Most theater is a lie we all agree to believe. We sit in the dark, pretend there’s a fourth wall, suspend our disbelief like good little audiences should. But what if the whole premise is wrong? What if the real theater, the kind that actually matters, happens in the places we’ve forgotten? In the ruins. The margins. The spaces we drive past without looking.
The IOTA Project isn’t about making theater. It’s about archaeological excavation with a pulse.
Here’s what we do: we take fragments, and I mean fragments, the textual shrapnel that survived when 90% of Greek tragedy burned or rotted or got scraped off parchment to make room for someone’s grocery list, fragments from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho. The stuff that survived because some medieval monk thought it was worth copying into a margin. Eight lines. Three lines. Sometimes just a phrase that glints like bone in the dirt.
Then we take these splinters of text and we go find the places that shouldn’t be theaters. A horse racing track. A superfund site. The hold of a 19th-century schooner. An abandoned house outside Watsonville at dawn. We’re looking for spaces that have their own tragedies, their own forgotten narratives. Sites that remember what we’ve chosen to forget.
Site-specific theater, and here I mean real site-specific theater (a more accurate description would be site responsive theatre), isn’t about gimmicks or immersive dining experiences. It’s Artaud’s fever dream made flesh: “We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind.” No safety. No distance. The environment isn’t a backdrop; it’s a collaborator with its own agenda.
And here’s the thing about Artaud that the academics always sanitize: the man was howling at the walls of his own skull. He wanted theater to be a plague. Not a metaphor for plague, an actual contagion that would crack open the social order and let the demons out. He knew something the rest of us keep ignoring: that real art requires a kind of productive insanity. A willingness to follow the irrational impulse at 5:40 AM to an abandoned house because the light will be right and the fragment demands it. You cannot workshop that. You cannot paper-tech your way into that level of surrender.
This work is driven by desire, not the polite kind, but the kind that wakes you up at 4 AM and won’t let you rest until you’ve figured out how to perform Aeschylus in the hold of a ship. The kind of compulsion that makes you stand in the Pacific at dawn in April because something about Daughters of the Sun and cold water and the sound of elephant seals makes a kind of sense that can’t be explained, only done. Passion isn’t a strong enough word. This is closer to possession. If you’re open to it, these fragments possess you. The sites call to you. And you have to be a little bit crazy to answer.
Because let’s be honest: nobody needs to perform a lost Sophocles text with dead fish heads on fence posts. There’s no grant money in it. No tenure track. No run at the Taper or Public. But there’s a rightness to such an action that transcends need. An inevitability. When you find the perfect marriage of text and site, when the fragment and the location lock together like they’ve been waiting two thousand years for this exact moment, you don’t have a choice. You have to do it. That’s not discipline. That’s desire. That’s the impulse that Artaud understood: theater as compulsion, as exorcism, as the thing you do because not doing it would be a kind of death.
The wind doesn’t wait for your cue. The tide doesn’t care about your blocking. The geometry of the space, the light raking across mudflats at 6:25 AM, the acoustic properties of a water temple, the way shadows fall in a dollhouse, these aren’t production values. They’re the dramaturgy itself.
What we’re after is what Bert States called the phenomenological presence of performance, that moment when the actor isn’t representing something but is something, when the text stops being literature and becomes breath and spit, when the space stops being a location and becomes an event. We’re creating moments scored for voice and body and whatever the hell the environment decides to throw at us.
This is live art research. Emphasis on both words. Live, because it happens once and then it’s gone, the geometry of human presence that exists for a few moments then dissolves. Research, because we’re trying to understand something about what theater was, what it could be, what happens when you strip away everything except text, body, and place.
The fragments know something we’ve forgotten. The sites remember what we’ve paved over. And somewhere in that collision, a Sophoclean text about speechless fish performed with eight fish heads on fence posts in San Gregorio; Euripides on love education performed on Slacker Hill at dawn; Aeschylus in the waves off Año Nuevo, somewhere in that collision, theater stops being an institution and becomes what it always was: people gathering in impossible places to speak the unspoken or unheard truths.
This is what we’ve made so far.
On the evening of March 9th, 2020 we performed a site specific production of a fragment from the lost tragedy Laocoön by Sophocles at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
On August 23rd, 2020, I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned dollhouse discovered on a sidewalk. Informally, the piece is called Enclose the Divine.
At 6:50AM on July 3rd, 2020 I incorporated a text fragment from one of Sophocles’ lost tragedies with a site responsive approach to an abandoned house outside Watsonville. Informally, the piece is called In Time of Need.
At 5:40AM on March 23rd, 2020 I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies with a site responsive approach to Environmental Art and Public Art (The statue: To Honor Surfing Statue) on Santa Cruz’s Westside. Informally, the piece is called The Man Who Knows.
At 4:45pm on November 19th, 2018 we performed a site specific theatre piece of the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo county.
At 7:02AM on December 27h, 2018 we performed a site specific theatre piece of the three remaining fragments of Aeschylus Mysians in the Wailua River State Park, Kauai, Hawaii.
At noon. on May 9th, 2018 we performed a site specific theatre piece of an unattributed fragment from one of the lost tragedies of Euripides at a superfund site along the East Palo Alto shoreline. Informally, the piece is called Path of Steady Success.
At 1:08 p.m. on July 10th, 2016 we performed a site responsive theater piece of the only two fragments that remain from the lost Sophocles tragedy Nausicaä at Pillar Point (Mavericks).
We performed a site responsive theatre piece using a fragment of text from a lost Sophocles tragedy at the Wave Organ in San Francisco. Informally, the piece is called Savage Blasts.
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself performed a site specific theater piece with fragments of one of the lost tragedies by Euripides on top of Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands. Informally, we called the work Love is The Fullest Education and the fragment relates the myth of Zeus’ seduction of Io in the form of a cloud.
At 3:57 p.m. on December 23rd, 2015 I performed a site specific art installation of an unattributed fragment of one of the lost tragedies by Sophocles in San Gregorio. The piece was created with eight dead fish heads speared on eight fence posts. Informally, the piece is called Speechless Fish.
On October 9th, 2015 Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata and myself created an experimental piece for Artist Weather TV that incorporated a text fragment from one of Sophocles’ lost tragedies: Sophocles Fragment #137. Informally, the piece is called Cloud Talk.
At 2:45 p.m. on October 3rd, 2015 I performed a site specific theater piece of the only remaining fragment from Aeschylus’ The Argo in the hold of the schooner C.A. Thayer at San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.
At 5:55 a.m. on July 1st, 2015 we performed a site responsive theatre production of an unattributed fragment of one of the lost tragedies by Euripides’ at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. Informally, the piece is called No Man’s Friend.
At 1:15 p.m. on June 6th, 2015 we performed a site specific theater piece with the fragments that remain from the lost Aeschylus tragedy at the Golden Gates Fields horse racing track.
At 8:01 p.m. on May 4th, 2015 we performed a site responsive theatre event of Sophocles’ Sinon (using the textual fragments that have survived) in the Emeryville Mudflats: adjacent to the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.
At 6:25 a.m. on April 24th, 2015 I performed a site specific production of Aeschylus’ Daughters of The Sun in the waves off Año Nuevo State Park