The Oakland-based guerrilla performance group headRush is serious when it comes to taking their message to the streets. You can find them performing their brief but high-energy sketches not only in theaters, festivals and cafés, but also on sidewalks and in parking lots. The group brings its brand of urban poetry and satire to audiences wherever it finds them.
The brainchild of a trio of teacher-actors -- Rosa González, Simón Hanukai and Xago (Luís Juarez) -- headRush debuted at Oakland's Jahva House in September 2003. Calling themselves a "psycho-politico spoken-word theater crew," González, Hanukai and Juarez hoped to exhort and incite their viewers out of passivity using Chicano "teatro," a satirical agitprop style made popular in the 1960s by Luís Valdez and the farmworkers' El Teatro Campesino. Setting up wherever there is space to move, headRush's off-the-cuff improvisations and audience involvement recall the immediacy of Campesino's "actos," or one-act plays, which might have been performed on the back of flatbed truck or on a picket line.
Read more on the KQED Spark website.
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