Miss Jinx at school
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
By: Jan Uebelherr
May 9, 1995

Waterloo- She will shout, she will challenge. Yes, she will abuse you. She will get you to take that gum out of your mouth and sit up straight. Or maybe you’ll just find yourself telling her to just shut up. Just what is Jinx Davis trying to do?

On this night, the last Friday in April, Davis is staring in an interactive production called, “Miss Jinx Teaches School” at her Mode Theater in tiny Waterloo. What Davis is trying to do is expose the abuse of power. The agent of this abuse is Miss Jinx, the teacher whose favored tools are fear and repression. “In a time that I feel is, historically, very fearful, I’m trying to collectively identify how we abuse each other,” Davis said. The fear in our times comes because “change is occurring so rapidly on all levels,” she said. “And in the middle of change there’s only two ways to go—either you fight it and fear it, or you learn to work within that chaos. “We’ve always abused each other, but in a time of great change, when fear raises its head, I believe that the abuse becomes more obvious,” she said. “I pick the metaphor of the teacher because that’s one experience we’ve all had. A teacher can hold, because of the position of power, the potential of being a petty tyrant or an individual that negates others.”

While Davis is performing this “power play,” she is also doing something else. She is dismantling the time-honored wall between actor and audience. Her class is invited to talk back to the teacher, something Davis believes helps revive the essence of theater, which is to connect people.

The backdrop for this and other offbeat theater and art is the 1938 movie theater that she and her partner, Andy Pizer bought in 1989. They’ve remodeled it into a residential gallery and performance space. The lived upstairs in a huge loft. As the audience will see, theater a la Jinx Davis is unexpected but orchestrated.

“I use school teaching type techniques to keep me on track. I have flow charts and a blackboard, but none of those techniques are written in stone. The audience can change anything,” she said.

In the past year, 12,000 people have been to the Mode Theater, she said, and it’s been a “real mixed bag.” Audiences have included Jungian psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, gays and lesbians, and “little old ladies in their 80’s,” Davis said.

As the show begins in the art-filled performance space with rows of white, molded plastic patio chairs, Jinx Davis tells that she can present this performance because her battles with power are over. Before she begins, she lays down a few rules. “You are a classroom tonight. I will be treating you as my students,” Davis says. “Don’t deny anyone’s reality,” she says. “The reality is that this is a classroom, and if people choose to be a witness, or to take a particular stance that should be honored. “I ask that you authentically respond,” she says. She starts to explain the television set at her side, then stops. “This is pervasive.” She said of the TV, adding that the reason for its presence should become clear as the show progresses. Pizer runs a camera in the corner of the room, panning the audience. The images show up on the television. He later explained that this creates a reflected reality.

Yoda the cat roams the aisles, and before she begins Davis says, “She’s probably going to be in your lap, so if you don’t like her just push her away.” Then in high-pitched, clipped tones, Davis becomes Miss Jinx and primly begins her lessons. On this night, the audience is not quite as involved as others have been, Davis later acknowledges. Exchanges between teacher and students are brief. That’s always possible with an interactive theater, she says.

A few scenes from Miss Jinx’s classroom on this evening:

“Put your feet on the ground. Don’t sit there like a prostitute.”
“Who here asked to be born? Raise your hands. (No hands are raised.) Well, the same thing is true about your school. No one asked your opinion about getting in. And now you’re here; and you can’t get out.”
“You are so stupid. That’s all right. I know you are stupid.”
A rhyme sets the tone in class. “’The deserving ones, who are they? They are the ones who obey!’ I want you to memorize this.”
“You see, each time that you think you know something, Miss Jinx can prove that you are stupid.”
On why we need discipline: “Without discipline, there is no progress. And without progress, my goodness gracious, we’ll never get anywhere.”
“Put your feet down, dear. I’ve told you three times this is not a brothel. You and I will reckon with each other later.”

After an intermission during which three different kinds of cheesecake are served, Miss Jinx begins the second half of the show. She foretells an apocalyptic future and gives advice on how to survive it. The recurring theme: Investment in various technologies.

The show ends with Miss Jinx disintegrating into a robotic stupor. After she collapses a man in the audience calls out, “I think the Prozac is in the top drawer,” bringing ripples of laughter.

It will be many months before Davis undertakes another interactive production like this. That’s because it requires work from the audience. “You have to give the audience a break,” she said. In the fall, she intends to turn the Mode Theater into a fundamentalist church with a character based on 1920s preacher and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Davis is looking for an organist for that show.

Her June show, the debut of “All Nets Have Holes—The Character Dramas of Jinx Davis,” is partially interactive. It’s populated with “society ladies and homeless characters.” Some will interact with the audience, others with individual people.

All About Jinx

At 44, Davis’ past jobs include teacher, librarian, television and radio script writer and storyteller> She holds a master of fine arts degree in theater from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has traveled with the homeless and lived in impoverished areas in the South. “I did a lot of corporate climbing,” she said. In San Antonio, Texas, she was the vice president of a national accounting firm. She also has enjoyed the fringe benefits of having liberal and well-connected parents who were professors at UW-Madison.

Her father, David C. Davis, taught film literature, children’s literature, early childhood education and black literature. Her mother, Madeline Davis, taught black literature and wrote radio and television scripts for WHA in Madison. Through her parents, she knew many children’s authors and illustrators, including Dr. Seuss. And because of her parents, who were active in the civil rights movement and encouraged creativity in their kids, she says she’s able to take the risks involved with experimental theater.

Before she was born, her parents wanted to name her Jinx, after actress Jinx Falkenberg. Her parents thought the name would be an unwise choice when their daughter was born partially paralyzed—a condition from which Davis has almost completely recovered. Instead, her parents named her Nils Rene, after a character in a children’s book. But Davis took matters into her own hands, at age 14, reclaiming the name Jinx when the family moved to the South.

“I love it,” she says of her name, “I love it!”

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