Decay, it doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. It seeps in through the cracks like cigarette smoke under a bathroom door, until one night you’re sitting in what used to be a vital space and you realize you’re watching a wake, not a party.
Franconia Performance Salon #11. By this point, the whole enterprise had that exhausted feeling of a band on their fourth encore when everyone just wants to go home. The original spark. that raw, unfinished urgency that probably made the early salons feel like something mattered, had calcified into this sad procession of “completed work.”
Completed work. Jesus. That’s the death rattle right there. When artists start bringing finished pieces to what’s supposed to be a laboratory, you know the fear has won. Nobody wants to bleed anymore; they just want to show you the cleaned-up scar and wait for applause.
But then, and this is where it gets interesting, Ryan and Tonyanna decided that if the thing was going down, they might as well kick the coffin over on the way out. A live birth scene. With an actually pregnant Shaudi. That’s not art direction, that’s throwing a Molotov cocktail into the proceedings and watching what burns.
The trolling impulse here is the only honest thing happening. Because what do you do when the revolution becomes a routine? When the dangerous space gets domesticated? You don’t play along. You don’t bring your safe, finished, crowd-pleasing piece. You stage something so viscerally real, so uncomfortably actual, that it makes everyone else’s careful presentations look like what they are: cowardice dressed up as professionalism.
The pregnant body as weapon. The ultimate “completed work” that nobody asked for, unfolding in real time, refusing to be ignored or neatly categorized.
featuring performances by Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Sarah Mendelsohn, and Karen Penley; and excerpts of a new performance text by Martin Schwartz; a sound installation by Derek Phillips; and a video game by Daniel Jackson.
Navigation:
The full fourteen-night trajectory shows what happens when revolution becomes routine.
Salon #12 is next. Two more after that. Almost done.
Or go back: Salon #10, half masochism, half desperate hope.