Felipe Steinberg: Opening

As a transdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural producer I am interested in the meanings created around events – in how the act of re-telling shapes past events, as much as how the creation of events forges new ways of telling. I was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program and, recently, a lumbung public program coordinator at documenta fifteen.

“Opening” is an event (2018) and a lecture performance (2023). One does not exist without the other. “Opening” is a lecture performance that returns to a one-evening event also titled “Opening” that I conceived and organized at the Playhouse Theater in Houston in 2018, furthering my ongoing exploration of decentralization, labor practices, and the relation between artists and society.

The lecture performance loops around a one-evening event that I staged at the Playhouse Theater on August 25, 2018. This was the first time the theater had been used in fifteen years, even though it had been heralded as a landmark space and the world’s first theater-in-the-round, that is, a central stage surrounded by the audience. It was built in 1951. The event needed to be created in order for a story to be told. In that regard, “Opening” is also a digressive and wide-ranging lecture performance that uses the documentation of the 2018 event, alongside never seen documents and research material, in order to take the audience on an exploration of the theater, its surroundings, and the many layers of modern life hidden within this seemingly abandoned edifice. The following note encapsulates some of the ideas surrounding the lecture performance, which was presented as a work in progress during Onassis AiR Open Day #4 on March 10, 2023.

Some years later, I remembered my first solo opening. It happened in 2018 in a small, largely forgotten theater in Houston, which had not been used in over a decade, but whose grand opening in 1951 was given pride of place in the New York Times. It was the world’s first theater-in-the round, an experiment in decentralized audience viewing and participation. It promised to usher in a new era of post-War commonality, but it also contained within itself the secret of its own destruction – that decentralization was not a strategy for the commons but for the dispersal of life into evermore eccentric and isolated monads, islands of individuality bereft of the very commonality that their separation had promised. By the time I was to perform there, it had been decommissioned, reopened with its signature stage destroyed, converted into a museum, and then left closed to history. Around it had grown all the tell-tale signs of modern American urban “redevelopment” – an abandoned Sears department store turned into a university “innovation hub”; a highway that had destroyed neighborhoods and created an encampment of the unhoused under its steadily fracturing concrete; a temporary employment agency skimping half the pay of mostly Amazon workers; new real estate developments; and, of course, an artist residency.

It was at this residency that I found myself in 2018, a pedestrian in a car city, walking around the pentagon of urban renewal sites, trying to understand the dispersed city clawing at innovation while leaving its citizens behind, pacing through the air-conditioned Sears that had everything except shoppers, vaguely hallucinating scenes from Wim Wenders’ Texas movies as the ambulance took me to the hospital in the wake of drivers who could not fathom a person would be walking there, and finally finding a hand-made sign – perched below an empty museum and theater marquee, in the shadow of a construction crane – inviting inquiries to rent the once noble theater-in-the-round. I would wonder how to create an art show that captured the non-space of the site, who the invitees would be, whether the city would fund such a project-without-a-product. And, finding that indeed they would, I would then find myself hidden under the stage, an artist not present at my own opening, hoping the photographer would capture the fleeting images of the people of Midtown, Houston, paid fairly to leave their encampment, and participate in whatever it means to actually open a space.

Some years later, I was to remember all of these experiences and try to reproduce for myself (who had not seen the opening) and the audience (who may not know anything of Houston and its endless sprawl) a recreation, a recentralization of the experience of being together, using the tools at hand – from the personal archives and memories of those I met to the omniscient images of Google Earth – to find a way, from a future that will have been, to conjure a past that will have been forgotten, to make an opening of something together, to gather once again around a storyteller trying to pull together the shards of experience and breathe into the endless concrete spirals of this dispersed world something like what used to be called a hearth.