You walk into the Stanford d.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone stands in a corner for three hours. The kind where someone wraps themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a bullhorn. The kind that makes you want to set yourself on fire just to feel something specific.
What was actually happening in there, three nights a week for ten weeks, was a class. A real one. Called The Intersection of Performance, Architecture and Design, cross-listed CEE 32Z and TAPS Dance 22. Yes. Yes. You read that right. Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Theater and Performance Studies Dance department, sharing a course number, sharing students, sharing a syllabus. I dare you to find a more Stanford sentence. I dare you to find one easier to write off, and I dare you, then, to actually try to write it off, because the second you try, the thing turns around and bites you.
Aleta Hayes ran it with me. John Barton on the architecture side. Aleta runs Chocolate Heads, her movement band, and look, Aleta is the kind of teacher who can stand in a room of fifty strangers and have them moving in three minutes without anyone noticing she did it, without anyone agreeing to do it, without a single person feeling like they were asked. That’s a magic trick. That’s something you cannot learn from a book. John brought the architectural rigor, the bones, the actual training in how buildings work and what they do to the people inside them, the engineer’s eye that knows what a load-bearing wall is and isn’t romantic about it. I brought the live-art lineage, the site-specific stuff, the Kaprow, the Halprin, the obsession with what a space remembers and what it’s trying to forget. Three teachers. Three vocabularies. One class.
Monday nights were the heavy stuff. Lectures. Screenings. Debates. Bachelard one week. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis the next. Then Foucault on heterotopia. Then Miwon Kwon on the genealogy of site-specificity. Then Doreen Massey on space-time and the politics of location. Then Debord on the dérive. Then Diana Taylor on the archive and the repertoire. Stewart Brand on how buildings learn. Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. The Halprins, Lawrence and Anna, on the reinvention of public space, those magnificent obsessives who turned a Sea Ranch deck into a manifesto. The reading list. Christ, the reading list. Look it up if you don’t believe me. We force-fed them the canon and then a sub-canon and then a sub-sub-canon and we did it to engineering undergrads, dance MFAs, architecture grads, a philosophy major who showed up because he heard there was theory (the way philosophy majors will, like raccoons to garbage cans), a woman from the registrar’s office who hadn’t read theory since 1987 and remembered every word of it, a guy from IT who turned out to know more about Lefebvre than any of us did, and a landscaper who, by the way, was the single best reader of physical space in the entire room and we all knew it by week three.
Wednesdays. Wednesdays were the body of it. Two parts. First half: lecture and debate, the arguing about what Monday actually meant when you’re standing in a room trying to figure out how to make emptiness speak. Second half: groups. Interdisciplinary by design, and look, that’s a buzzword and I know it’s a buzzword and you know it’s a buzzword in a desperate attempt to save the humanities from irrelevancy . But the actual point, the thing that word is trying and failing to gesture at, was this: put a dancer next to an engineer next to a data analyst next to a guy who maintains the campus irrigation system, and watch them try to translate. The dancer says the space has weight here. The engineer says describe the weight in terms of load and force. The dancer says no, I mean it feels heavier. The engineer says that’s not a unit. The data analyst says can we measure foot traffic against perceived weight. The landscaper says the soil under this part of the building is different and the building knows it. And the dancer says yes, exactly, that’s what I mean. And the engineer looks at the landscaper. And the landscaper looks at the engineer. And then weeks pass. Weeks. And then, finally, on some Wednesday in February, the engineer says okay show me where, and the dancer shows her, and the landscaper nods, and the engineer feels it too, and the engineer says, quietly, huh. That’s the whole class right there. That moment. That huh.
And the guests, ha, the guests. Shinichi Iova-Koga from inkBoat in week three, Butoh meets site-specific work, the man who can make ten minutes of stillness feel like a confrontation, like the room is the one breathing and you’re the one being looked at. Ava Roy and Lauren Dietrich Chavez from We Players in week six, the company that does Shakespeare on Alcatraz and the Presidio and Fort Point, the company that figured out that site is not backdrop, it’s co-author, it’s the third actor in the room with the audience and the performer, and you ignore it at your peril. Amy Larimer in week eight on space, boundaries, material. Every one of them walked in and dismantled whatever the students thought they were doing, gently, with love, the way a good teacher dismantles, leaving the student standing in the rubble with a tool kit and a smile.
The assignments stepped up. Week one: a Remy Charlip Airmail Dance, score a piece for someone elsewhere to perform, which sounds like a parlor trick and isn’t, because the second you try to put a movement on paper in a way another body can read, you realize you don’t actually know what you’re doing with your own body. Week three: make a two-to-four-minute piece in or near the studio using only naturally occurring movement, conveying time, space, and scale. Naturally occurring. Try it. Try it some time. Watch yourself fail. Week five: a written performance score for what you intend to make. Week six: go on a soundwalk, write the experience, construct a score from it. Week eight: rough run-through of the final piece in the actual space. Week nine and ten: perform. By the time they got to the performance weeks, they had been thinking about space for two and a half months in two registers simultaneously, the theoretical and the practical, and the registers were no longer separate in their heads. They were the same register. Which is the whole point, the only point, the thing the entire course was bending toward from week one.
Here’s the thing about this class. It wasn’t theory on Monday and practice on Wednesday and never the twain shall meet. It was theory and practice every day, beating against each other, arguing, fighting, occasionally making out in the back of the classroom, until the students stopped being able to tell which was which. Reading Lefebvre on rhythm and then trying to choreograph a piece that respected the rhythm of the building it was in. Reading Kwon on locational identity and then choosing a site on campus and asking what its identity actually was, and getting back answers like defensive and forgotten and trying too hard, which are answers about buildings the way you’d give them about people, and that’s the point, that’s the whole damn point. Reading Debord on the dérive and then wandering through the d.school at midnight trying to figure out which corner of which floor was the dead one. (Spoiler: there’s always a dead corner. There’s always a dead corner in every building. Find it. That’s the assignment.)
The d.school, for all its design-thinking apparatus, all its post-its and pivot-tables and innovation-speak, gave us the whole building. The entire space. Use it. Find your site. Make your work. And the students, all of them, the eighteen-year-olds and the forty-five-year-olds and the dancers and the engineers and the IT guy and the landscaper, fanned out like they’d been waiting their whole lives for someone to say go. Teams choosing stairwells, atriums, hallways, the cafe, the bathrooms (the bathrooms, twice, by two different groups, which tells you something about how Stanford people of all ages feel about bathrooms), the parking lot outside, the loading dock, the corners nobody used. The building became a hundred sites instead of one. By week ten you couldn’t walk from the front door to the back of the d.school without bumping into someone’s rehearsal, someone’s argument, someone’s tape on the floor, someone’s chocolate head sitting on a pedestal in a hallway being slowly, slowly licked by the warm air of the HVAC system.
And the performances. Damn, the performances. Some of them sang. Some of them fell flat. Some of them were beautiful disasters, the kind of failure that teaches more about space than the working pieces did, the kind of failure you write home about because it means somebody tried. There was a piece with the Chocolate Heads. There was a piece where audience members were led one at a time into a room that had been altered just for them. There was a piece that used the d.school’s HVAC system as a score, which is the most aggressively Stanford thing ever attempted. There was a piece that didn’t work and the team stood there afterward, three of them, in a hallway, looking at the floor, and we all sat in the failure together. And that, that right there, was where the actual learning was. Not in the working pieces. In the postmortem on week ten, when we asked: how did the design evolve as you spent time in the space, what obstacles did you overcome, what discoveries surprised you, what was the audience actually doing while you thought they were watching the piece.
You don’t get that from a lecture. You don’t get that from a paper. You don’t get that from a TED talk or a design-thinking workshop or a sticky note on a whiteboard. You get that from making the thing and standing in the wreckage afterward and being honest, brutally honest, generously honest, about what worked and what didn’t and why and how and what next.
Limited means. Maximum stakes. Engineers reading Bachelard. Dancers reading Brand. A landscaper reading Lefebvre. An IT specialist quoting Foucault back to the philosophy major. A choreographer learning to draft. A registrar learning to move. Ten weeks. Twenty performances. One building taken apart and put back together as a hundred different rooms by a hundred different bodies who had never met each other in week one and could not be separated from each other by week ten.
That’s how you teach space. Not by talking about it. Not by reading about it. Not by reading about reading about it. By making people argue with it until it answers back. And it does answer back. It always answers back. You just have to be quiet enough to hear it. Or stupid enough to keep asking.