Activations: Rec, Center, Stage | Salome Oggenfuss and Stephen Kwok in conversation
Imagine using theater as schooling; as a tool for the transfiguration of everyday life: what imaginations could it help access, what positions could it help embody, and what relationships could it help define?
In January of 2024, Rec, Center, Stage, convened a group of 20 members of the public who had responded to an open call issued by Dia Art Foundation and NYC Parks to devise a site-responsive performance at the Chelsea Recreation Center as part of Dia’s Activations series. Led by Salome Oggenfuss, the group was comprised of Chelsea locals and members of the recreation center who shared an interest in writing, performance and choreography.
What would eventually become an hour-long performance flowing across the center’s various rooms, including the front desk, billiards room, weightlifting room, and pantry, in which all the participants acted as characters while also as versions of themselves, began with an intimate conversation on societal roles as performed in public spaces.
I take a deep breath. I steel, center, and ground my body. The key card comes in contact with the device on the wall. The bleep on the device signals ‘it’s showtime!’. On paper, all fronts and for appearances sake I’m just a Black mother with a few degrees. A Creatrix in the Matrix, patiently awaiting her direct deposit every 2 weeks.
– Participant Turquoise Juanita Martin, urban planner and burlesque dancer
Taking cues from accounts such as the one above, and reimagining them through theatrical experimentation, the subsequent public performance positioned the audience among the performers and center goers and asked people to take note of the roles we are asked to play in everyday life. Reenactment and détournement disclosed the dramaturgical potential that everyday contexts hold, and how performance and 'real life’ are really never that far apart.
In the following conversation, Salome Oggenfuss and Stephen Kwok, curator of public engagement at Dia, speak on the boundaries of performance, the politics of the everyday, and potential for social change, recounting their experience collaborating on the program.
Stephen Kwok:
In recalling our early conversations, I’m struck by the questions that quickly emerged between us. We began by talking about the possibility of disrupting social protocols and contracts; that by studying them and using them as source material for performative interventions, social change might be instigated in some way. I remember it feeling intimidating to say out loud.
Salome Oggenfuss:
Yes, it sounds a little bit grandiose, but I think it’s okay to have grandiose visions underneath a practice.
SK:
This also came up in recent conversation I was having with a writer who was saying something along the same lines: art needs grandiosity, and artists need to have a certain ego to believe that they can make things that break from the status quo.
SO:
I do have a strong desire to create social experiences for people that challenge that status quo and the patterns of how we’re supposed to socialize. I think there is a very strong power of suggestion towards people that leaves us feeling dehumanized by the choices that we feel we should make on a day-to-day basis, as far as how we interact with one another. We’re supposed to spend money going to an expensive restaurant and think that is the reward for the struggles or pains that we go through in life, like working certain jobs, and so on and so forth.
I’m interested in looking at how micro decisions –“Am I going to get a coffee here or there?” or “am I going to get on the subway or ride my bike?”– are relevant to how we function as a society. I think as artists we can propose experiences that can render such subconscious patterns visible and help create change that resonates in everyday life.
SK:
It seems to me that although we’re often making those day-to-day decisions on autopilot, each one is making an emotional or psychological imprint on us that’s difficult to be fully conscious of.
SO:
Yes, and how are we agents of power dynamics that play out through those little decisions? Am I being, let’s say, overly kind and polite to someone because I want to make sure they’re comfortable and see it as my social function to make them at ease in a situation? Or do I decide to withhold that and allow for them to be put off by something? And how is that the result of my social existence?
In certain cases, it’s a survival technique—you can’t afford to upset people. In other cases, I think it’s an act of habit where you feel like you always have to play that role; you’ve been conditioned to it. That’s what’s was interesting to me about working with members of the public who responded to an open call. We could connect on matters on everyday life and I could encourage them to think about these micro-experiences, ask them to consider the ideological forces that inform how they act in day-to-day situations.
SK:
Can you talk about how you decided that would be your focus for this program? Activations is a participatory and site-responsive series, and prior to Rec, Center, Stage, most artists had engaged with their sites through objects or architecture. Your approach, which centered the social nature of Chelsea Recreation Center and the people who use it, was relatively unprecedented.
SO:
I’ve come to making art with a social practice in response to the economic and societal reality of living in New York. I emerged from 2020 feeling that it’s an important time to use art to create real-life experiences that get us away from screens and out of isolation. It’s of course a paradox that now this type of work is more needed than ever but is also more difficult to execute as it doesn’t enter the market. The upside is that you don’t need a studio or costly tools to work in this way, but you still need a certain amount of time and ideally, facilitation. Activations is great in the way it supports this kind of practice.
SK:
You’ve done work in this vein before with Montez Press Radio and the Kitchen. Can you share more about that experience and if or how define this type of work? For instance, do you think of it as theater?
SO:
Comte des Cierges, the performance I did with Montez Press Radio and the Kitchen in 2023, was a play that was staged in the semi-public lobby of the Seward Park Coop building on the Lower East Side. It was performed by a mix of amateurs and trained performers. The screenplay was written by a professional doorman, Carlos Cotto, and it was based on his experiences working in the profession. Because we staged the work in an active lobby, residents were coming and going, crossing paths with the performers who were acting out their roles as building residents or as building personnel.
Since theater is traditionally staged in a proscenium with lights and seats, it’s separated away from daily life. I’m curious about what happens when you extract theater from its typical context and put it into a public or semi-public site. At what point does it become something else? Both Comte de Cierges and Rec, Center Stage used theater techniques such as narrative and scripts in the making process, but at some point, by being out in the field, started to lose the traits of traditional theater.
SK:
It’s almost like a form of non-performance or (non)performance. That inability to distinguish between the work and the everyday life that continues to happen around it is, in my mind, the most potent aspect of this way of working, but I think there’s also something that was happening behind-the-scenes. Perhaps that’s where your interrogation of the micro social scripts played out. In the case of Rec, Center, Stage, the participants did the opposite of blindly follow the scripts, instead they recalled them and analyzed them in order to generate material for the performance. It’s as if the act of reenactment allowed them to become more aware; it interrupted that passive acceptance and reproduction that occurs on a day-to-day basis.
SO:
I think that it’s also important to consider the audience’s reception. The blurriness may also do something to how the work is viewed. I think if something is clearly catalogued as theater (or another genre), people go into it with a preexisting notion of how they should interact with it. If people go to an off-Broadway show in a black-box theater in Midtown, they have a certain expectation. You go in, you sit down, you maybe dress a certain way, and you expect to be entertained a little bit and challenged a little bit. Once it’s finished, you will clap, and you will get up and leave. Maybe afterward you have nice glass of wine with your friend and talk about it. There is a whole score of how an audience member should receive and react to the experience.
The idea with Rec, Center, Stage was to create something where we could push against that kind of consumer culture–the presets of how culture is supposed to be consumed–which are often limiting. By opening up the genre or disrupting expectations, I think it also opens up something within the audience member.
A lot of our ability to break out of norms comes from subliminal or libidinal impulses, right? Or unconscious desires; not calculated, rational decisions. That’s another way change could happen; it can come from those deeper impulses that are buried in us. I think creating spaces where those impulses can be accessed is meaningful.
Through the use of animation, this 10-minute video depicts the performances in the various rooms as a number of parallel scenes reverberating through the building. The documentation is a creative reinterpretation that departs from the actual staging, where the performances unfolded consecutively.
Activations: Rec, Center, Stage was devised and performed by Robert Block, Fernanda Cardoso, Archie Caride, Chris Chung, Isabelle Garbani, Joan Greenberg, Walis Johnson, Joan Kane, Stephen Kwok, Sonia Lopes, Turquoise Juanita Martin, Penelope Mermall, Elizabeth Meyer, Charles NY, Emma O'Donnell, Salome Oggenfuss, Mark Rosa, and Gillian Walsh.
Photographer: Don Stahl
Videographer: Connor Sen Warnick
Choreographer: Gillian Walsh
Thanks to Angel Barba, Archie Caride, John Contreras, Bobby Vangelatos, and the staff of the Chelsea Recreation Center.
