A decade ago, San Cha had reached her breaking point. The San Jose native was earning a reputation as a riveting live musician in San Francisco’s queer Latina bars, drag dives and underground goth/industrial scenes. But nearing age 30, she was burnt out — working too many low-paying gig economy jobs, yet still struggling to survive amid the soaring cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So in 2015, San Cha (born Lizette Gutierrez) moved out. She settled in at her grandmother’s farm in Jalisco, Mexico. The rural reset afforded her time and emotional space to focus on creating her original music.

It also supplied her with an unexpected inspiration. She often tuned into the ever-popular telenovelas that entranced Mexican viewers much as their American counterpart soap operas do here. The shows’ colorful, over-the-top melodramas seized her imagination, opening up creative space for a wilder, more theatrical expression. 

That infatuation, along with her earlier punk and electronica influences and affection for the traditional folk sounds she was hearing in Mexico — cumbia, bolero, and now especially ranchera — propelled San Cha in a new artistic direction. It eventually led to an acclaimed 2019 album, and now, a new experimental chamber opera co-commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

That opera, Inebria Me, will have its West Coast premiere Sept. 5 and 6 at PICA’s annual Time Based Art Festival, a whirlwind of contemporary dance, poetry, performance art, and more that runs Sept. 4-14 in four venues around Portland: PICA’s home on Northeast Hancock Street, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Reed College, and downtown’s Dolores Winningstad Theatre. 

Co-presented by Portland’s Boom Arts and playing twice at the Winningstad Theatre, Inebria Me tells — in heightened telenovela style — the story of Dolores, a working-class farm laborer who’s also at a turning point: remain in a loveless marriage to a wealthy abusive spouse, or risk poverty and social scorn to seek authentic fulfillment elsewhere. The answer erupts in an ecstatic encounter with an embodied spirit.

The Light of Hope

Dolores’s trajectory somewhat parallels San Cha’s own life arc. Born into a working-class, immigrant Mexican family that accepted neither her emerging queer sexuality nor her desire to be a professional musician, she bolted from an unsatisfying straight, monogamous relationship to find her true queer identity in San Francisco’s demimonde. 

Meanwhile, her musical inclinations morphed from her teenage church choirs and flute lessons to playing punky guitar and electronics and singing in bands, queering those often macho-oriented traditional Mexican song forms. Her evolving identity is reflected in her performing name, which roughly translates (via Mexican slang for a chick on the side) to “St. Courtesan.” 

After returning from her bucolic Mexican sojourn and creative renewal, San Cha moved to Los Angeles and released a series of increasingly acclaimed albums. She thought about creating an episodic telenovela about the character of Dolores with music videos.

Then suddenly came a major career boost: an invitation to open the 2018 Red Bull Festival. 

“They said, ‘You can do something that incorporates all the multi-hyphenates you are, all the artists you know in L.A.,’” she remembers. In a few frantic months, she created a telenovela-inspired stage show that became the first version of Inebria Me. 

The show told Dolores’s story in a larger-than-life, sometimes over-the-top style (e.g. the flamboyantly weepy “Levanta Dolores”) inspired by telenovelas, which San Cha describes as “overdramatic and tragic, like an opera. They kinda go hand in hand. The themes always have something to do with wealth and the prejudices people face from being poor, especially the way it is in Mexico, with a big divide between rich and poor. There’s usually one poor character coming up through high society through marriage, or maybe a father who all of a sudden is rich.”

She also noticed another feature. “Why is there so much BDSM in telenovelas? These themes are so intense! They’re really queer and really gay.“

Those and other ideas found their way into Dolores’s story. Conceiving it as a telenovela “freed me up from pop structures,” San Cha explains, because the music had to serve the dramatic needs of a stage presentation — an abrupt ending when Dolores is locked up, an extended outro sequence to accompany stage action, etc. 

The original stage version was more like a solo show with backup singers, with San Cha singing all the major characters’ parts. She originally envisioned the music as electronic disco. “The idea was to start with ranchera and go into electronics, use more of the sparkles like disco,” she says. “Disco to me is like an illusion of glamour. So once [Dolores] gets rich, it’s an illusion.”

But as the show developed, so did the music, growing richer and more diverse. In L.A., she’d put together a strong live band that allowed for a richer musical palette, and also worked with a vocal coach to strengthen and broaden her range to sing convincingly in ranchera style. Ultimately, the music incorporated not only San Cha’s punk and electronic dance roots and Mexican traditional styles, but also drew from the examples of her personal musical icons, from Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin to Chavela Vargas, Selena and Shakira.

Like the music, her lyrics embraced both Mexican and American culture, veering organically between Spanish and English, like the Spanglish you often hear in border towns.

“It happens pretty naturally,” San Cha says of her bilingual lyric writing. “I am most comfortable writing words for music in Spanish. It was my first language, and singing it sounds more round than English. English can feel so stiff. You can get a lot more flowery and emotional with Spanish. But sometimes the English just wants to come out. I’m not trying to force it either way.”

You certainly don’t need to speak Spanish to follow the story, which will be performed at TBA in Spanish with English supertitles.

After the Red Bull performance, the songs appeared on San Cha’s breakthrough 2019 album La Luz de la Esperanza (The Light of Hope), which like the original stage show drew raves from fans and critics. Her music started appearing in TV shows, she scored various arts grants, her striking songs increasingly embraced social and political themes, and her performances moved from gritty clubs to prestige venues such as L.A.’s major art museums and other artsy/fringe-y spaces, including TBA’s virtual 2020 festival.

Make Me Drunk

PICA also played a major role in San Cha fully realizing Dolores’s story in its new, fully staged incarnation, Inebria Me, which the organization co-commissioned. It also sponsored a residency for her last year. “Portland feels like a second home to me,” she says, in part because one of her best friends, singer-songwriter-guitarist Fabi Reyna, lives here. 

PICA is reaching out to local Latino organizations to try to get the word out beyond the fringe-fest bubble. San Cha is grateful to PICA and the opera’s other co-commissioners. 

“It’s fun creating with people like us, and having the freedom that these organizations give us,” she says. “There’s other places where they basically tell you, ‘This is the way things are done.’ If it’s a corporate or beer gig, you can’t talk about drugs” or other controversial subjects. “With these fringe festivals,” she continues, “your way is the only way. The only restraints are about budget stuff. Those are things you can deal with. They let me really create a world of my own, and that’s what I love to do.” 

With music performed by San Cha and her three-piece band, Inebria Me draws on performance and visual art (inspired by telenovelas and religious iconography) and includes actors, props, costumes, and choreography. Along with the free-spirited Dolores, there’s a mother figure and a pair of sisters (including an evil one). The spirit of hope, Esperanza, represented as a projection in the original show, is now embodied in a performer, while the male character, Salvador, is a shadow. 

“The people in the opera are all stars in their own right,” San Cha says. “It’s crazy that they can all be together in this show.”

She also added a couple more songs, appended extra verses to others, and “turned every track into an electronic track,” so that the music now also includes orchestral and electronic sounds, live flute, keyboards, and more.

Inebria Me’s title comes from the medieval Catholic “Anima Christi” prayer, which begins:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me

Sponsor

Body of Christ, save me

Blood of Christ, inebriate me

“It’s one of my favorite Spanish words!” San Cha says. “That’s so sexy — it means ’make me drunk’” — in a spiritual sense, of course. 

In another song, “Alimentate en Me (Eat Me),” she recalls, “I kept thinking of communion and how people can take your light. Esperanza is offering her light to the audience.” 

Inebria Me’s tone isn’t exactly satirical, nor entirely serious. How does it compare to, say Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodovar’s fabulous comedy film that also draws on telenovelas? “Almodovar is very over the top and dramatic,” she says, “but this is a little more serious and dark, more on the vampiric side — like Almodovar with a touch of Nosferatu.”

After Portland, the show goes back to San Cha’s current (L.A.) and previous (San Jose) homes, where her friends and family will see it. 

“How are they gonna feel when they see this?” she wonders. “The campesino [farm worker] stuff is directly inspired by all my aunts and my mom, the way they talk about the abusive parts of working in the fields. It’s inspired by their loyalty to the Catholic religion, and choosing to live with abuse over leaving a man — because God said so. To be honest, I am a bit afraid of bringing them in, because it’s so in their faces. Or will it go over their heads? It’s dark, but it will be really fun. Let’s see what the tias (aunties) think!”

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Boom Arts and PICA’s TBA Festival present Inebria Me at 8 p.m. September 5 and 6, in Portland5’s Dolores Winningstad Theatre, 1111 S.W. Broadway, Portland. Tickets and information.