The Franconia Performance Salon wasn’t some grand vision that appeared fully formed. It started the way these things always start, with drinking and dinners. Cheap wine, the kind you buy because you’re broke and idealistic and figure it’s good enough, especially after the fourth glass. Someone would read a passage from a book they’d stumbled across that week, something that had moved them or pissed them off or rewired how they thought about performance. Furniture would get shoved around to create an impromptu art installation. A corner of the room would become a stage. Or a gallery. Or both. Nobody was keeping minutes or drafting mission statements.
Slowly, messily, it became something more. What started as informal gatherings evolved into something that needed a name, a shape, some kind of structure, loose structure, but structure nonetheless. There’s no record of the first one. This was after grad school. I was coming out of a breakup with someone whose entire life ambition was to be a professional tourist. Not the artificially creative type of an Instagram influencer, but another type that collects passport stamps like fucking merit badges and recites Travel + Leisure reviews like they’re the Bhagavad Gita. She moved through the world like someone in an overpriced hand blown glass bubble that you buy in the gift shop of the Venice Hilton, seeing everything the tourist board approves. For my part, I was also making vapid videos for Google, restoring an old sailboat that sadly I’ve yet to actually sail anywhere meaningful, chasing some narcissistic fantasy of permanent escape that had nothing to do with actually being anywhere or doing anything real.
Regardless, I was there that first night of the Franconia Performance Salon (though it wasn’t called that until #2, maybe even not until #3), so I can tell you it happened, but beyond that? Memory gets hazy. Niki did a puppet performance, Niki’s boyfriend at the time, John, tried playing something on the Tuba, I remember that. Michael and I each did something with wigs, which tells you everything about where our heads were at. Maybe Kyle did something. Or Daniel. Or Ciara. In truth, I don’t remember. The only artifact from that night is a selfie I took of myself in a wig, which is either perfect or pathetic depending on how you look at it. Probably both.
These were held at 282 Franconia in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. Always there, except for one time at the Museum of Performance + Design. Michael would often cook up something really wonderful in the kitchen. He couldn’t just organize experimental performance, he had to feed people too. Properly. Not some artisanal small plates social media garbage, but actual food that sustained you. It mattered. The food wasn’t an afterthought; it was part of the ritual, part of what made the evening feel like something real instead of some performative art world circle jerk.
I documented the project after that first night. Not out of some archival impulse or belief that posterity would give a shit, but because somebody had to bear witness to what we were building, and because documentation, real documentation, forces you to see what’s actually happening, not what you wish was happening or what would look good on social media.
People I loved and trusted started bringing their work. Artist/Scholars like Ryan Tacata and Angrette McCloskey. Individuals who understood that the work had to be rigorous, that “experimental” didn’t mean “anything goes,” that pushing boundaries required knowing where the fucking boundaries were in the first place. These weren’t dilettantes playing at being avant-garde, and yes there were a few of those. They were serious people doing serious work, even when, especially when, that work looked utterly insane to outside observers.
The idea was simple: create a space where challenging, difficult, necessary performance could actually happen. Not a black box theater with grant money and a board of directors and subscription seasons. Not some commercial venue where ticket sales determined what got staged. A salon, in the old sense, a gathering place for artists and thinkers, where work could be shown, discussed, dismantled, rebuilt. Where failure was not only acceptable but expected, because without the freedom to fail spectacularly, you can’t take real risks. Franconia became that space, though not without struggle. Convincing artists to show work in progress, which is always more terrifying than showing finished pieces because you’re exposing the seams, the doubts, the parts that don’t work yet. Building an audience that understood they weren’t coming to be entertained in any conventional sense, they were coming to engage, to think, maybe to be disturbed. Maybe to witness something fail beautifully, or more likely awkward and uncomfortably.
The performances themselves ranged wildly. Some nights it featured solo work, a performer working through ideas about the body, about presence, about what happens when you strip away narrative and spectacle and leave only raw action. Other nights it was multimedia chaos, video and sound and movement colliding in ways that shouldn’t have worked and maybe never would. We had scholars presenting research that became performance, performers creating work that demanded scholarly engagement. The boundaries kept dissolving, which was exactly the point.
Then artists like Meklit and Nathalie Brilliant started showing up and performing. The crowds got bigger. Word spread. Which was exciting, and also the beginning of the end, though we didn’t know it yet.
