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.
Here’s the whole gorgeous lie right up front: These photos exist because I wanted to fuck around with new glass, a 1950s Zeiss lens I’d mated to a Canon 5D Mark II like some beautiful Frankenstein of fetishized equipment and actual need. Not because the performance demanded documentation, not because Warhol’s ghost required witnessing, but because that bokeh, that falloff, that thing seventy years of German engineering does to light when it hits skin mid gesture, that needed testing, and Michael’s Warhol fetish gave me the excuse. The rest is backfill, narrative I constructed after the shutter clicks stopped, slapping “#2” on it like that makes it inevitable, like there was always going to be a series when really there was just a group of people saying “let’s try this” and me thinking “I can bring my new lens.” And yeah, the actors committed and yeah, my images have a quality, not because the moment was realer but because Zeiss glass is just better, period, better than my iPhone shots from the wig thing, better because better costs more and weighs more and I wanted to believe that matters. The sick joke being it actually does matter, that my fetishization pays off in images that make you forget the whole thing exists because I had gear lust and friends willing to perform while I indulged it. More honest than anything I could’ve planned, which is to say: the realest things happen when you’re half paying attention to something else entirely.
So by number three we’re pretending this is actually a thing, Jordan Essoe’s doing new work and Luciano Chessa’s bringing whatever the hell Luciano brings and Niki’s back with marionettes because apparently it’s being curating now, there’s programming, we’ve got a “#3” which means there was institutional memory and intent where really there was just us saying yes to whoever asked if they could show something. Fuck, I even built a Facebook page for this thing to spread the word. And I’m still shooting with that Zeiss because that last time justified it, and now I’ve got a system, a workflow, an aesthetic commitment to vintage glass on digital sensors like that means something more than I spent money and need to keep spending it to make it make sense. The truth is I’m competent enough with a camera that when interesting shit happens in front of me I can capture it without fucking it up too badly, and these people, Jordan and Luciano and Niki, they’re giving me interesting shit, they’re performing like it matters even though we’re in somebody’s living room calling it a salon because that sounds better than anything else.
By salon #4 we’ve got Kelly Rafferty doing solo work and Michael and Derek collaborating and Niki with her puppets again and Angrette building installation environments, and the whole thing is starting to feel almost legitimate. The images from this one have a quality, that fall off, that thing the lens does that modern glass can’t quite replicate. Angrette’s work, this vessel thing, raises the stakes, the kind of shit that takes actual risk to put in front of an audience. At this point it feels like we’re not just fucking around anymore, after all i’ve built a website for it… or maybe we are but we’re fucking around with purpose, with intent, with this growing sense that what started as an excuse to drink wine and shove furniture around has become something worth showing up for, worth documenting, worth believing in even if we don’t quite know where it’s going yet.
Salon #5 is when it got real, when Meklit Hadero showed up and played a mini concert and suddenly we weren’t just a bunch of weirdos in a living room anymore, we had actual musicians, actual talent, people with followings and careers and shit to lose. Ryan built this haunting performance sculpture, Tiffany Trenda did projections, Yula Paluy brought new work, and the whole thing felt like we’d crossed some threshold from scrappy experiment to actual thing people wanted to be part of. The crowd was bigger, people were taking it seriously, My images are getting better because I’m getting better, because repetition builds skill even when you’re just documenting your friends doing weird shit in Bernal Heights. This is the moment where the Salon stopped being just ours and started belonging to something larger, where word of mouth turned into actual buzz, where the intimacy we’d built over four salons started opening up to let other people in, and honestly it felt good, it felt like growth, like we were building toward something that mattered, like maybe this thing we’d stumbled into half drunk and fully earnest might actually have legs.
By #6 the room is packed now, people standing in the back, spilling into the kitchen, and that should feel good but something’s shifting. Conversations after the performances are starting to feel more like networking than actual discourse. My documentation is getting easier because I know how these people move, but also because some of them are learning how to perform for documentation, and there’s a difference, a crucial fucking difference between being witnessed and being photographed, between making art and making content. The energy in the room is still good, still electric, but there’s something else creeping in around the edges, something that smells like ambition and résumés and the slow rot that happens when people start showing up for the wrong reasons.
Salon #7 is when it all clicked back into place for a minute, when Ryan and Angrette showed up and reminded everyone what this was supposed to be about, actual theft, grand fucking larceny, standing up there and taking something from the audience and then someone else stealing it from you until nobody knows who owns what anymore and everyone’s covered in fingerprints. Kellen got it too, understood the assignment, and then Angrette and Tonyanna stole it all back which is exactly how it’s supposed to work when people stop performing their intelligence and start performing their guts. This was the best salon so far because something real actually happened, the kind of thing my photographs can’t capture because a camera can’t catch the moment when a room collectively forgets to breathe or when somebody says something so raw everyone has to look at their shoes.
Salon seven featured performances from
Ryan Tacata, Angrette McCloskey, and Tonyanna Borkovi
By #8 we’re just going through the motions, Karen Penley and Niki with her puppets again and Nicholas Berger and Meredith Axelrod doing a musical set, all perfectly fine performers doing perfectly competent work but where’s the theft, where’s the grand larceny that made #7 feel alive. This is what repetition does, it drains the blood out of the thing, turns ritual into routine, turns risk into predictability. The room feels the same, the wine is there, Michael’s food is laid out, but something essential has leaked out of the enterprise and we’re all pretending not to notice. People are performing work they’ve already shown elsewhere, polished pieces instead of experiments, and the conversations afterward are getting shorter, more polite, less dangerous. Nobody’s stealing anything from anybody because there’s nothing left to steal, just résumés getting padded and documentation getting collected and the slow realization that what made this matter in the first place was fragile as hell and maybe already gone.
Salon #9 and we’ve got seven people on a lineup, Arianne Foks and Ryan and Yula and me and Michael, Derek and Niki, which sounds impressive until you realize it just means the pieces are shorter, safer, more digestible. The room is full, people still show up, Michael’s still cooking, but something fundamental has shifted and everyone can feel it even if nobody’s saying it. The work is competent, professional even, which is exactly the problem because competent and professional was never the point, risk was the point, failure was the point, that escalating series of heists where everyone walked out covered in fingerprints. Now it feels more like a showcase, like people are testing material they’ll use somewhere else, somewhere that matters more, somewhere with actual institutional weight behind it. There’s no gravity to it anymore, no blood, just supports holding up something that’s already hollow.
Salon #10 and I’m going into it half cultural masochism, half desperate hope that someone, anyone, is going to do something that actually matters, and Nicholas Berger‘s documentary about Lithuanian folk music is the evening’s unexpected grace note, beautiful and moving in ways those words usually aren’t, because Nick understands something fundamental about art needing to hurt a little, needing to reach inside and rearrange your furniture without asking permission. Ryan and Raegan dragging taxidermy and long underwear into the living room, operating on some frequency the rest of us can’t quite tune into, and you don’t have to understand it, you just have to respect that they committed, that they showed up with dead things and thermal wear and made a choice. The Brilliant sisters wrapping Breille in cellophane while a room full of adults suddenly forgets how to breathe normally, that’s theater, that’s understanding eroticism isn’t about sex but about attention and control and the voyeuristic contract we pretend we’re not signing, of course it held everyone’s attention, we’re all just sophisticated primates staring at fire. And then the O’Keefe play reading, and sometimes the kindest thing you can do is know when you’ve overstayed your welcome, and they didn’t know, they kept going, and by the end of it I’m thinking about how ten salons is a nice round number, how maybe that’s enough, how maybe we should quit while we’re ahead except we’re not ahead anymore.
Salon #11 and decay 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. The whole enterprise has that exhausted feeling of a band on their fourth encore when everyone just wants to go home, the original spark, that raw unfinished urgency, has calcified into this sad procession of completed work, and completed work, Fuck, 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 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.
Salon #12 and here’s the thing about watching Angrette saw a table in half at what amounts to an art salon in someone’s living room, it’s the most honest thing you’re gonna see all night, none of this precious bullshit, none of the let me explain my process hand wringing, just here’s a table, watch me destroy it, the violence is the point, the sweat is the point, the doing is the point. I showed my snail film and fuck me the hubris of thinking I can direct gastropods, that’s the kind of beautiful failure that keeps this whole thing from calcifying into another dead scene, I tried something genuinely deranged, it didn’t work. Richie Rhombus doing his thing, the Brilliant sisters, Green Tooth Girl, fine, great, we need our reliable practitioners who show up and deliver, that’s the backbone, but I don’t remember the backbone, I remember when Angrette picked up that saw. And it ended early, of course it ended early, someone’s energy ran out or people had church in the morning or a thousand other mundane reasons that art happens in the cracks of regular life and not in some hermetically sealed cathedral of pure expression, it tells you this stuff is fragile and human and not particularly sustainable, which is exactly why it matters when it happens at all, and exactly why twelve feels like maybe enough.
Thirteen salons and somewhere along the way the wisdom got replaced by habit, the projection of depth turned into just projection, the surface of the thing mistaken for the thing itself. The performances are fine, competent, everyone showing up and doing their part like good soldiers in an army that forgot what war it was fighting, and I’m still documenting it all because that’s my ritual now, that’s my participation in whatever myth we’re pretending still exists. Maybe ritual is terribly important right up until it becomes terrible, until the terror of actually risking something gets replaced by the comfort of repetition, until you’re just re-enacting instead of creating, remembering instead of discovering. #13 is an unlucky number and maybe that’s fitting, maybe this is where it should have stopped, should have let the thing die with whatever dignity it had left instead of dragging it forward into #14 and beyond.
Salon #14 at the Museum of Performance + Design which is different, that’s for sure, Alessio Silvestrin and Rebecca Ormiston and Yula and Ryan and Renu and Tonyanna and Derek and Michael all showing up in a proper venue with proper lighting instead of Michael’s living room where furniture got shoved around and wine got spilled. The space gives me room to work, the lighting is consistent. I can move without bumping into someone, and maybe that should feel like progress except the audience is smaller now, noticeably smaller, maybe people have moved on, found other scenes, other salons, other living rooms where the thing still feels urgent instead of obligatory. Nine people on the lineup bringing solid committed work and maybe twenty people watching instead of the packed rooms we used to get, and you can feel it, that thinning out, that sense of something winding down whether anyone wants to admit it or not. This is the last one I documented, not because it was the last salon, there were one or two more after this, but because by #14 I’d stopped needing to prove something, or maybe I’d just gotten tired of watching the thing evolve into whatever it was becoming, or maybe I just had other shit to do, other projects, other obsessions that needed feeding. Sometimes I document something until I don’t anymore, until the impulse runs out or redirects itself, and that’s fine, that’s honest, that’s knowing when my part in the story is finished even if the story keeps going without me.
What made these salons matter, what made them 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 résumés 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.