Fusebox à Deux, or a Spark Shared by Two Austin Artists

From its humble beginnings out behind Canopy’s gallery complex 22 years ago, Fusebox Festival – which has its first biennial (aka every other year) run this year, April 15-19 at various stages around Austin – has always been a breeding ground for artistic connection. Co-founder of the arts nonprofit and current co-Artistic Director Ron Berry says this was, in fact, their desire all along.

“We were a group of artists living in Austin [who] love living in Austin,” Berry says. “We were also hungry to meet other artists living in other parts of the world, because we wanted to spark each other. We wanted to be in dialogue with each other.”

But it’s not just any type of artist who can enter the coveted Fusebox dialogue. “If there is a kind of a thread – a thing that unites all of these artists – it’s that we are interested in projects and artists that provide a sort of spark,” Berry says. “A lot of our projects crack open a sense of possibility, like, ‘Oh, I’ve never really seen someone do that,’ or ‘I’ve never thought about that thing in that way.’”

If artists igniting artists is what defines Fusebox’s vibe, then the 2026 fest debut of local collaborators Andie Flores and Sam Mayer is totally apropos. 

Despite coming into performance art by different avenues, both Flores and Mayer share a drive to create work outside the usual models. 

Current UT-Austin doctoral candidate Flores first became enraptured with experimental work after renting studio space at the Museum of Human Achievement (MoHA). “I was like, ‘Okay, you’re paying for this space. Let’s set some goals. Let’s make some work. Let’s get in there and play around,’” she recalls. Aiming to spend at least three hours a day three times a week at her rental, Flores found inspiration in a handheld, Nineties-era Sony camera. 

“I was obsessed with [it] because I have so many tapes and footage from my family filming so much of me as a kid,” she says. “It’s very interesting to comb through that stuff, so I wanted to play with the same sort of technology.” 

Flores has utilized that video tech as well as drag, music, and more in her performances. “I’ve got things I want to tell you in video that I can’t do for you live,” she says of the multimedia approach. “I’ve got feelings I want you to feel that can only happen through music.” 

As to why she can’t stick to just one format, she’s been rethinking her usual answer.

“I used to blame my parents. Like, if you were to just let me focus on one thing, then I would’ve been really good at one thing. But now I realize what a gift it is.” Being that she’s a jack of many artsy trades, experimentation onstage is Flores’ calling.

“I’ve just always done this, always loved doing this, [and] always really wanted to find a way to have fun in front of people, saying words that I find really funny,” she explains. “I came to performance art because it’s just the neatest category to put all the things I like to do inside of.”

Mayer’s journey to performance art was inextricably linked to being a UT playwriting graduate student during the 2020 start of COVID-19. Prior to that year’s lockdown, he recalls his mind frame being: “‘I’m a playwright. What I do is write plays, and actors perform them, and I have no interest in performing myself, because it’s really scary.’” When in-person performance disappeared, that inner mantra was challenged – not least by Zoom’s paltry imitation of the stage.

“I experienced a real crisis of self,” Mayer says, “because the thing I was devoting my life to was revealed to be so fragile it could go away immediately and there would be no more theatre.” 

That was when he found Twitch, an online video game-streaming platform that presented Mayer with fresh performance format possibilities. Under the username poolboy00 – which later became simply poolboy – Mayer could turn his life into art by “just [turning] on my camera and [streaming] for hours and hours every day, just doing everything in my life,” he says. 

Becoming the character poolboy – a lightly fictionalized version of himself – transformed Mayer’s recorded life into a reality show. “Initially me and a couple of friends would go on once a week, each of us, and we would try and work through issues in our relationship live on the stream,” he says of the series’ early days, “and people in the chat would tell us what to do or offer their suggestions. The project became about finding ways to deepen intimacy with people when the world was really separate, isolated, and apart.”

When Flores found Mayer thanks to a friend’s recommendation, she was entranced by his work’s energy. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘This is fascinating. The fact that someone lives here and is doing that, I need to be friends with this person.’” 

Since linking up as friends, the two have forged collaborations like the majorly meta 3 Scenes From Queer Utopia, which originally staged at the MoHA’s Cage Match Project in 2024 and returned this February for queer transmedia fest OUTsider. In the show, Flores and Mayer stage their relationship’s essential conflict – what is queer art’s role in changing the world? – with actors portraying the two friends. 

To center their collective work on how they push each other makes sense given how integral that aspect is to their creative partnership. “One of the things that makes our collaboration so fruitful to me, personally, is that it’s so intellectually and emotionally rigorous,” remarks Mayer. “I’m always being challenged when I work with Andie – thinking through my positions, my opinions, and my aesthetic decisions.” 

For Flores, Mayer inspires new levels of authenticity. “I gravitated toward the honesty, the transparency, that Sam puts into all of his work,” she says. “If you look at the things I’ve made since forming a friendship with Sam, I’ve also been pushing myself to be less veiled about the truths I’m trying to communicate.”

Their visual styles do contrast, with self-titled “embarrassment artist” Flores trafficking in tactile and play-centric costumery and the more naturalistic Mayer choosing more minimal accessorizing. Yet in each other, they find a thematic twin. 

“We’re both interested in performance: the way people perform in their daily lives, as well as the way people perform onstage, and how the two are in rhyme with each other,” Mayer summarizes. “We’re both interested in our place as queer people in the maybe larger ecosystem of cultural noise, art, and activism, and how to be a citizen, I guess.”

Together, “we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Flores says, “and also are well aware of all the mechanisms required in an art world or performance world about taking yourself seriously, the degrees to which you must.”

“I was really interested in the question of ‘What have I done?’ in two senses,” says Flores of her Fusebox show, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!?!??!: Failure, Art, and Accountability at the End Beginning End?! Beginning?? End of the World. “What have I done by signing myself up for grad school? What have I done by spiraling out about my research? And also, what have I done? Have I done anything? What have I been doing to help other people?”

To be staged at Ground Floor Theatre April 15-16, the show’s questions synthesize ideas present in Flores’ doctoral research – probably because the show is her research. “My program is not an art program,” she says of her work within the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “I just have been fortunate enough to sort of razzle-dazzle [and] finagle them into letting me do more experimental approaches to this degree.” That after this year the department, caught up in Republicans’ anti-DEI assault, is “legislatively doomed to no longer exist,” as Flores puts it, makes putting on WHAT HAVE I DONE bittersweet.

“It’s wild to have to focus on finishing,” reflects Flores, “and have to put being angry about that on pause.”

Utilizing performance art to interrogate the relationship between art and activism – as well as interrogate her interrogation – is a long-standing preoccupation of Flores’ work. It was present in her and Sam Lavigne’s 2022 APD Decruitment Initiative, which asked how to incentivize Austin police officers to quit their jobs, and in last year’s 10 Ways to Effectively and Consensually F*** a Minion: Vignettes – Nay Minionettes – for the End of the World, hers and Mars Wright’s ATX Sketch Fest headliner. But especially in this year’s Fusebox show, her intent isn’t finding successful solutions; Flores wants to explore failure.

“[I’m] taking a look at some of the artists that I’m interested in, and some of the pieces of art or actions, interventions, that I think both exemplify failure as bad thing – failure as [if] you’re not doing enough – and also failure as a model for encouraging other people to experiment,” Flores explains.

Though she’s not collaborating with Mayer on the project, Flores still has many helping hands involved. “I used to be really afraid to ask people to help me [and] collaborate,” Flores remembers. “It’s been such a joy to not have that fear anymore, and to have so many people just being like, ‘Yeah, let’s fucking do this.’” Those people include production designer Terror Pigeon (Neil Fridd), musician BRUCE (Carrie Fussell), and co-performers Arinna Dior Heys, Travis Randy Travis, and Amethyst Daze – as well as poster design work by Turito. She’s also gotten help from outside Austin with video work by Jake Vest (NYC) and Kelsey Rogers (SATX). 

“I was supposed to write a solo show,” she admits. “I’m always supposed to just be writing a solo show. It just doesn’t work that way for me. There’s no such thing as a solo show, I think. I really bloom in collaboration with other people.”

While Flores’ work centers her instincts and drives, Mayer’s upcoming poolboy (the play) reflects more of the audience than it does its creator. This participation from the crowd has been a poolboy fixture since the series’ online origin, where viewers could participate and affect the character Mayer played by typing suggestions in Twitch’s chat function. 

Yet once COVID lockdown restrictions eased and in-person performance opened up, the audience participation method needed to evolve. As the series currently operates, suggestions are submitted via a system of note cards available for audience members to inscribe with conversational prompts, comments on the show’s proceedings, and even physical tasks. These then get passed to Mayer anonymously by other folks in the crowd. 

“For the 90 minutes of the show, poolboy will say yes to any note card that’s read, no matter what it is,” Mayer explains. “That’s sort of the compact of the show between me and the audience. I’ll do anything they want for 90 minutes.”

He’s taken pains to also recreate the amorphous energy a livestream brings out. “One of the things that I love about the chat being online or being in a Twitch stream is people in the chat can be having their own conversation,” Mayer says. “People leave and they come back. People are sort of half paying attention, or they’ve got, like, eight other tabs open all the time.” 

Ultimately, he hopes to create a non-theatre vibe within the physical space the poolboy performance happens in. “You’re sort of at a party,” he says of the atmosphere. “There’s music playing really loudly. You’re not sent to a place to sit down and watch. You’re talking at any volume you want.”

His and the poolboy audience’s relationship has maintained a rhythm, Mayer says, with the first 40 minutes dedicated to raucous physical requests like shotgunning beers. By the second half of the show, though, introspection develops in the viewers and moves them to submit more personal requests. “There’s lots of getting naked,” Mayer admits. “I’m always getting naked during poolboy. I’m always calling my mom. I’m always eating bugs and stuff, or grass. There’s lots of reading of my diary.” That switch from surface-level physical suggestions to more deeply rooted emotional requests comes from, Mayer thinks, “a sense of safety in the anonymity of the crowd.”

“The show is about creating a structure that allows audiences to tap into this impulse in them to harm someone else, or to push someone to the limit and see how far they can get away with it – to be bad in the way you can be bad online,” he says. “That is really exciting and fun for me and dangerous for everybody, and makes the show feel really alive and scary. But at the same time, I’ve noticed that when you do get these people together, they do exhibit some kind of care toward me, even if the care is only in the fact that they don’t make me cut or hurt myself or pee on myself.” 

Poolboy (the play), which stages at Museum of Human Achievement April 16-18, offers much the same atmosphere as prior Mayer performances, with a very important addition: Grant Gilker. The actor, who previously portrayed Mayer in his and Flores’ 3 Scenes, will not only join the artist in playing the poolboy role, but is also co-writing the titular (play). “The show will partially be rehearsing and performing this play alongside everything else that always happens at a poolboy show,” Mayer explains, “which is the party, the tasks, the endurance, the emotional vulnerability.”

Gilker is, of course, not Mayer’s only collaborator on the project. He’s also brought on Anderson Funk (video installation), Dan Foley (sound), Leah Yacknin-Dawson (dramaturgy), and producer Chris Gwillim. This crew represents quite a change from his days in front of the webcam, and Mayer admits the undertaking is “so scary.”

“The playwriting aspect [of poolboy] has always been, until this point, about creating a structure in which the story can unfold, improvisationally or naturally, in response to an audience,” he says. “In this version, because also now I’m working with so many talented collaborators … These decisions all need to be made so much farther out. It’s not just me anymore.”

Though they’ll be performing apart from each other, finding their way into Fusebox this year was a joint goal between Flores and Mayer. To Houston-born Mayer, Fusebox represented a “big homegrown, hometown connection to the larger world of experimental performance.” When earlier this year Flores – who shares Eastside theatre Crashbox with Mayer as their current studio spot – asked him about his upcoming aspirations, Mayer already had plans in motion to join the fest’s lineup. Having worked with Ron Berry and Fusebox to bring her APD Decruitment project to the fest’s 2022 “It’s Not” fair, Flores was more than enthused to share her friend’s aims. 

“It just kind of became a thing,” she remembers, “where I was like, ‘Okay, you’re going to get into Fusebox. I want to get into Fusebox. Let’s get into Fusebox this year. Let’s make that a goal, and let’s freaking do it.’” 

Their enthusiasm makes sense given how dedicated Fusebox is to helping its artists and their projects succeed – the very model of effective collaboration. Prioritizing that attention to its artists is also what ultimately led to the fest’s decision to go biennial. Experimentation with format isn’t new to Fusebox, as co-founder Berry says they’ve tried all sorts of shake-ups over the years, including making tickets free for a decade. (Some shows are still gratis, but most run on a sliding scale between $1 and $10.) But the change to an every-other-year festival came more from a sense of “starting to hit the edges of what we could do as we were currently configured,” says Berry.

“Part of what makes Fusebox unique is that we spend a lot of time really citing each work,  caring for each project, and investing in those projects,” he adds. “We wanted to keep doing that and keep imagining what this festival could be. We just wanted a little more time to imagine it.”

With more time comes more opportunities for artists like Flores and Mayer to showcase their work on the Fusebox stage. “I’m excited to be part of this festival,” Flores says. “I’m excited to be in front of people I don’t know, and in front of people I love and adore … It’s going to be weird and cool.”

“There’s so much to do at Fusebox,” she continues, “and I hope people will come see what this crazy Latina is talking about, and trust me to give them a good time and to give them something to chew on.”

For Mayer, getting into Fusebox represents a personal dedication to cultivating his place in Texas. “Something that both Andie and I have done, and, I think for me, was a conscious decision at some point after finishing graduate school, was to narrow the net of what my goals were, what I was doing, and have that be really focused on things that are in Austin [and] Texas,” he says. 

That focus has kept he and Flores in close collaborating distance and has grown his and her artistic scene roots. “You start to see the things you sow come to flower without even realizing it,” Mayer concludes, “if you just spend time working in your community.”

This article appears in April 10 • 2026.

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