The following article and interview is by guest contributor Lisa Kaselak, who will be curating a short film series at the Fuse Box Festival tomorrow evening. Check the IST list for details. -- Ed. Note

I first met Ron Berry last year, after I finished a short documentary piece and some accompanying prints and was looking for a community space to house the whole exhibit – not necessarily an easy task since this work was not salable – read: no gallery commissions. We’d agreed to meet at the Blue Theatre - home of Refraction Arts, where Berry serves as artistic director.

The Blue Theatre is near the corner of Springdale and Airport, next to the Blue Genie Art Industries and behind the “secret” Goodwill hangar. It’s not a place you’d run into on your way around town, unless you need a 10 ft. styrofoam brain fabricated or are looking for a wheelchair dolly for your indie film. The parking lot is dirt and rock bleached by the Texas summer sun, and when you drive through the complex you fully expect to skid into Harry Dean Stanton leaning against a junked-out car. Across the way I could see cast-off fiberglass body parts, broken chairs, and set pieces that had assembled into their own conceptual opus.

Having never met Ron, I expected something producer-like, a guy with a Jabra BT500 glued to his ear as he waves an “I’ll-only-be-a-minute” finger in my direction. But casting back in my memory of all the times I’ve since run into Ron, it occurred to me that I’ve never once seen him on a cell phone. Or texting. Or multi-tasking his way through a conversation. Or doing anything other than being 100% present when he’s talking with you. Berry is almost an anachronism – a genuine human in the most analog of ways, and his moon pie face and general affability makes you wonder how long it’s been since he moved from the mid-west. Which he did not, of course. He’s from Houston – one of four children of a NASA rocket scientist. Go figure.

Since I thought I was going to be convincing him to give me the space for free for a night, I was surprised when he started the meeting by showing me where the lights were and where I could hang my prints and discussing how much beer we’d need. Then he picked up a can of paint, grabbed a roller, handed me one, and we dove into the details. And that’s pretty much how it goes with Ron Berry. His “this-shit-is-supposed-to-be-fun” approach creates a zero barrier-to-entry that is the founding principle of Refraction Arts. Berry’s other principle belief - that he should get the fuck out of people’s way and let them make their art - is turning out to be one of the most important ingredients in fostering a transcendent arts organization.

With some pretty impressive accolades, Refraction Arts has gone from a little non-profit founded in 1997 by three high school pals (insert standard Austin “slacker-to-success” story here) to an organization that sponsors some of the most innovative and critically successful theatre and visual art works in Austin. As a company, Refraction has been nominated for and won over 100 awards. Their performances and other installations have been voted the #1 Arts Event of the Year by the Austin Chronicle three out of the past four years (The North Project, The Battle of Hickory Ridge, and The Assumption); their original play The Philomel Project received a rave review in the NY Times; Anna Bella Eema and the Kindermann Depiction both received Best New Play Awards from the Austin Critics Table, and Berry’s own play, Orange was nominated for the American Theater Critics Association national New Play Award. The message is, it isn’t all madness.

Recently, I sat down with Berry over a cup of tea (he doesn’t do caffeine) at Clementine to talk about FUSE BOX, the 3^rd annual Refraction Arts spring festival, and how it is that Ron isn’t fixing toilets at the Blue anymore.

The Fuse Box Festival runs through Saturday, April 28th. Tickets and more information can be found on the Refraction Arts website.

You’re primarily a theatre actor and playwright – you’ve been voted best actor by the Austin Critic’s Table and best actor in the Chronicle Reader’s Poll, and your own plays have been widely recognized. Shouldn’t you be hauling ass to New York to live the dream? Let’s not have the NY-Austin quality-of-life debate, but after – what, almost six years now since you started the Blue Theatre – what’s the attraction to running a space that struggles to keep itself afloat?

(laughs) Well, the point of running the Blue Theatre was to provide a way for people to make glorious beautiful things. But the reality of it is that I’m a landlord – no one calls you up to say thanks – they call you up at 2:00 a.m. to fix the toilets or tell you that the lights aren’t working. That part is definitely a drag. But there was this belief that I had in the space and what it could be.

Which was – a place to develop a repertory?

I always had this vision that it would be a place where people could create non-commercial, personal work. A place to make mistakes, to fuck up, to experiment. I think that’s vital to making good art. One of the things that kept me in Austin was a sense of possibility. Everything is possible here – hey, I have this hunch that this thing might be kind of interesting and I love that. There’s this sense of play and of making something without necessarily worrying about where is this going to get me, where is it going next? Who do I need to invite to this thing so that it will go somewhere else? My experience has been that when I’m worried about failure, or worried about making something too perfect or too good, especially in the early stages, I feel like that’s not conducive to making good art, you’re going to build yourself a cage.

I’ve noticed you tend not to get into too many legitimacy issues. Do you consider yourself a gatekeeper?

I have thought about trying to do – so maybe I’m inching toward being a gatekeeper but I thought about trying to shape that a little more. I’m an aspiring gatekeeper. A gatekeeper wannabe. That’s funny. That’s really funny. Because I do really believe in getting out of people’s way. But I also believe in combining that openness with a certain amount of rigor – trying to negotiate living in Austin with that issue. I try and, if anyone has an idea, I try and make that possible.

To a certain extent I guess that I’m making decisions about what’s happening at our space and I have opinions about that but I’m into letting people do their thing. For example, other organizations in town rent their space out, but no one else gives a space to visual artists without asking them for anything in return – we do that for MASS. We don’t take a percentage of anything sold. That was important. Phil Soltanoff has this manifesto about the value of uselessness and how important that is in life. We have all these graduate programs that are grooming people to go out into the world and be plugged into a system and whatnot, but what he’s interested in is art-making as a way of being in the world, that isn’t a commodity that can be sold and plugged into something.

Do you find yourself straddling this fence between audience and artist? I mean, you don’t WANT to make a lot of distinctions between the stuff that sucks and the stuff that sells, BUT… how does that approach affect the reputation of the Blue Theatre? At least in terms of keeping things afloat. Do you care?

The idea of creating a culture around a space that is very hospitable and welcoming and supportive - treating people respectfully. I desperately want the public to come to see the work, but its not what we base our decisions on. In that sense I do care about audience in terms of being inviting and open and in many ways… It sucks when only 10 people come to see it, that doesn’t make me happy, but we’re going to create it regardless. I mean, we’ve done a lot of not so great stuff, the ideas have been interesting and not everything has been fully realized. I feel like we’re maturing and learning from our mistakes – they’re invaluable mistakes. That’s what I love about Austin, you can make mistakes and not be hung out to dry.

The other thing is, well, it’s hard to say if this has hurt the Blue Theatre. But, some of the stuff that I didn’t really feel worked, other people loved. It is hard to measure success in this arena. You can’t do attendance or box office or reviews or any of that. On a certain level, you can measure by those things, but I don’t know which is most accurate, and once you start measuring by those things you give up your goal of goal-lessness. And then you become something that maybe you don’t want to be. You have to have a certain amount of failure to be successful, I guess. We try to take the work really seriously but not ourselves. How many clichés can we come up with? Juicy turd is another good one. The can-do attitude here is beautiful and fantastic and frustrating because of its lack of vigorous discussion that I often long for, and when I go to New York I get it, when I go for two weeks I get it.

Is that why you started Fuse Box, to impart rigor?

Fuse Box got started because we had a month free at the theatre and I thought, hey let’s do this thing that speaks to what we’re all about. The first year was a month long – each weekend featured one main space performance, a film series, we divided the theatre space into areas and gave them to different artists to do installations. That was a good idea but became a little problematic in actuality. Then we had a day of site-specific work happening all over Austin.

It happened and I could see it, it was exactly what we need to be doing. Some shows were really well attended, some not so well, but I feel like that’s a festival, we’re doing new, sometimes experimental work and sometimes you’re rehashing something. Last year was a little bit bigger crowd – a little more mixed. This is our 3^rd year to do the festival, and its just starting to come into its own. One of the things we’re trying to do with Fuse Box is engage discourse to get people from different disciplines to start talking to each other about our work, and our ideas, and stuff. Or even just, how do you live as an artist? How can we help each other out? It’s important to create a forum or an outlet or some structure for these kinds of conversations to take place. The nature of the festival speaks to the nature of Refraction as an organization - we saw this festival as an opportunity to celebrate what we do and sort of help us better articulate what we do.

Is there anything else like this in Austin?

There’s not much else like this in the country. There is the Time-Based Festival in Portland, but they have like a million dollar budget, so it’s very different.

The Portland festival is more like a presenters festival, but we want to see things created here, as opposed to just presented. And we want audiences to get out of their comfort zone, to see things they wouldn’t normally see. Like we have an art gallery in the theatre, and the people who go to see the art shows will come to the performances and vice versa. I’m not a total dreamer, I know visual artists do their thing and performers do their thing, but for two weeks I’m hoping they expand and do something different.

This year we did this artist collaboration project where we invited a bunch of different artists from different disciplines to forge some interdisciplinary projects for this festival. Again, we want to start conversations. In terms of bringing outside artists in, the main aspect I’m interested in is conversation, and I want Austin artists to be part of this larger conversation and you can’t have that without bringing other people in to engage that. Some of the folks we’re bringing in are coming to work specifically with Austin artists. This will stimulate new conversation that you haven’t had or work with people you haven’t worked with yet. Some of these folks will sit on panels or participate in workshops. There’s Gary Bede, a composer and sound artist who was just commissioned by the winter Olympics to do a big installation. And Phil Soltanoff’s company 111 is jawdropping, incredible. Phil is an experimental director in the best sense of the word. Last year he did an investigation with trash bags –

Yeah, I saw that. It was a fun piece.

But his stuff is like, to me, it’s experimental in that it’s strange in it’s form but there is a human quality about it – an emotional component that I don’t always get from a lot of experimental work. As a performer, it’s some of the most honest work I’ve ever done.

So how do you balance these goals of holding artists to a standard and still keep this playfulness that is vital?

I think playfulness is especially true in the gestation early period of work, but there is a point where you do actually have to try and put forth effort. There can still be a lot of rigor even if you don’t know where it’s going. Experimental is not a substitute for rigor.

But, as much as I love the discourse in NY, the truth is, no one in NY is making the kind of work that gets done in Austin. I hear that comment a lot, that work from Austin is like a breath of fresh air. They describe it as, in Austin, there is just this sense of play and we don’t worry about who’s coming to see it. I love the idea of making work that we can hold up to look at, instead of saying, we’re going to make a statement with this thing or this is what we want to convey. I like the idea of making work in a way that says, let’s hold this up and look at this thing together.

You know, most of my career has been in the theatre world until a little more recently. Just stepping over into the other half, feels very non-collaborative. Its funny for me because I’m generally the person who talks to both sides and mediates between company members and visual artists.

Again, this festival is a real opportunity to start breaking down some of that crap. The theatre community is very supportive of one another but we don’t talk to each other as much as we could. No one is making a living at this, we’re all piecing together a living so we can do this other thing and it’s hard and if I can create a space that has few barriers that is the thing. That’s the initial idea. A space that is open with a culture of invitation, that’s important. That’s what I’ve hung on to all these years.