We’re going to give you all this stuff to do your thing, and then we’re going to pull it out so you can’t succeed.’”
Her nonprofit dance company, which includes Skywatchers, received more than half of its 2023 budget of $300,000 from government grants and federal cuts worry her.
But even when the group is tight on cash, it feels impossible for them to turn away requests. Last year, Skywatchers put on about 30 performances. For each one, they paid their dancers and performers out of that limited budget.
“There’s a sense of wealth here, for sure,” said Bluethenthal. “If you want to be involved in it, you’re welcome.”