Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The Museum of Performance + Design, formerly the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum offers exhibitions, educational services, a library, events and artistic programs.
I'm not gonna romanticize it. The Museum of Performance + Design was always kind of fucked, underfunded, perpetually on the edge, occupying whatever leftover space San Francisco's hyper-capitalist real estate hellscape would allow. But that's exactly what made it matter.
For a hot second, I was on the board. Which tells you everything you need to know about how desperate they were, or how punk the whole operation actually was. Me. On a board. Jesus Christ. But I showed up because the place was real. It wasn't some glossy tourist trap or academic circle-jerk. It was a repository for the ephemeral, the forgotten, the stuff that matters precisely because it disappears the moment it happens.
Bill Eddleman, former professor of mine, scenic designer, absolute madman, donated a million theater postcards to this place. A million. You understand what that means? Not just the artifact itself, but the obsession, the decades of collecting, the understanding that these little scraps of paper are how we remember. They have the actual angel wings from the original 1991 Eureka Theatre Company production of Angels in America. The original production. Tony Kushner's masterwork, and here were the physical remnants of that theatrical apocalypse, hanging in this scrappy little museum.
I performed there. Documented Anna Halprin's work when they co-produced one of her pieces. And look, if you don't know who Anna Halprin is, we probably can't be friends. Watching her move at ninety-whatever, still more present than any twenty-five-year-old Tik-Tok choreographer will ever be in their entire life, that's the kind of shit the MPD understood.
Muriel Maffre ran that place like it was a sacred trust, which it was. She got it. She understood that performance ephemera isn't some dusty academic curiosity, it's the DNA of culture, the proof that we were here, that we made something that mattered even if it only existed for ninety minutes in a black box somewhere. Then she went to run Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and honestly, she was too good for them.
Now the museum's out in some industrial park. Still breathing, still archiving, but exiled to the margins like everything else that matters in this city. At least it's alive. At least someone still gives a shit about those angel wings and Bill Eddleman's postcards.
Engineering 2017
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
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Speculation 2017
Oedipus and Tiresias (Nathaniel Justiniano and Tonyanna Borkovi) rehearsing for a site specific staged reading of Anthony Burgess’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus The King to be performed in the Fort Mason Chapel for the San Francisco International Art Festival and produced by the Museum of Performance and Design Oedipus and Tiresias walk into a Japantown […]
ReadIndividualism 2016
Look at those hands. Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s […]
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Collusion 2015
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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Speculation 2015
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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