My longer article about the salon, A Gathering Spirit: The Franconia Performance Salon, 2011-2020, was published in the May 2023 issue of Performing Arts Journal.

From 2010-2020, I hosted a regular salon in my home in Bernal Heights.

The Franconia Performance Salon grew out of my experience living in an architecturally unique 1970s home, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, that lends itself to social events and live performance.

FPS was different from other kinds of public performance spaces: the salon was intended as a forum for artists to share and get feedback on new ideas and works in progress, so the question that I posed to every audience was always the same: how can you use your perspective as a spectator to help the artists see the future of their work?

Most audiences are trained to respond to artworks with a verdict about their merit as finished products. At FPS, I invited spectators and artists into an informal conversation about process.

I have made hosting a central part of my artistic life, and FPS was a logical extension of that ethos: eating and drinking together in the environment of an unusual San Francisco home helped to create the atmosphere which was central to audience members’ experience of the salon.

The artists who presented at Franconia ranged greatly over time, though most of them work in performance. I curatee the evening by reaching out to a few artists whose work I know, and artists also approached me, directly or through friends and colleagues in the arts scene. I welcomed a wide range of work, though I avoided curating conventional theatre scenes or literary readings.

The house has a great deal of flexibility, so often there were numerous pieces happening simultaneously – a tiny marionette show in the garage might run concurrently with a ritual cleansing in a shower and a live restaging of an Andy Warhol film in the main space. 

As a curator, director and educator, I see many benefits to an event like this. One is the genuine sense of experimentation that can happen outside any structure of economic expectation: there was no money to be made through ticket sales at FPS, which was on one level artistically liberating, for me and for the artists.

Another is the kind of audience FPS drew; many of them were regulars, and many of them did not go to see performance art in other kinds of spaces. I built the audience through an ever-growing email list, word of mouth, and Facebook.

They were local students, scholars, artists and professionals who usually heard about us through their own networks, and they came to FPS because it was a uniquely intimate event, with high quality but unconventional work, in an atmosphere in which people could share ideas with the artists and each other.

I never hosted formal talkbacks, but instead asked audiences to spend time before and after the performances, and to engage the artists about their development process. A number of artists have told me that there was no other forum in the Bay Area like FPS for the development of their ideas, and many audience members claim that it was their most vital ongoing artistic experience.

Many longterm contributors, collaborators, and housemates worked hard to keep the salon going: Renu Cappelli, Niki Ulehla, Brian Yarish, Derek Phillips, Ryan Tacata, Richie Rhombus, Angrette McCloskey, Yula Paluy, Nathalie Brilliant, Raegan Truax, Helen Paris, Leslie Hill, Tonyanna Borkovi and Lily Lamboy, to name a few. The photos here were all taken by Jamie Lyons, who began documenting the salon from its inception.