You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building Code as her Rosetta Stone, and eight cameras turning the whole thing into a live vivisection of itself.
Building Score 101B doesn’t ask you to observe. It conscripts you. They hand you dust masks and safety goggles, not as theater, not as cute participatory gesture, but because this thing is actually happening and you might catch a splinter of reality in your eye. Six carpenters, two performers, four nights of live construction that treats building codes like John Cage treated silence: as a framework begging to be honored and violated simultaneously.
But here’s where it gets properly dangerous: those eight cameras positioned throughout the space, feeding into two immense projections designed to shatter your single perspective into something kaleidoscopic and true. You’re watching carpenters measure a joint, and simultaneously you’re seeing their hands in brutal closeup, the grain of the wood magnified, another angle catching the whole spatial relationship, another documenting what’s happening behind you while you’re transfixed by what’s in front. The projections don’t just document, they argue with the live action, creating a surveillance state of making where nothing escapes scrutiny.
Angrette’s operating on dangerous frequencies here, and that projection system is the amplifier cranked to eleven. She’s taken the driest document imaginable (bureaucratic specifications for structural integrity) and exposed it for what it secretly is: a score for organized chaos, a prayer against entropy. Every night these people show up and try to translate intention into matter, and every night the cameras catch what the naked eye misses: the hesitation before a cut, the micro-adjustments, the moment when improvisation colonizes instruction.
The carpenters aren’t actors playing carpenters. They’re the real deal, which means they bring muscle memory, professional pride, the weight of craft tradition. Then Angette asks them to perform this craft inside a frame that makes it visible as performance, and those projections ensure you can’t look away from the transformation. What happens when you make the invisible labor visible? When eight perspectives fracture the unified field of work into competing narratives? The whole thing vibrates with cognitive dissonance, amplified and multiplied across those immense screens.
Four nights because once isn’t enough. You need repetition to see how the cameras find different stories in the same actions, how the projections recontextualize what you thought you understood. It’s less about construction than about entropy wearing a hard hat and demanding to be filmed from every angle.
What McCloskey’s really building isn’t a structure. It’s a four-night argument against certainty, staged in sawdust and pixels and sweat.
at Performance Art Institure, San Francisco for
Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies
Collaboratively devised and directed by Angrette McCloskey
With Ryan Tacata, Raegan Truax, Derek Phillips and Jamie Lyons
