How It All Started: Sam’s Memories

For a long period in college I was an Urban Studies major and I tried to live and breathe it. I devoured urban theory like The Life and Death of Great American Cities, The Arcades Project, and The Image of the City, hoping the more I read that more I’d feel its vocational calling, but always with the creeping fear that I would relapse into drama and find myself free-basing some stilted Ibsen with the rest of the drama kids. And when that happened, I wasn’t really surprised because no matter how hard I had tried, I found theater insinuating itself into my Urban Studies talk; I kept using the word “performativity,” I analogized Jane Jacobs’ Lower East Side to “a ballet of the city,” and I fully intended on writing a thesis about theater organizations’ roll in attempts to revitalize hollow downtowns. In the end, I dropped Urban Studies for Theater and thought that would be the end of it, until I noticed how Urban Studies was inflecting my theater-talk; I kept imagining site-specific work, I continued to use the word “performativity,” and I wrote a whole play about the ethno-sociology of theme parks.

It was at this unresolved point that I graduated, and returned home to DC to an internship at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, a DC theatre that led the revitalization of Downtown DC’s Chinatown/Penn Quarter neighborhood. Owen was also home, working a co-op job at a large, corporate architecture firm and feeling like his work was missing a creative, radical, experimental outlet. Over the course of the spring/summer we realized how neatly our interests overlapped – a nice little Venn diagram of theater and architecture with spatial intervention, site-specific performance, and non-traditional approaches at the center. That’s when we envisioned a collaboration – designing a special space for a performance, and a special performance for a space. We spent a bunch of late nights working together. We talked, we drew, we listened to music, we drank coffee, we wrote and we recorded it all, even the stupid half-ideas we argued about at 2 AM. We focused on the idea of thresholds and intimacy. We wanted it to be low tech. My writing exercises focused on the idea of loss; of moving into a new place of passing on/over/through, actually and metaphorically; on place-making and ritual.

Then, Owen had to go back to Cincinnati for his last year of college and I got pulled deeper into my internship and grad school applications. We let the project sit, ferment. And now we’re picking it back up, with a new collaborator, Sebastian, some structure, a blog, and an actual performance/build date. Here we go.