Downtown Phoenix Voices is an ongoing series of profiles on the many diverse and inspirational voices in the downtown Phoenix community. To read the previous installment in the series, click here.
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Dialogue is revolution.
The phrase is a favorite for Mary Stephens, producing director of Arizona State University’s Performance in the Borderlands. But it’s more than just a phrase — the idea motivates and shapes her work, which centers on creating theater performances that develop political change.
“We create political shift through cultural shift. That’s my belief. We get to the political through the cultural,” Stephens said. “So we continue to push for public dialogue.”
Stephens is perhaps best known for developing the Phoenix Youth Hostel and Cultural Center, which she owned for four years and converted from just a hostel into the place it is today: a squat home for international travelers with lights strung up around the front yard, including space for a microphone and seating for outdoor performances, where events are held alongside the normal hostel activities.
In August, Stephens announced she was leaving her position as owner of the hostel. Now, she said, she will continue to be involved with the programming in small ways, but running the hostel is no longer among her priorities.
“The consideration came in two ways. It was, ‘Can the hostel, if I were to leave, survive and continue to still do the work that it needs to do with our international guests and our local community members to bridge that dialogue that can happen globally?’” Stephens said. “Or, ‘Would my work with Performance in the Borderlands and my teaching and my cultural work with ASU and in the community, could that survive without me?’ And it became very clear that the hostel, while it might change, could survive my departure, but the other could not.”
Stephens’ family has owned the hostel since 1990, though the building has been a hostel in its location at Ninth and Portland streets since 1981, Stephens said. Four years ago, her mother told her they were going to sell the hostel, so Stephens offered to buy it — after a lot of time she spent traveling during and after college, buying the hostel solidified her move back to Phoenix.
During her years of ownership, Stephens converted the hostel into the cultural center it is today. Upon leaving, she sold the shares she owned back to her father. A second partner who will own and fund the hostel but is a silent partner, which means they will remain unnamed, also took on a portion of the ownership.
While the hostel has long been inextricably connected with Stephens’ name, she has plenty of other work to drive her forward. Stephens programmed a wide variety of events since summer’s end, both with and separate from Performance in the Borderlands, including Bocafloja at the Herberger Theater Center, a Banned Plays reading during First Fridays in October as part of the Nogales Map Grant project and a performance by Ana Tijoux at the Crescent Ballroom.
Stephens has dark, curly hair and brown eyes. Whether her hair is pulled back bun-like on her head and captured beneath a headband or hanging to frame her face, whether casually dressed or professional, the energy she exudes changes little. She’s charismatic and humorous with any audience, but alongside this, she’s thoughtful. She listens.
Tamara Underiner, who is the adviser on Stephens’ Ph.D. work, said Stephens is characterized by her creativity, energy and ability to bring disparate people together.
“(What) it boils down to for me with her is she has a gift for catalyzing community through art,” Underiner said.
There are a few key things Stephens incorporates into her work to catalyze community in this way: culture, politics, global perspective and conversation.
Many of these elements are important to her because of the way she was raised, she said. Her family was highly political, leading Stephens to question authority and speak politically even as a 10-year-old in elementary school.
“From the very atheist household that I grew up in — being 10 years old and being like, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ you know, that’s a political statement from a child in the United States,” Stephens said.
The hostel played a part in developing the cultural and global perspective Stephens brings to the work she does. She spent much of her time there growing up, including Christmas, and there, she said, was where she developed a sense of sharing space with others, whether in giving others the room to speak in conversation or sharing meals.
“As a child I grew up in the eye of adults who just saw this kid running around the hostel, and so the woman in the sari or the woman in the hijab, the man in a lungi, these things were not strange to me,” Stephens said. “As I grew older, at 21 when 9/11 happened and suddenly these stereotypes really took hold, it was very shocking.”
Two years later at 23 years old, Stephens, now 35, first visited Mexico City. She found there what she called an “incredible experiment in terms of art, culture and politics”: underground arts venues, a street selling used books for an entire mile and the casas de las culturas, or culture houses, that inspired Stephens’ development of the cultural part of the youth hostel.
“What I began to see was through literature and through music and through performance, people were having these counter-narratives in their work, and they were happening all over the world,” Stephens said. “I think in other countries, people don’t have the luxury to make art that doesn’t matter. They don’t have that luxury. Artists are public intellectuals, and I really believe we need to see a public intellectualism move back into the artists.”
The idea of artists as intellectuals, as people capable of creating public dialogue and political shift, is the center of Stephens’ work — and what she finds lacking from art in the United States today.
“I was so thoroughly bored by the arts,” Stephens said. “Theater. All of these things were not engaging to me because they didn’t have a social engagement. They weren’t political.”
Thus grew the cultural center portion of the youth hostel. Thus developed Performance in the Borderlands. And thus comes Stephens’ focus on creating a space for dialogue. In response to controversial issues in Arizona such as immigration, Native American and borderlands issues, Stephens pushes for a willingness to listen to all sides of the conversation.
“We need to hear from indigenous communities, people of color, Latino communities,” she said. “We need to hear these voices in their native tongues, and they need to be privileged spaces that we feel are important. Not that you do with your community center on the south side. We need to center these spaces.”
Casandra Hernandez, the artist programs and career services coordinator for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, met Stephens, whom she considers a “dear friend,” two or three years ago. Hernandez said Stephens’ work to create dialogue gives people the opportunity to look at the boundaries of their own lives.
“She really has a unique voice in this community in that she’s someone who’s not afraid to ask difficult questions,” Hernandez said.
It’s honest dialogue that also drew in Rashaad Thomas, a justice studies student who became involved with Stephens’ work through the Banned Plays series. Thomas participated in a Banned Play reading and, during the discussion afterward, realized his opinions and politics were very different than those of the people around him — but it was Stephens who taught him to better communicate through those differences.
“She was one of the first two people that expressed that the feedback (I gave) wasn’t received, or the way that I communicated — I didn’t realize how I communicated that might (repel) people,” Thomas said. “That Banned Play was hard for me, because I didn’t know for so long. But she was the first person who reached out and let me know the honest truth.”
Now Stephens is moving forward to continue providing that kind of honesty and dialogue in other spaces. Leaving the hostel was hard, she said, but she’s looking forward to her new opportunities. Stephens is where she would have wanted to be years ago, she said.
“The way that I understand the life that we want to lead is, would I pick these struggles? Yes. Do I think they’re worth it? Absolutely,” she said. “Would I choose the things that force me to fail? Then yeah. I would definitely choose this.”
As for the work she does in the future, Stephens is grateful for and humbled by the ability she has, along with the artists she works with, to begin to create change.
“There is something really gratifying about knowing we have the ability to rescript the political lies and machinations we’ve been living with,” Stephens said. “It’s not every day that I wake up feeling excellent about life, but I do wake up every day knowing that we need to put a pen to paper and rescript, and rewrite the story, and continue to allow people to tell their stories.”
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu
