Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room (1982)
Suzanne Lacy with Carol Leigh, Julia London and Ngoh Spencer
This tableau performance featured 120 women staged in groups of varying ages, occupations, and races, on couches in an upscale furniture show- room in the San Francisco warehouse district. The women talked amongst themselves about their experiences of survival while an audience that wandered from scene to scene eavesdropped freely. As a final act, the performers gathered in one room to relate personal experiences about stereotypes, pride, belonging and exclusion—the first time during the performance that they spoke directly to the audience. The performance was a six-month effort to bring together representatives of San Francisco’s diverse female population for conversations centering on their social circumstances, similarities, and differences. Pregnant women, sex workers, disabled women, older Afro-American women, ex-mental patients, older Jewish women, carpenters, card players and teen- agers were arranged in diverse tableaux on furniture throughout the showroom.
Produced for the joint convening of the annual conferences, The International Theater Festival and The International Sculpture Conference, Roche Bobois Furniture showroom, San Francisco, California.
Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room is documented in the 1984 documentary, SOFA. Executive Producer, Suzanne Lacy; Director, Steve Hirsch; Editor, Doug Gayeton
Distributed by Video Data Bank