Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Look at this shit. A whole archive of ghosts and the DEMOCRACY OF ERASURE where Franconia Performance Salon #2 through #14 all get the same little thumbnail, the same brief mention, like I knew from the start we were building something that would end, and maybe that's honest, maybe that's the only way to do it... you can't have art without annihilation... you can't have communion without the wreckage... and yeah I know that sounds like pretentious bullshit but look at these images, really LOOK at them.
The Balcony. Of course it was fucking Genet. You don't do Genet unless you're already halfway destroyed, unless you understand that the performance is the thing eating you alive even as you're making it, because Genet wasn't writing PLAYS he was writing HOWLS, he was writing the sound your soul makes when it realizes it's trapped in a body trapped in a room trapped in a world that doesn't make sense. Those aren't costumes in those photos, that's people wearing their damage like a second skin, Carmen in that dress, Ryan Tacata at rehearsal, and the Old Mint sounds about right for a venue. Some decaying monument to money, filled with people pretending to be other people pretending. Genet would've loved that irony.
And then there's the Performance Art Institute, unheated warehouse, probably a front for a meth lab, the kind of place where you're drinking bourbon straight from the bottle between scenes just to keep your hands from going numb, where the chemical smell might be coming from the neighbors or might be coming from under your feet, and nobody's asking questions because everyone's too busy trying to make Gombrowicz work in a space that's actively hostile to human survival. That's where you rehearsed Ivona. That's where the projections got built. In the cold and the dark with bourbon for warmth and suspicion hanging in the air thick as the fog rolling in off the bay.
Alcohol and egos did this group in, as if there's any other way for these things to go, as if there's some alternate universe where burning this bright doesn't consume you. But let's be honest: the alcohol was already THERE, it was part of the process, bourbon in the unheated warehouse, drinks at the salons, the bottle passing hand to hand like communion because that's what it WAS, a way of saying we're all in this frozen meth adjacent hell together and we're going to make something beautiful anyway. You think the salons were just polite gatherings? Every performance was another little suicide, another little resurrection, and I kept doing it until I couldn't anymore, until I walked out or maybe someone drank themselves into oblivion or someone's ego got the better of them.
And those projections for Princess Ivona, they were awesome and fucked up and essential because that's what Ivona IS, she's the silence that destroys the party, she's the reality that crashes the performance, and I put THAT on video and projected it mixing recorded with live media and suddenly the audience can't hide from what's happening because a 60' X 35' wall projection juxtaposed to another 45' x 35' wall projection is showing them something realer than the actors can be. That's not just technical work, that's understanding that truth is corrosive, it eats away at the structures that contain it.
Even now as the people who were there don't remember which salon was which, maybe they'll just remember the FEELING of those nights, the sense that something mattered even if they couldn't articulate what. And when it ends, when somebody can't take somebody else's vision anymore, when the drinking becomes the point instead of the relief, that's not failure. That's the natural lifecycle of rust.
Better to burn out at Franconia Performance Salon #14 than to make it to #140 out of habit. Better to do Genet once, with everything you've got, than to do Shakespeare in the park for a decade. I got the salons in. I got the Balcony up. I made the projections for Ivona and they were good enough.
2015 Speculation
Backstage: Ryan Tacata as Carmen in The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint. Entering a brothel means rejecting the world. Here I am and here I stay. Your laws and orders and the passions are my reality. Jean Genet, The Balcony
View document2015 Collusion
So here’s how it ends: not with a bang but with institutional validation, which is the same as saying it ends with a whimper dressed up in gallery lighting. Franconia Performance Salon #14. The Museum of Performance + Design. A “joint collaboration,” which is fancy talk for “we got legitimized.” From Michael’s living room with […]
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2015 Speculation
Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal Here’s the thing about Genet that nobody wants to admit at a museum opening with the wine and cheese: the motherfucker understood that we’re all whores. Not metaphorically … actually. We’re all selling some version of ourselves, […]
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2015 Collusion
The wine was flowing, cheap and plentiful. The food? Thrown together. Not Michael’s usual spread, no carefully considered dishes that made you remember why communal eating matters. The kind of afterthought that tells you nobody’s heart is really in it anymore. The audience. Fuck me, the audience. The Game of Thrones Burning Man type has […]
View document2015 Engineering
My talent will be the love I feel for that which constitutes the world of prisons and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them around to your kind of life, or that I look upon them with indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless […]
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2015 Collusion
Look at these people. Really look at them. These are theater people, the real kind. The ones doing Genet in a defunct federal building in San Francisco. Site-specific theater, which means they’re not just memorizing lines; they’re wrestling with architecture, with history, with the bones of a building that’s got more stories than any script. […]
View document2014 Collusion
A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool. Molière So here’s the thing about watching someone saw a table in half at what amounts to an art salon in someone’s basement or warehouse or wherever the hell these things happen anymore: it’s the most honest thing you’re gonna see all night. None […]
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2014 Collusion
Decay, it 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. Franconia Performance Salon #11. By this point, the whole enterprise had that […]
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2014 Collusion
So here’s what happened at Franconia Performance Salon #10, and going into this one was half an admission of cultural masochism, and the other half a desperate hope that someone, anyone, was going to do something that matters. Nick Berger’s documentary was the evening’s unexpected grace note. Beautiful, moving, words we throw around until they […]
View document2013 Collusion
So it’s basically a haircut. Performance art as a goddamn haircut. Niki with scissors, Michael sitting there probably feeling vulnerable and exposed and wondering if this is profound or if he’s just getting a trim in front of an audience that showed up because there was cheap wine and they knew the artists. And you […]
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2013 Collusion
The images themselves are gorgeous in that way that makes me suspicious. Too composed, too deliberate. This first shot with the bodies arranged like they’re performing an autopsy on performance itself. And that Gertrude Stein quote stuck at the bottom like a fortune cookie aphorism: “This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.” Yeah, no […]
View document2013 Collusion
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. John Cage Collected Works John Cage Lecture on Nothing. PSi, Stanford Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips did John Cage‘s Lecture on Nothing at the Performance Studies International conference. Stanford’s Roble Gym. The old fencing studio, before they […]
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2013 Collusion
I don’t know what the fuck happened in that room, but I know something happened. This is the thing nobody tells you about live performance, about actual live performance, not the kind where everyone’s mentally composing their Instagram caption while politely golf clapping: it’s supposed to be theft. Grand fucking larceny. That’s the whole beautiful, […]
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2013 Collusion
Most of this is complete bullshit. Not because the artists are frauds, though some are, but because they’re trying. They’re performing performing. They’ve got this idea in their heads about what transgressive looks like, what experimental sounds like, what matters, and they’re executing that idea with all the spontaneity of a tax return. And then […]
View document2013 Cinematics
Staging decadence, and I mean real decadence, not the Instagram bullshit where someone arranges twelve cupcakes in a spiral. It’s gotta have that edge. That nervous making quality where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh or recoil or both at once. Gombrowicz knew this. The guy was writing about grotesque courts and paralyzed […]
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2013 Engineering
So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them […]
View document2012 Collusion
My photographs catch people mid-transformation, Yula Paluy suspended in whatever private negotiation she’s having with gravity and self. Tiffany Trenda projecting outward while the room pulls inward. What’s gorgeous and sad is knowing these salons are a kind of endangered ecosystem, people still willing to show up, sit down, shut up, and be there for […]
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2012 Collusion
These aren’t just photographs of bodies doing things in rooms, they’re evidence of something that mattered, at least for one night, in a living room that was never the same afterward. Kelly Rafferty, Michael Hunter, Derek Phillips, Niki Ulehla, Angrette McCloskey and Raegan Truax… these aren’t just names that matter to seventeen people in the […]
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2012 Collusion
It’s a hot summer night in San Francisco, the kind that feels like a mistake, like the city forgot what it’s supposed to be, and I’m at Michael’s house for salon number three. I don’t want to be here. I should be literally anywhere else. And for some reason as I’m thinking about this night […]
View document2012 Collusion
So here’s the real truth: I’d just bought a Canon 5D Mark II and I’d found this gorgeous 1950s Zeiss 35mm lens, put an adapter on it, and I was looking for any excuse to shoot with the damn thing. That’s it. That’s why these photos exist. That’s pretty much why this website exists. And […]
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2011 Collusion
Failure… it’s the only fucking meal worth eating when you’re stupid enough to think you can improve Anton Chekhov. My Head is Burning. Christ, of course it is. Your head, their heads, Chekhov’s rotting tubercular head somewhere in a Russian cemetery still burning with the knowledge that a hundred years later, some ambitious assholes with […]
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