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 of soulless life-form 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, experiencing nothing. Now every few months twenty-three retirees pay her for the privilege of following her around the Uffizi while she mispronounces “Caravaggio.” 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 the second one), 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.
What made it matter, what made it different from a hundred other experimental performance spaces that flared up and died out, was the commitment to discourse. Most performances were followed by informal discussion. Not polite applause and wine (of course there was that), but actual conversation about what we’d just witnessed, what it meant, where it succeeded and where it failed. Those conversations sometimes got heated. People disagreed. People walked out. But that friction, that willingness to engage critically with work even when, especially when, it made you uncomfortable, that’s what created the conditions for real artistic growth. At least, that’s how it was. Toward the end, it became something else. Something worse. People started showing more fully formed work. Polished pieces instead of experiments. They were more interested in impressing than in communing with peers. More interested in adding a line to their CV than getting real feedback. Some even started showing up specifically to get me to document their work. That was the worst part, the thing that made my stomach turn. They’d perform to the camera instead of to the room. Check with me between takes like I was shooting a fucking music video. The photos and videos became more important than the liveness, than the actual moment happening in that space with those bodies and that audience. The thing we’d all built together, raw, messy, honest, got replaced by something slicker, safer, more careerist. Performance as content. Documentation as the real product. The kind of thing my tourist ex would have applauded. It happens. It always fucking happens. The space that was supposed to be about risk became about rĂ©sumĂ©s and Instagram posts and having the right images for grant applications. I didn’t document the last two salons, but I was there, mostly for Michael’s food. Sometimes you just show up and eat.
The Salon was never going to be sustainable in any conventional sense. I don’t think that was ever the goal. The goal was to create a space, however temporary, where a certain kind of work could exist. Where artists could take risks without worrying about ticket sales or critical approval. Where the work itself, challenging, difficult, uncompromising, was the priority. And for a while there, before it got co-opted by ambition, egos and careerism, it was a shit ton of fun.
I went back to Franconia a year ago. I still have friends who live in the neighborhood, people who remember when the house was alive with bodies and arguments and Michael’s cooking. The place is abandoned now. Doors hanging off hinges like broken jaws. A few windows busted out in the back, just time doing what time does. If you wipe the slime off one of the windows and stand there long enough, patient, still, you’ll see them. Half a dozen rats, maybe more, owning the space that artists once held. Moving through the rooms with more purpose than half the performers who showed up at the end, when the thing had already died but nobody wanted to admit it.
The rats don’t give a shit about legacy or meaning or whether what happened here mattered. They’ve got the whole place to themselves now, and in a way that feels right. Honest, at least. We had our moment. We did what we came to do, or tried to, and then it was over. The way these things always are. The way they should be.
Everything ends. Everything gets reclaimed. Sometimes by careerism and compromise, sometimes by rodents and rot. At least the rats aren’t pretending to be something they’re not.
A joint collaboration with the Museum of Performance + Design,
Franconia Performance Salon fourteen
featured new work by Alessio Silvestrin,
Rebecca Ormiston, Yula Paluy, Jamie Lyons, Ryan Tacata,
Renu Cappelli, Tonyanna Borkovi, Derek Phillips, and Michael Hunter
Salon thirteen had works by Rebecca Ormiston & Rebecca Chaleff,
Omer Gal, Nathalie Brilliant, Richie Rhombus,
Vivek Narayan, Yula Paluy and Renu Cappelli
Salon twelve had showings by by the Brilliant sisters
Richie Rhombus, Green Tooth Girl,
Angrette McCloskey, Niki Ulehla, and Jamie Lyons
Salon eleven featured performances by Fred Schmidt-Arenales,
Sarah Mendelsohn, and Karen Penley
excerpts of a new performance text by Martin Schwartz
a sound installation by Derek Phillips
and a video game by Daniel Jackson
Salon ten had Ryan Tacata and Nathalie Brilliant sharing new performance works
Nicholas Berger presented an excerpt from “Land of Songs,”
a new film documentary about Lithuanian folk music,
and Kimberly Jannarone directed a section of
an unproduced play by Jon O’Keefe, “Saying Emily”
Salon nine had new work by Arianne Foks, Ryan Tacata,
Yula Paluy, Jamie Lyons, Niki Ulehla,
Derek Phillips and Michael Hunter
Salon eight showcased new work from Karen Penley
Niki Ulehla, and Nicholas Berger
as well as a live musical set from Meredith Axelrod
Salon seven featured performances from
Ryan Tacata, Angrette McCloskey, and Tonyanna Borkovi
Salon six includeda piece by Martin Shwartz
a live music set by Meghan Dunn
and a large-scale hair choreo-poem by Michael Hunter
Salon five featured a mini-concert from Meklit Hadero
a performance projection from Tiffany Trenda
a haunting performance sculpture created by Ryan Tacata
and a new piece featuring Yula Paluy
Salon four included a solo performance by Kelly Rafferty
new work by Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips, Niki Ulehla
and an installation environment by Raegan Truax
The third salon featured new work
by Jordan Essoe, Luciano Chessa,
and Niki Ulehla with Renu Cappelli
In our second Franconia Performance Salon,
we worked together to present a live version of
Andy Warhol’s film The Life of Juanita Castro
with Michael Hunter directing the actors live
using Ronald Tavel’s script.
“… It’s a long time since I heard something equally great; there Beethoven mocks the whole world.”
But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation— and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity— the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
Joseph Conrad