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A Gathering Spirit: The Franconia Performance Salon, 2011–2020

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00654

1537-9477

Michael Hunter,

Theatre and Performance Studies

In November of 2020—a year none of us will ever forget—I suddenly found myself driving, alone, from my part-time home in the Santa Monica mountains, where I had been living with my partner throughout the Covid crisis, to a house in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where I had lived, with a series of housemates, for more than fifteen years. I was heading back to the Bay on fairly short notice in order to pack up my belongings and move out of this house, which by now I and many others affectionately called “Franconia” because it sits at the intersection of Franconia and Rutledge streets, and because, over the previous decade, I had hosted a salon there—the Franconia Performance Salon—which had made some kind of mark on the performance culture of the Bay Area.The Franconia Performance Salon existed as a named, numbered entity—FPS#1, FPS#2, etc.—for roughly ten years (2011–20), over which time it grew from an organic gathering among a few friends, to share drafts and fragments of performance work, to a series of curated performance evenings attended largely by people I did not know, although I grew familiar with them over time because they tended to come back and bring their friends. I would make more or less the same announcement at the beginning of every FPS, which explained the following: (1) we’re here to give artists a chance to share work they probably can’t share anywhere else; (2) we don’t care if you like it, the point is to see it and respond to it; (3) we’ll never do a formal talkback—you should find the artists after their performance, drink some wine with them, and talk about their work; (4) you should drink lots of wine and eat lots of food and leave ten dollars in the cardboard box with the slit in the top; and (5) you should feel at home.At its largest, the FPS audience numbered around a hundred, and by 2015 or so I was frequently being contacted by people I didn’t know, some of whom didn’t live in the Bay Area, to ask if they could perform. My curatorial tendency was usually to say yes to everything, and I asked artists about their spatial and technical needs much more often than I asked about content. The point of the salon had from the beginning been about freedom for artists to try things, and I felt I needed to trust them to try anything, which sometimes meant they would scrap an idea and come up with something else at the last minute. They didn’t need me policing their process, especially since they weren’t being paid. One artist early on did attempt to destroy our wooden floor as part of his performance; watching him repeatedly smash cinder blocks against it, trying to stay calm as everyone in the audience was looking at me rather than him, was admittedly a rather Job-like test of my curatorial philosophy. But I smiled and reminded myself this is why one rents, and after hearing various friends afterwards say I should draw up a contract for performers, I ignored their advice and continued to say yes.As I recall it, the salon emerged organically from the life of the house. A large, open-plan redwood and glass residence built in the 1970s by the artist Win Ng, the house shares a property with another residence, built by Win’s brother Norman in roughly the same period. Together, the two houses exist as a sort of compound, with a cobblestone yard and a fishpond occupying the shared space in between. The aesthetic is classic Northern California, although it’s unusual to find these houses in San Francisco itself. Win Ng was a queer abstract expressionist sculptor-turned-businessman: after abandoning his fine arts career, he co-established the storied Bay Area company Taylor and Ng, which brought artist-designed homewares, manufactured in Asia, into the kitchens of middle-class Californians.Win’s vision of the house was clearly a social one. Arriving in the main communal area of the house—you get to it by entering through an outdoor wooden gate and a sliding glass door, and then up a set of stairs from a small ground floor landing—you’re suddenly greeted by an immensity of space, with long, old-growth redwood walls (the kind that would be illegal now) rising to more than twenty feet at the ceiling’s highest points, and an extended solid wall of glass facing out onto the pond and the ruins. Next to the main space is a large alley kitchen with a professional six-range stove and open shelving on both sides. We could have run a small restaurant out of this kitchen, which we more or less did, and the creation of food, as well as the sociality of the kitchen, became a centerpiece of the salons. Between and during performances, a constant stream of dishes came pouring out of the kitchen. At one point, a four-foot wooden serving tray, rescued from the dumpster of Whole Foods and filled with ten dozen oysters from Hog Island, almost silenced the room.And always, the rivers of red wine had the opposite effect of silence, enervating both spectators and performers and creating a sense that something intimate and unrepeatable was being accomplished. Red wine can create that sense—a particular life-giving warm drunkenness—like no other substance. Over many years we rarely diversified the beverage options: I would drive to the store that morning and buy at least three cases of red (plus a bottle of champagne for my dear friend Florentina, who would drink nothing else) and several bags full of ingredients, which by nighttime had been transformed into food. For as long as we could, we insisted on glass, ceramic, and steel rather than paper and plastic, though once we counted to one hundred we had to acquiesce to paper and plastic. I could feel Win trembling in his grave.But also, I thought a lot of how proud Win Ng would have been of what we were doing with his house. I never met the man—he passed away in the 1990s, long before I found the house on Craigslist—but I heard stories, first from my landlord Alice, the widow of his brother Norman, and her two children, Allyson and Jonathan. Much of what I learned about him, besides his intense creativity and work ethic, was his sociality. He and Spaulding Taylor threw parties that remain enshrined in San Francisco social memory, including one in which invitations were issued by carrier pigeon—the invitee was meant to RSVP by tearing off one of two tabs attached to the pigeon’s feet, though apparently they all flew away into the wild—and another in which hundreds of chickens were roasted, rotisserie style, in the company’s new kiln. The house on Franconia Street was clearly built with sociability as its primary function: performers would arrive early—usually while five different dishes were being prepped in the kitchen and piles of AV cables were being untangled and routed to the nearest, least-flammable power source—and drop bags, costumes, and props into one of the bedrooms upstairs, where they would later get dressed or put on makeup. For the first few years, when almost everyone performing was a friend, the mode of everyday living in the house—the workshop-like way we constantly wrote, read, and created there; the constant cooking; the friends who would come for dinner and stay into morning—bled fairly seamlessly into the salons, as if they were sporadic formalizations and public exhibitions of our creative life there. During these years, the people getting ready in our rooms upstairs were the same ones who might be there on any given night, chatting or building props for a theatre piece or sleeping with us. Later—during the period of the salon that most excited me—both performers and spectators were increasingly likely to be strangers, and there was often a weird but satisfying feeling when I finally made my way to my bedroom at 5:00 a.m. and found the remnants of a process of transformation undergone by someone I had never met and might never see again.As I’ve mentioned, the salons developed quite logically out of informal gatherings with friends. The first group of housemates to live in Franconia included two sisters, Niki and Julia Ulehla. At the time, Niki, a jeweler and artist, was carving wooden marionettes based on the traditions and craft of Czech puppetry; Julia had recently finished an MFA at the Eastman School of Music, having trained as a mezzo-soprano, and was teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The house afforded possibilities to invite some musicians that Julia was meeting through her work to accompany Niki’s puppet shows, most of which were segments from a longer sequence she was imagining in which George Washington falls in love with a chicken.The people coming together around this time were friends: besides Julia’s musicians, I had a growing cohort of grad students from the drama department at Stanford, and Niki’s boyfriend John had introduced us to a network of electronic music producers, many of whom were also involved in conceptual art projects. People quite naturally started offering more complex and unexpected contributions and collaborations, and the evenings grew into something like a cabaret format. Participants started to bring friends, friends told other friends about it, the house started filling up, and more people started talking to us about wanting to share something. My friend and collaborator Jamie Lyons suggested we turn the salons into a series and begin to number them: he was developing a keen and creative eye for performance documentation, and we shared a sense that we should start to formalize what had until now been a mostly organic and unpredictable presence into a local arts event with a title, an email list, and an event page on Facebook, which still felt somehow cool and would include his performance photos. He also understood that developing artists needed not only venues for experimentation, but also high-quality visual records of their work that they could use to apply for grants and grow their networks, and that this would be a crucial but non-monetary incentive for artists to contribute to FPS. Documentation still exists online for the salons going back to #2, in 2011, in which I cobbled together a set of bleachers and “re-staged” Andy Warhol’s 1965 film The Life of Juanita Castro, with unrehearsed participants being fed their lines by me (as writer Ronald Tavel had done in Warhol’s film version). Soon the salons were each curated and then announced via the growing email list (with no images, only a brief text) and the FPS Facebook page, which we generally didn’t publicize beyond those who were already receiving the emails.For me, two big questions emerged early in the process of formalizing the salon into a publicized event: the extent to which we wanted to grow it, and how money would work. I was very sensitive to the fact that the salon should grow to create a sense of dynamism and integration with the larger Bay Area arts landscape, but not so much that the crowd would overwhelm the venue. It was clear already that the intimacy of experiencing live performance in an architecturally unique space that was also someone’s home was a large part of what made the salons special, though I wouldn’t realize the extent of that until years later, when I’d accumulated informal testimony from dozens, if not hundreds, of people who had attended. This sense guided my decision to maintain the very basic structure of publicity for the ten years of the salon’s existence: we never departed from the simple email and the Facebook event page, except for the single collaboration we did in 2015 with the Museum of Performance + Design. In the period when it seemed as if the house couldn’t absorb the crowds anymore, we considered some kind of ticketing or reservation system, and we also talked about moving the salon permanently to another location. But stationing someone at the door to check off names on a reservation list felt like anathema to the spirit of FPS, as did relocation. Stumbling through the big wooden gate on our usually unlit street and up a staircase, into a room where a performance was already in progress and people were crammed into every inch of available space: this was part of the magic of the experience.My insistence that there were no reservations was also connected to the economic model of the salon, which is something I revisited at various points over the years but never changed. When you climbed the stairs and arrived in the main space, there was that box with a slit cut out, and you were asked to voluntarily drop ten dollars into it, as well as your email address if you weren’t already on the list. The only adjustment we ever made to this system was that we added a Venmo link to the box, though (shockingly, for Silicon Valley) almost everyone continued to use cash. This money was used to pay for the food and wine that we supplied for the evening. That cost balanced out to around three hundred dollars per salon, and for ten years people contributed almost the same amount; I never lost or gained more than fifty dollars on a night. I never quite understood why, but when there were thirty people at the salon we took in around three hundred dollars, and when there were ninety people we took in around the same.This model meant that neither artists nor I were ever paid for their work at the salon, and this is why I did return to the money question several times over the years and discussed it with those of us who had been involved over the long journey. In our current moment there is general insistence that artists should always be remunerated for their labor, even if it’s a token amount. I very much agree with this idea and recognize from my own life how my work as an artist has seldom been properly paid for, and how notions of community and collaboration have often acted as justification for a cultural belief that the work of artists is not valuable in the same way as other forms of labor. But I also felt very strongly that introducing that kind of economy into the salon would kill it: beyond the question of how we would do it (though in the Bay Area, local arts grants were a reasonable option), it seemed that if we paid people to perform, the salon would no longer be the kind of laboratory and incubator of performance that it was, especially for the artists that participated in it regularly. Part of what worked so well about the salon was that there was no economic expectation that artists had to bring “good work,” or a certain kind of work. Richie Rhombus, a remarkable artist who showed work many times over the years, created some of the most crowd-pleasing (and incredible) pieces I remember, but at times he also used the salon to bring something utterly different from what he’d made before, barely formed, and not particularly engaging or effective.In retrospect, I see clearly that these pieces were testing changes in the direction of his work that ultimately led to profoundly fruitful results. This, more than anything, was the point of the salon for me: that artists could genuinely try things—often fragmented and deeply unfinished—in an intimate and supportive setting, without any risk beyond the kinds of anxieties most of us have before we perform anything anywhere. I talked regularly to most of the artists who were involved in the salon over the years, and the continued sense I got was that having a structure that felt supportive and offered so much freedom to play and fail was rare, if not completely absent, from their artistic life. I risk sounding as if I’m advocating for event structures in which artists are unpaid, but looking back across the development of the salon, I feel we made the right decision, and that removing it from any economic system other than reimbursing me for the food and wine I provided kept it from falling into the traps of the market that can make genuinely experimental work impossible.It strikes me in retrospect that Win’s house was a kind of time capsule that allowed us to explore, and dwell within, some of the energies that circulated in the Bay Area in the 1970s. The golden-brown glow of the main space in Franconia, especially as it looked during a salon, framed from the backyard, filled with constellations of guests in pockets of shifting warm light, is an image I suspect will remain central to my life, both as nostalgia and an ideal horizon of possible living. During the day the house was saturated with light, but for me, it was the nighttime in Franconia, with its appearance of incandescence everywhere, that has burned into a picture I think I’ll always seek out in some form.Beyond the way the house was dressed, though, it imposed a more profound artistic arrangement on our lives, which also called back to the 1970s. When Win built the house, the Bay Area was experiencing a rich explosion of alternative arts venues, many of them tied up with experiments in living. During that decade, spaces such as La Mamelle, Site, the American Can Collective Gallery (later called Southern Exposure), Project Artaud, and 80 Langton Street (later New Langton Arts) began curating programs, including performance, that resisted the conventional production and consumption logics of commercial institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and defined themselves as artist-centered community spaces. A significant ingredient in that resistance was the emergence of a Bay Area culture of performance. As Constance Lewallen has written, The traditional institutional structure for exhibiting art—the museum and gallery—had its limitations for work that existed only at the time and place it was created … The ephemeral nature of this work prompted artists to seek new solutions to sharing their ideas within the community. Art that was created in an artist’s studio or in a location in the community was communicated through peer-generated situations, which formalized and became known as alternative visual arts spaces. In San Francisco in the mid-seventies this movement became a vital force in the avant-garde.1In 1970, Tom Marioni used the frameworks of performance and conceptual art to transform social gatherings into artworks, housed within both established institutional spaces (the first iteration of his decades-long series “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” took place at the Oakland Museum in October 1970) as well as non-profit galleries. The same year, he started his Museum of Conceptual Art—in his words a “large-scale social work of art”—which was housed in a series of spaces that he rented or occupied in downtown San Francisco (MOCA opened at 86 Third Street, closed for a time and became a curatorial project in other spaces, opened a second dedicated space on Third Street, and then held a weekly Café Society at Breen’s Bar). Marioni’s work—which I only had opportunities to participate in later in his career, when he brought his weekly beer gatherings to SFMOMA in 2008—embodies many of the same attitudes towards conceptual art and performance that we built into the Franconia salons: the importance of intimate spaces (even when those are constructed within institutional frameworks), the emphasis on friendship and communion as part of the ephemeral material of the artwork, and the use of alcohol (though we preferred wine to beer!) to elevate a shared experience with liveness.On the East Coast, and as a precursor to the loft performances that took place across Manhattan and other cities in the 1970s, Jack Smith also looms as a kind of spiritual ancestor to FPS. His Plaster Foundation performance space was also his home, and when he listed his legendary, meandering performances in The Village Voice, people would come and dwell with him—famously on his terms, such that a substantial number of them wouldn’t make it through the night. I thought about Smith a lot in that week when I packed up Franconia and said goodbye; I wasn’t evicted like Smith was in 1971, but I wasn’t exactly prepared to go either. Combing through the house, I constantly encountered the remains of the salon, as well as my other experiments in making site-specific theatre in the Bay with my theatre collective, Collected Works. A brick, which used to have an old cell phone tied to it with a microphone cable: Richie Rhombus used it in one of his astonishing pieces that began like Laverne & Shirley and ended like Borges. A glass jar full of ashes from one of Ryan Tacata’s painterly living tableaux that straddled sculpture and dance. I started to pack these things into storage, and then thought: why? During the performances and afterwards, in the house, they’d been magical objects. Removing them from Franconia was like unplugging them from their circuitry or killing their aura. Sitting in a storage facility, separated from its story, a brick is just a brick.Those small somewhat ordinary things, though full of history, were easy enough to let go of. What about the enormous Victorian chaise that I’d brought home from the historic Old Mint building after staging Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1957) there? Or a gilded fold-out mirror from a warehouse production of Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona (1935) that weighed so much I couldn’t lift it on my own. Was I supposed to carry these things through life with me, or pay to store them, for the rest of my life? I imagine Jack Smith piling up dozens, if not hundreds, of trash bags full of fabric and feathers and fake flowers—most of it having been trash in the first place—and deciding what to drag with him to his next crazy alcazar and what to let go. When you live in a performance venue you keep everything, and you attract even more: all that stuff then conspires to become the aesthetic of the home. Each salon or performance altered the space my housemates and I lived in. I recall a friend coming to Franconia for the first time and remarking how much she loved the “decorations.” I laughed for minutes: almost everything in the house had found its way there by way of performance. I just had to decide how to arrange it all.One thing I tracked over the decade of FPS was the fact that many of the people who faithfully attended did not otherwise seek out or watch live performance. They were a representative cross-section of the city—young tech workers, designers, art students, editors, academics—but they were not, for the most part, a performance crowd. That makes sense to me: San Francisco was not, in this period, much of a performance city, despite its rich history as a hub of time-based arts. The economic forces that continue to render San Francisco virtually unlivable for anyone who isn’t wealthy mean that live performance—especially the experimental variety—has become an increasingly rare beast. Spaces like CounterPulse and ZSpace continue to create vibrant new work, but their increasing infrastructural costs make risk-taking a potentially expensive existential gamble; I worked for a time with the Performance Art Institute, but its haphazard organizational structure and unrealistic financial model meant it was perpetually trying to outrun its own demise. Angela Mattox at YBCA and Frank Smigiel at SFMOMA did remarkable work in performance curation, but they were also hemmed in by the fiscal, not to mention taste, expectations of their institutions and boards. In my time in SF, the drag scene was probably the most robust locus for live performance, in large part because it hosted on a network of bars and nightclubs that was not fundamentally reliant on it for revenue. Overall, the cultural and economic factors constantly pressing on SF meant that its performance landscape was fairly anemic, especially for a city that had contributed so much to the development of the medium, and it was clear that most of the attendees of FPS came not because they were interested in performance per se but because they almost always experienced an encounter that was markedly different from their day-to-day experience.Those of us involved professionally and passionately with performance know this already: it’s about a live, intimate experience with others that also engages dynamically with space. I’m stating the obvious, but this is why Covid has felt like such a death blow to the field of live art. Like many others, I’ve scrambled to recalibrate and find life in virtual space, but most of the makers I know came into this work because we felt we couldn’t live without the electric jolt that can arrive when embodied action meets time meets place meets mutual witness.Driving back to LA from San Francisco in 2020, after ten days sorting through the ephemera of FPS (wearing a mask in my own home), I didn’t feel a sense of loss so much as anachronism, as if I’d inherited with Franconia a structure that was already a dinosaur and kept it alive by painstakingly recreating and maintaining its natural environment, which everywhere else was long since extinguished. Probably it was time to move on: the only thing keeping me in the Bay by this point was Franconia; my work and relationship had been starting to flourish in Southern California. Covid arrived as an interruption and forced most of us to take a critical distance from the circumstances of our lives and make new choices about how or whether we would continue. As I headed further southward, I felt increasing clarity: yes, the time for FPS was definitely up. I don’t mourn that, and this piece is not meant as a lament but a marker of something that burned bright for a time, in a specific place. It’s also a reminder that the ephemeral nature of performance, which Peggy Phelan has captured so pithily (“Performance’s only life is in the present”), suggests its profound vulnerability not only to the movement of the clock but also to the way we build our mutually inhabited worlds.2Some of you were there. For the rest of you, I’m sorry you missed it. If you were here with me in this place where I am now, I’d propose we clink a toast (red wine, not virtual) to gathering.