Opening, event and lecture performance, 2018-2023
Opening is a lecture performance that explores how theaters, cities, and nations become stages for democracy—and how those visions are shaped, distorted, or deferred. It examines architectures of spectatorship and urban planning, asking how environments designed for gathering also encode ideological frameworks. The work centers on the Playhouse Theater in Houston, mythologized as the first “theater-in-the-round” in the U.S. Built in 1951 with a circular stage surrounded by the audience, it was imagined as a “democratic surround” for a “decentralized gaze.” After sitting unused for fifteen years, the theater came back to life in 2018 with an event I conceived and organized—its dramaturgy inseparable from the research. By looping through inversions—revitalization as displacement, audiences as performers—Opening reframes what a “theater for democracy” might mean today: not a finished project, but a constellation of small, provisional acts of assembly and conviviality.
Review by Francesca Fuchs here.
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Opening is a lecture performance that explores how theaters, cities, and nations become stages for democracy—and how those visions are shaped, distorted, or deferred. It examines architectures of spectatorship and urban planning, asking how environments designed for gathering also encode ideological frameworks. The work centers on the Playhouse Theater in Houston, mythologized as the first “theater-in-the-round” in the U.S. Built in 1951 with a circular stage surrounded by the audience, it was imagined as a “democratic surround” for a “decentralized gaze.” After sitting unused for fifteen years, the theater came back to life in 2018 with an event I conceived and organized—its dramaturgy inseparable from the research. By looping through inversions—revitalization as displacement, audiences as performers—Opening reframes what a “theater for democracy” might mean today: not a finished project, but a constellation of small, provisional acts of assembly and conviviality.
Review by Francesca Fuchs here.
