Satori in a Storefront
My first time was in a storefront gallery and performance space on 19th Ave East in Seattle in 1992 with a girl named Kristen Kosmas. The space was called Room 608, my friend Matt had started it about a year earlier, and Kristen was performing a solo show called blah blah fuckin’ blah.
I was sitting on a folding chair with maybe 50 other people in this gallery, a few rows of chairs on the floor, another three rows of chairs on risers, at least this is how I remember it. The audience all know each other, we’re local artists, theater makers, writers, musicians, friends of Matt, mostly in our twenties, with some folks in their thirties and forties who had lived in the building since they turned it into an artist’s collective in the 1970’s. We chat with each other while we wait for the show to start.
I had moved to Seattle in 1990 to start a theater company with a handful of college friends, part of a massive wave of young people, mostly aspiring artists of all kinds — musicians, theater makers, dancers, writers, visual artists, technologists, counterculture psychonauts and adventurers — looking for a place that was affordable, creative and cool.
When my friends and I arrived in Seattle in 1990, things were simmering and soon to boil over, but it was still magical, full of possibility. Seattle was a very open place, receptive to new ideas and new ventures. Rent was affordable and so was the cost of living, it was easy to have a not-too-taxing day job and spend the rest of your time drinking coffee or beer, finding collaborators, having conversations and making art.
For me and my friends, at least, there was a sense of the freedom of being outside the mainstream, despite the media hype on the music scene, of being a part of a community of young artists in conversation with each other, trying to figure things out together. Room 608 was one of those spaces where artists gathered to collaborate, co-create and explore.
People talk about Seattle in the 90’s as the epicenter of “grunge” or alternative culture, and I suppose that is true, but I remember it as a place of curiosity, possibility and creativity, a welcoming place, churning with energy and invention, where experimentation, artistry and vision were prized over commercial gloss and success.
So, I’m sitting in Room 608, waiting for the show to start. The gallery’s white walls are bare, the stage is empty but for a folding chair; a few parcans — those wide, unfocused theater lights, not much more than coffee cans with light bulbs in them — hang from some pipes on the ceiling. Somebody turns off the fluorescent room lights and the room is briefly dark. When the stage lights come up, there’s this compact, waifish girl with short reddish-brown hair and big brown eyes standing center stage in a pool of light, looking out at us, taking us in. She leads with her head; she is leaning forward, her body taut and poised, arms raised with her hands held in front of her just so, as if to support the torrent of words that she is about to unleash, and she begins. Tell me something, tell me something true.
Her voice is rich, her diction clear as she tells these elliptical stories that feel like modern myths, like a Cassandra channeling prophecy from deep in the collective unconscious. Something about bandaged hands that feel like pillows. Something about something else. Family drama that is at once specific and oblique. Surprising, poetic observations of easily overlooked moments between people, the familiar made unfamiliar and new. Thirty years later, I remember the feeling more than the actual words. I’d never heard anything like it before and to this day I can still hear Kristen’s voice clearly in my head, I would recognize it anywhere.
One story leads into another, there’s a movement sequence, like contact improv partnering with the chair, we can hear Kristen breathing from the exertion, the swish, swish swish of her clothes as she moves, the sound of her feet brushing the floor. I’ve never been more present in my life — Kristen, her words, this room, these people; breathing, listening, paying attention, together. We are transported, sharing an experience that is happening both physically in space and in our collective imaginations, dreaming together in real time.
An hour goes by, more or less, I’ve completely lost track, and Kristen is standing center stage, arms outstretched, beseeching the audience in that unprecedented voice, “Listen to me, I have something to say!”
I was astonished. I had been going to theater since I was a little kid, I had been in plays and musicals, I had gone to all kinds of concerts from the symphony to the ballet to the Grateful Dead to Black Flag, I had taken all kinds of drugs, but I had never before had this experience of connection that was at once so intimate and profound; never had I been so aware that life’s grandest truths are contained in the minutiae of the everyday, revealed through immediacy and presence.
As I caught my breath and collected my thoughts, trying to re-acclimate to the familiar world, I knew, for the first time, that this specific experience would never, ever happen again. Kristen, the words, the stories, the audience filled with friends in Room 608 in Seattle, 1992, couldn’t possibly happen again because that’s not how time works. Each moment is irreplaceable, here and then gone, now is all there is. Essential to remember, but easy to forget.
I was so moved by this feeling, this knowledge, this experience, that I spent the next thirty years chasing it down and, more often than you might think, finding it — great reckonings in little rooms.
Every so often people bemoan the death of theater, or the disappearance of the indie scene in theater — or music, or dance, or visual art, take your pick. But this disappearance is usually just a change in appearance, a transition between generations, a shift in styles and tactics. But it never truly disappears, it only changes shape. It is resilient.
Over the years I have come to believe that there is something about live, in-person, small group experiences — not just theater but most any in-person, small and co-creative group experiences — that is uniquely powerful. Under the right conditions, these experiences can spark profound, meaningful, transformative change in individuals, and within a group, both in the moment and over time.
I will be exploring this idea over the course of several essays drawn from my personal experience ranging from an all-blogger reading and performance series to a Nirvana concert, to my high school lunch table and beyond. Please join me.
This essay was originally published on Culturebot.org
