Shortly after I graduated from art school, I began to work as a performer in Anne Bogart’s company. In her early work, Anne created a series of pieces called The Emissions Project where we performed in disused and abandoned spaces, like an empty detective’s office on 42nd Street and an empty school on the Lower East Side. Anne’s highly choreographic visual aesthetic, in which she used the city as her stage, enabled audiences to see their surroundings with fresh eyes. This theatrical form broadened the tools of storytelling to bring the environment directly in conversation with the performers, creating its own visual poetry. This was what I wanted to do artistically. Forever.
En Garde’s first show in New York City was in 1986 on the façade of a then-empty condo on Chambers and Greenwich streets. Called Naked Chambers, and written by the now-late Dick Beebe, the story was about a mountain climber who became an urban art thief, who climbed in and out of the apartment windows of this twelve-story empty condominium with paintings on his back. Each night we placed thirty folding chairs in the streets that looked up at the building so that the audiences could watch the story unfold. In the windows were videos of actors playing out scenes of alleged tenants. One night, the president of Actors’ Equity, Alan Eisenberg, came strolling down the street, looked up at the building, looked at me, and immediately realized there was nothing legal about this endeavor from a union perspective. Seeing that the show was free and there was no money, he laughed, shook his head, and kept walking. I was immensely relieved that I never heard from the union.
My inspiration for wanting to start a site-specific theatre came from my unending passion for public art and its ability to reach new audiences by virtue of its accessibility.
Together with the playwrights and directors at En Garde Arts, I developed a storytelling aesthetic that was not just about the spoken word but that used “place” as a key element in the narrative. Cobblestone streets and empty meat lockers in New York’s meatpacking district, which harkened back to the nineteenth century, became the perfect backdrop for Reza Abdoh’s Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990). The statue of JP Morgan, at the intersection of Wall and Broad streets, was a perfect symbol for Jonathan Larson’s musical JP Morgan Saves the Nation (1995). Director Tina Landau loved the twisted metal pier that jutted out over the Hudson River beside the Penn Yards, which she envisioned as a symbol for the House of Atreus for Chuck Mee’s adaptation of Orestes (1993)—and every night Jefferson Mays, the then-unknown actor playing Orestes, took his life into his hands as he climbed up to the top of this precarious yet magnificent structure.
The artists working with En Garde Arts all created highly public and highly accessible works that enabled audiences who had never been to the theatre before to come. At the Towers Nursing Home for Another Person is a Foreign Country written by Chuck Mee and directed by Anne Bogart, kids from the nearby projects arrived popcorn in hand, thinking they were coming to see a film, and were joined by local residents from surrounding apartment buildings. When we were on Wall Street, office workers stopped to catch the show on their way home from work. These new audiences were awakened to the magic of theatre, some of them for the very first time. And those who were used to seeing theatre in traditional settings saw their city with new eyes.
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I am in the process of writing a book. It's not only about En Garde Arts but also about my journey to the West Coast to run a global division for Disney and my return to New York to relaunch the company. We live in very different times now but there is and will always be a great deal to accomplish producing risk taking theatrical work.
While you're writing to capture your past work, I want to thank you for creating readings of new works in Brooklyn's Commons. A welcoming den of creativity, even for us provincial Manhattanites who rarely dare to venture out of our boro!
Really enjoyed this post. In addition to great memories of those shows, it also brought to mind Isadora Duncan, Allan Kaprow, and Richard Schechner, and why we don't have more books about site-based work in the US. It seems UK folks have been writing about site-work way more. Makes me grateful for Bertie Ferdman and her recent book, "Off Sites". There is hope. ha! Now, who's gonna write that En Garde Arts book?
So glad to read this article, Annie, and to relive some powerful EnGarde moments...and look forward to your future in our beloved city.
I was on a bleacher in the parking lot of an abandoned, dark, lugubrious building, watching actors flinging themselves up and creeping down fire escapes, peering out of windows, shouting down to diners at an elegant picnic table caught in intricate conflicts.. Thanks Anne Hamburger for mentioning that amazing theater adventure at "the Towers Nursing Home for Another Person is a Foreign Country written by Chuck Mee and directed by Anne Bogart." Twenty years later, that odd evening still resonates. The article makes me wonder why. I think what stays with me is a visceral connecting of people creating life on, in and around the physical city building... conscious flesh and blood creatures crawling over and playing in their city... the shock of experiencing dramatic action burst alive, engaging, dining on the decaying bricks and broken windows of abandoned urban left overs.