You meet people at conferences, symposiums, networking events, most of them you forget by the time you’ve hit the hotel bar. But every once in a while, you meet someone who gets it. Who speaks your language even though their work looks nothing like yours. That was Angrette at some Performance Art Institute gathering, both of us probably wondering what the hell we were doing there.
New York. That was the first connection. You can always spot another person who’s come of age in New York, even in California. There’s a certain bullshit detector that comes standard issue after serious time spent living in New York, a way of cutting through the niceties to get to what matters. We both had that. We also both had Stanford’s PhD theater program in common, that particular brand of academic rigor mixed with creative chaos and diva scholars. And then there was Robert Brill. She’d assisted him in his studio, and I’d worked with him on Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight at the Mark Taper Forum, where he’d designed the set. That connection, knowing the same people, respecting the same work, it’s the kind of thing that turns a casual conversation into something that sticks.
I invited her into the Franconia Performance Salon group. Because when you find someone whose work is about the body at work, about construction as performance, about what it means to build and destroy and memorialize, you don’t let that person slip away. You make space for them at the table.
Angrette’s a scenographer, which is a fancy word that doesn’t quite capture what she does. She doesn’t just design sets, she creates architecture that performs. Her work explores home displacement, landscape destruction, scales of geological time. She thinks about the “building-body,” about construction not as backdrop but as embodied practice. It’s heady stuff, but she makes it physical. Real. You can photograph it.
She knows her lineage. Ask her about Lawrence and Anna Halprin, the landscape architect and the dancer/choreographer who understood that bodies and spaces speak to each other, that movement and environment are in constant conversation. She knows the details, the history, the way those two changed how we think about public space and performance in the Bay Area. That knowledge runs through her work like a blueprint you can’t see but always feel.
Over the years I’ve documented her work, though “documented” undersells it. We’re collaborators. Building Score 101b, where she turned construction itself into choreography. For that piece, I created huge video projections using live feeds… cameras capturing the construction in real time, the image blown up massive on the walls so the audience could see both the intimate detail of hands working and the larger architectural gestures simultaneously. Body and building at different scales, all happening at once. The Franconia Performance Salons where artists pushed against the boundaries of what performance could be. Sophocles’ Nausicaä staged at Pillar Point where the ocean became both set and actor. Genet’s The Balcony at the Old Mint, that decaying monument to California’s gold rush excess.
Nearly twenty years she’s spent as a scenographer for experimental theatre and devised performance. From Warsaw to the Met to English National Opera to abandoned buildings in San Francisco. She earned her doctorate, completed her research on the intersections of architecture and scenography, and kept making work that refuses to sit still in any single category.
That’s the thing about long-term collaborations and friendships, they’re not about one big project. They’re about showing up repeatedly over years, understanding what someone’s trying to say even when they’re still figuring it out themselves. It’s about documentation that goes beyond pretty pictures to preservation of ideas, of process, of the moment when theory becomes practice and practice becomes art.
Phoenix-born, Brooklyn-based now, but she spent her Stanford years making work that belonged to the Bay Area’s particular brand of under appreciated experimental fearlessness. And I got to be there for it, camera in hand, bearing witness to someone who understands that performance happens in the building as much as in the body. That destruction and construction are two sides of the same gesture. That sometimes the most radical thing you can do is take theatre seriously enough to tear it apart and rebuild it from the ground up.
