Tourettes Without Regrets

If you’re looking for an entertaining night out, you might start by deciding what kind of performance you’re interested in attending. Maybe you’re into listening to poetry, or standup comedy, or rap. But you don’t have to choose. In a warehouse space near the Oakland waterfront, there’s a show that combines all of those – and more. Lindsey Lee Keel has this story.

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LINDSEY LEE KEEL: Jamie DeWolf  takes the stage. He’s the founder and host of tonight’s performance. The stage juts out into the center of the Oakland Metro Theater. He’s practically surrounded by the eager crowd. 

JAMIE DEWOLF: Are you ready to get crazy on a Thursday night?

Tonight is the show’s tenth anniversary, and in celebration, DeWolf is dressed as an old man: he’s wearing a cardigan, his pants are pulled up to his waist, and he leans his weight on a walker. Standing on stage with him is a pretty girl in a revealing nurse’s costume and a man-sized badger with dusty fur. DeWolf calls on the crowd to engage in a sort of ritual.

DEWOLF: If you know what to do, start doing it now. Start to sway ladies and gentlemen. Sway like you will be after you finish the drinks. I would like everyone to hug someone you don’t know.

As the music picks up, hundreds of people begin to sway back and forth. Many have been coming here long enough to know the drill, and those that don’t quickly figure it out. The room becomes like a sea with people moving in unison. Strangers hug each other; people laugh.

This is Tourettes without Regrets, a once a month performance that’s hard to describe without giving a long list of the kinds of things you might see at any given show. There are beat boxers, burlesque dancers, and rappers. One in particular is dressed like a jelly doughnut. I don’t really know how to describe it, but DeWolf does it this way:

DEWOLF: It’s an underground variety show, and it kind of compromises up everything you can do with a microphone, on or off stage. So, it’s sort of like a dirty old vaudeville show with a contemporary, kind of urban twist.

When DeWolf says you can do everything with a microphone, he means it.

DEWOLF: We’re about to play one of my favorite games on the planet: what’s down my pants, ladies and gents, y’all ready for that?!

It’s never clear what will happen from one moment to the next. Genres seem irrelevant.

DEWOLF: if you’ve never been to a rap battle, if you’ve never been to a poetry slam, if you’ve never seen burlesque, if you’ve never seen standup comedy, or dirty haiku, or freakish inventive contests, then that’s what this show is for. It’s to put all those elements into one show.

DEWOLF: What makes Tourettes individual, unique, is throwing all these elements together and seeing what happens.

To be clear, DeWolf doesn’t have Tourettes syndrome. The name Tourettes Without Regrets is a play on the condition’s popular association with the inability to control outbursts of obscenity.

DEWOLF: I’ve just been accused of having Tourettes ever since I was a young child, so…

DeWolf doesn’t censor himself, and this show is an extension of that.

DEWOLF: In some respects it was just a defiant middle-finger to every one of these other shows that were like Minds Open or the Lyrical Corner. So, I started it as revenge.

Revenge, he says, for open mic’s that couldn’t handle his explicit style of poetry.

DEWOLF: Basically, every open mic in my home town banned me, and they kicked me out and on my last show I threw a chair at the host and I vowed that I would make a show that would dwarf all of theirs.

So DeWolf created a venue where he and other audacious artists could perform freely.

DEWOLF: Every religion needs its church; every art form needs its venue; every painter needs a gallery. Tourettes sort of became the clubhouse for all these different divergent talents and performances.

DeWolf says the surprising mix of creative forms often produces inspiration and connections among audience members and performers alike.

DEWOLF: Tourettes is sort of like a laboratory, that’s kind of the way I view it. It’s a lab. I just take all these chemicals and I throw ‘em together and I see what happens. For some people, it just means a one-night-stand and a hangover; for other people, they make creative alliances that are going to extend throughout the rest of their life.

Everyone is united, for the moment at least. Their voices combine in a cheer as slam poet Joyce Lee dominates the stage. She has them at every word.

JOYCE LEE: You know what sweetie? Everything happens for a reason. For instance, I busted the windows out your car so you could get the air I assumed you were talk’n about when you said I was suffocatin’ ya!

The thing about this show is that, while you can be a passive observer, you most likely won’t be. Audience members often become participants, performers, and judges. 

DEWOLF: We have five judges we’ve picked random from the audience. If you’re a judge, please come on stage now.

Keeping the roles open means the line between audience and performer is blurred.

DEWOLF: It makes everybody realize that anybody can be on that stage, that, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be. 

DeWolf says this transforms the experience for the audience and informs how they relate to performance and to art.

DEWOLF: I think that it redefines underground art for a lot of people. I think that it redefines what is comedy, what is funny, what is poetry, what is high art, what is low art. I think that shows people the diversity of crowds, that you don’t have to come from one scene. You can come from any scene and people are hungry for it. All these elements can be thrown together and they can coexist happily.

Tonight, Tourettes Without Regrets stands, as a symbol: ten years of open expression, and no one in the crowd, or on stage, is stopping yet.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Lindsey Lee Keel, in Oakland.

Lindsey Lee Keel is a student in the Public Interest Reporting Program at Mills College in Oakland. This story originally aired on February 16, 2010.