We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action is engulfed and physically affected by it.
Site-specific theatre is live art performance produced in unconventional environments. And yeah, before you get pedantic about it, that COULD mean a traditional theatre, Pirandello'sSix Characters in Search of an Author is site-specific as hell, deconstructing the very space it occupies. But that's not what we're talking about here.
What you're looking at is environmental theater that happens in places that were never meant to be stages. You take a 2,500-year-old Greek tragedy fragment, some piece of Sophocles or Aeschylus that survived because it got quoted in somebody else's work, or scrawled on a piece of pottery, and you drag it out to the Emeryville mudflats at dawn, or to some crumbling water temple, or to the ruins of Sutro Baths. Suddenly it's not dead anymore. It's not pinned to a page in some leather-bound volume gathering dust. It's alive, it's messy, it's happening NOW in the places where things actually happen.
The whole point is to engage with the histories and the people who have been impacted by these environments, the ones living there, working there, the ones who've been erased from there. The goal is to reach the folks who don't have subscriptions to the opera and symphony, who've never set foot in a theatre with plush seats and donor plaques, who've been systematically locked out of what gets called "culture." To give voice to the voiceless. Yeah, that sounds grandiose. It is grandiose. It's also fucking necessary at this point.
And let's kill this "immersive theater" buzzword right now. Every marketing department in the theatre world is slapping the immersive theater label on anything that makes you stand up or walk around. But here's the truth: any theatre, when it's played at an outstanding level, is immersive. You don't need to be wandering through a warehouse in Brooklyn to be transported. You need performers who understand what they're doing and why it matters. The site-specific work in this archive isn't "immersive" because of gimmicks, it's immersive because it refuses to let you forget the environment you are in and what that place means.
These aren't productions. Productions happen in buildings with fire codes and season announcements. This is something else, theatre that knows it doesn't belong, that stakes its claim anyway. Ancient words in contemporary ruins. Performers who understand that sometimes the best stage is the one nobody built for you.
The documentation here isn't pretty. Some of it's rough, shot on whatever camera I had handy, catching what could be caught before the fog rolled in or the park ranger showed up to kick us out. But that's the point. This environmental theater work was never meant to be preserved, it was meant to be experienced, to exist for a moment in a specific place with specific people, and then disappear. What you're looking at are the ghosts.
This archive exists because I thought these moments mattered enough to try to hold onto them, even knowing I can't really hold onto anything. That's either profound or ridiculous, depending on the day.
There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself. Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn […]
On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do […]
At 4:45pm on November 16th, 2018, a cold, gray, 54 degree afternoon, we staged the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus‘ Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo County. Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with here: Aeschylus’s Danaids trilogy is mostly gone. Lost to time, fire, neglect, pick your poison. What […]
May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions. We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition […]
The Garden Isle. Land of chickens running wild through parking lots, where the roosters crow at three a.m. like they’re announcing the apocalypse, and the trade winds smell of plumeria and possibility. The Mysians. Three lines remain. “Hail, Caïcus and ye streams of Mysia!” That’s the opening. The hook. The ancient Greek equivalent of “Once […]
The Fragment he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece. Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered. So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass […]
My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5 We’re all so fucking scared of being earnest that we’ve turned every production into a knowing wink, a deconstructed […]
July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play […]
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of […]
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]
‘Change life! ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. Henri Lefebvre So here’s the thing about fairy tales performed at dusk in an amphitheater: someone decided that the only way to properly fuck with Grimm and Perrault was to drag their corpses outside, shake the dust off those cautionary […]
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is. 2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the […]
Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doing Euripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, I call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes […]
There’s something deeply, irrationally beautiful about staging dead Greek shit at a racetrack. I mean, here we are: 1:15 in the afternoon, June 6th, 2015, Golden Gate Fields, where the smell of horse piss and broken dreams hangs in the air like a question nobody wants to answer. It’s 71 degrees, sunny, perfect California weather […]
Here’s what happened: 8:01 p.m., May 4th, 2015, and we’re standing in the Emeryville Mudflats, that beautiful nowhere between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, performing what’s left of Sophocles Sinon. And when I say “what’s left,” I mean four words. Four fucking words that survived 2,400 years while empires rose and burned and we landed on […]
Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 is basically a passive-aggressive guilt trip dressed up in iambic pentameter. “From fairest creatures we desire increase”, translate that from Elizabethan for what it really means: you’re too goddamn beautiful to keep it all to yourself, so make a baby already. But here’s Ava on my boat, reciting this thing, and neither […]
Collaboration: three people trying to figure out how to make Shakespeare’s storm feel real when the actual wind off the Pacific is already doing half the work. We’re not building a set. We’re negotiating with architecture that predates us and will outlast us, trying to figure out where bodies should stand, how voices will […]
Here’s a human, here’s a beach, here’s a poem about desire that refuses to behave itself. Figure it out. Maybe that’s the whole point. These words still work. They still cut. We’re still wrestling with the same beautiful mess: who we love, how we love, what we’re allowed to say about it, and whether […]
You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, […]
The government shutdown ran them off last year, locked the gates mid production like some kind of Kafkaesque joke, but they came back. The Golden Gate’s up there doing its thing, that low thrumming hum of bridge cable and wind and traffic I feel in my chest more than hear. The light comes through these […]
I stand there in the damp brick corridors of Fort Point with a camera and Shakespeare’s murder ballad echoing off Civil War-era walls, and I start to understand something about why I do this stupid, beautiful thing called documentation. Not because theater needs more goddamn photos. But because Ava and her company decided to stage […]
They asked me to document a site specific performance piece called Out of Water at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference. Fort Funston… where the cliffs give up and the Pacific takes over. Helen Paris and Caroline Wright had assembled the whole apparatus: commissioned sound scores, UK sopranos, singers and swimmers spread across […]
No. 01
