Vericocha… is dying. Not in some romantic, poetic way, but in the way all good spaces in the Mission are dying now, rent creeping up, city breathing down their neck, same old San Francisco story of things that matter getting squeezed out for things that pay. It’s one of those spots you walk past a hundred times before you notice it exists, tucked into the neighborhood like a secret nobody asked you to keep.
The performances are in the basement. The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards doesn’t do theaters anymore, they do spaces, places where the walls still remember what happened there before. Vericocha’s basement has that smell, that feeling of concrete and accumulated time, the dampness of underground existence. The kind of place where things either die completely or get born again.
This isn’t theater. Let me be clear about that up front. You go to theater, you sit in the dark, you watch. You came here tonight for something else entirely.
The Electric Party Songs project started as experiment, Workcenter taking Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and turning it into something alive, something that moved and breathed and happened in real time at parties, actual parties where people gathered. Not readings. Not performances in the traditional sense. Events. Encounters. The kind of thing that makes you reconsider what’s possible when bodies and voices and words collide in space.
They took it to nightclubs. Squats. Private homes. Anywhere but a proper theater, because the proper theater kills this kind of work. You need the friction of reality, the uncertainty of a space that wasn’t designed to hold what you’re about to do. You need Vericocha’s basement, struggling and imperfect and absolutely right.
The structure is open, meaning it shifts, adapts, responds. They’re not recreating the same show every night; they’re creating a new event every time, using dynamic material derived from Ginsberg’s poems but transformed into something visceral, electric, yes, but also strangely intimate. The goal isn’t entertainment. It’s not even art in the way we usually mean it. It’s an investigation into what happens between observer and performer, how presence changes when you’re packed into a basement instead of separated by a proscenium, how time stops being linear and becomes something you’re swimming through together.
There’s a moment in these performances, and I’ve been told this, I haven’t invented it, where you stop being an audience member and become something else. Not a participant exactly, because you’re not doing anything, but you’re not passive either. You’re necessary. Your presence matters. The performers need you there not to applaud but to complete whatever circuit is being formed in that space. It’s the feeling of an exceptional party, that rare night when something unnamed hangs in the air and everyone feels it at once, that collective…
“we are HERE, this is HAPPENING.”
Ginsberg understood this. The Beats understood this. San Francisco used to understand this. Performance isn’t something you consume; it’s something you’re inside of. And Grotowski, that maniacal Polish genius who spent his life stripping theater down to its essential molecules, he understood it too. What Mario Biagini and the whole Open Program crew are doing is carrying that understanding forward, but not as museum piece, as living practice, still searching, still asking questions.
Vericocha is struggling. The Mission is changing. San Francisco is eating itself alive in the name of progress. And here, underneath all of that, there’s a performance happening that refuses every commercial impulse, every easy answer, every comfortable theatrical convention. It’s not a show; it’s a series of unique encounters, each one unrepeatable.
Electric Party Songs has evolved into several distinct pieces now, performed as part of broader Workcenter programs at places like SFMOMA and PAI, but this basement version, this struggling-venue, low-ceiling, people-packed-in version, might be the truest iteration. Because that’s where the work began: in friends’ apartments, at parties, in spaces where performance wasn’t expected and therefore became necessary.
You go down those stairs not knowing what you’ll find. You come back up changed, or you don’t come back up changed, but either way you were there. You witnessed something that won’t happen again exactly that way. In a basement. At Vericocha. While it still exists.