Prologue 

In the early 2000s, I lived in Denver—part cow-town, part rocky mountain high-town, part seedy post-punk enclave, part landlocked western anywhere, and a town rife with ghost theaters. The Federal, a 1923 movie house, had been left vacant in the late 1980s until it was occupied, just barely, by an indie theater troupe. They’d scaled it down for their small audiences by removing all but a few rows of seats, and thick layers of moonlike dust remained settled in the folds of velvet draped over the still-towering proscenium. The Elitch, an 1891 a summer stock playhouse, sat boarded up at the crossing of railroads that no longer existed, the zoological gardens that once surrounded it having been paved over long ago. The Bug, named by the artists who rescued it from dilapidation in the late 1990s, originally opened in 1912 as a nickelodeon named the Ideal Theater. Its weekly open-stage variety show, Freak Train, drew crowds with $5 tickets that included free beer, which audiences sipped from plastic cups as they settled into the old plush seats, hinges creaking. 

I lived around the corner from the Lowenstein (it opened as the Bonfils in 1953), an uptown community theater that had fallen out of use in the 1980s and left for dead. Its glass lobby doors entombed the aftermath of its final audience, an airless assemblage of cigarettes arranged in the little sand dunes of the ashcans. I liked to imagine the chaos of the dressing rooms at a perpetual intermission, the air thick with hairspray and smoke, half-dressed chorus girls reapplying their lipstick. I yearned to be among them, to be cloistered in their limboland even as I moved my own physical position in life from back of house (dancer) to front (audience member, critic). 

Act I

Nearly two decades later, in Austin, I found myself working in a different ghost theater. It wasn’t on purpose: I was driving to a job interview with a corporate design group, following my phone’s directions to the address they had given me but not realizing precisely where I was being led. It wasn’t until I reached the top of a familiar hill and remembered what was on the other side that I knew. At this ghost theater, over the course of a decade, I’d seen scores of dance concerts, plays, and art exhibits, writing pages of indecipherable notes in the dark, allowing realities to be suspended, to mash up, to knot together. I’d been delighted and despondent, gained empathy and reverence, and made awkward conversation during intermission as I tried to not break my emerging sensemaking of the show at hand. 

I froze, but my car continued to move forward toward the address. I pulled up to the building and could see that its facade was now glassy and white instead of brightly muraled metal, its owners having renovated after increasing the lease amount, thus pricing out the theater group. I parked in the once precarious, now leveled parking lot and, exasperated, silently asked the universe what I was supposed to do. Going inside the ghost theater for the interview would implicate me in the displacement of the artists—the group who ran the theater plus the many small companies and independent artists who had relied on the modestly equipped space and affordable rental rates. But I was tired, tired of having to choose, and I knew that ghost theater to be a place for respite and reflection. I wanted to go in. 

I’m not sure I even tried to appear normal as someone led me through a badge-access-only glass door into the foyer, which was where I would stand outside at intermission, relishing the night air and watching people smoke. I gazed around at the conference room that used to be a gallery and up at the loft where pulleys used to dangle high above performers’ heads. A ghost performing the part of a person interviewing in an office, I pulled out my old and struggling laptop and shared my portfolio with kind, curious people who had no idea where we were. 

Inevitably, the design researchers on my interview panel—those whose job it is to learn all that humans need from things—asked about the arts writer part on my résumé. They didn’t see it, as corporate-world people sometimes did, as a non sequitur or a distraction from my corporate-friendly work. I came clean to them about where we were all sitting. I was no longer a ghost, and I got the job. This was three years ago, in fall 2019. 

The design group had moved into the ghost theater only recently, from a floor in a large corporate-style office complex, and they were thrilled to be there, in a cozy space just for them within a vibrant neighborhood. The design group’s leaders wholeheartedly believed that working together in person was essential to the human-centered design cornerstones of collaboration and relationship building, and they’d put great care into furnishing the ghost theater with ergonomic and moveable furniture, commissioned art, and a nice balance of techy equipment and pen-and-paper supplies. But in the months after I started, the building had systemic problems. The heat wasn’t circulating properly. The toilets didn’t flush well. I wrote a confession to my former arts-section editor: Secretly, this makes me so happy! I felt bad about it, because the design-group people were so good, so smart, so genuine. They hadn’t pushed the theater out. Let the ghosts know who you are, was the advice from my editor. I hadn’t told him about any of the ghosts. He just knew. 

Nevertheless, it’s thanks to our time in the ghost theater that I got to know how things were done in the design group. When the theater was still a theater, I’d never been backstage, but in the ghost theater, my colleagues and I toiled in the depths of the corporation, trying to rechoreograph its innermost workings to make things simpler, clearer, better. In the ghost theater, I learned that my boss wore colorful, immaculate sneakers that squeaked each time he crossed the polished concrete floor to check on each of his team members. I learned that my peers sometimes took meetings while seated on the floor, like dancers. I learned who doodled during calls and who couldn’t sit still. I learned what my colleagues looked like when they were stressed or disturbed, and I knew which afternoons they were leaving early to coach their kid’s basketball team or pick up a loved one’s birthday cake.

Interlude

Then one Thursday in March 2020, I was at my desk up in the loft, which I liked because I could peer over the whole house to the kitchen, which was approximately where the ticket counter once stood, when my project lead turned away from her monitor, announcing that SXSW was canceled. We knew we wouldn’t be in the office the next day; we didn’t know how long it would last. Within days, the mayor of Austin was on YouTube, demonstrating how to cut a t-shirt into a makeshift mask and tie it around one’s head. 

All the theaters closed, ghost and regular, movie and concert hall and playhouse and blackbox. The design group retreated to online chat and videoconference, and we learned new things about each other: what our kids and pets looked like, how good our lighting was, what colors our walls were painted. People tired of being on video, so we often spoke into an audience of black rectangles. Audio quality was irregular, sometimes amplifying background noises and other times distorting everything. A couple times, someone’s earbud mic dangled so close to their chest that I could hear their heartbeat. 

Act II

Over a year later, once vaccines were available, the ghost theater was tentatively reopened and we were invited back in, on a limited schedule. Leading up to reopening day, our group chat got a boost of energy: Who was going? What would we do there? Who would bring tacos? One of us, a scout, went to inspect and prepare the building before our return. She found that bats had taken up residence, and the flavored water and coffee machines were out of order. Our scout documented findings and questions on notes affixed to the machines: Nope, nope. Was the ice safe to use? Not sure.

Return was optional, and those of us who arrived found ourselves in truly decimated numbers and staggered shifts, metaghosts exploring a limboland between our own past and present. How did the printers work? Where were the dongles and the passwords? How close would we sit? Should we hug? Who was tall? Stuff from 2020 was everywhere—diagrams on whiteboards, documents and clippings from long-complete projects pinned to foamcore, notes on stickies, tchotchkes belonging to people who had since resigned. It was no one’s job to clear it all out. 

This limbo carried on for many months. Some of us welcomed the ghost theater’s respite from our home desks, even for just a few hours a week, and even if few colleagues were there with us. Some of us found it satisfying to use the large telepresence monitors for video calls, looking out into people’s giant faces from several feet away rather than peering into them on our own small screens. Some of us used whiteboards with abandon, the dry-erase markers squeaking clarity out of our staticky minds. I printed liberally, wrote edits on hard copies, and printed the revisions. I stuffed these drafts into my backpack like pilfered trophies and then, back in my home office, brandished them during videoconference meetings, pointing with my pen at lines that none of my online colleagues could see. 

Act III

In person, it can be enough just to show up, to offer your presence. Showing up requires you to give up a part of yourself—your anonymous individuality, your private life—in exchange for being part of something else. Since showing up is work, the something else must be worth it. And it often is: we get ambient knowledge and contextual information, as the ridiculous interfaces of our bodies light up all the wild and subtle connections between us. 

In digitally mediated togetherness, we lose both the clarity of showing up (are you really here?) and the circus of involuntary empathic connections (are you whole? are you well? do you hate this idea?). Of course, communities do form online. Since the early Web, many of the most tight-knit digitally connected groups have been by and for people with very specific points of connection: unusual interests, rare experiences, marginalized identities. These communities didn’t get created by proximity or by the internet. They were already there, communities in waiting, their members already holding tin cans to their ears. Eliciting a digitally mediated community from a group of people who simply work together requires different attention to engagement, ritual, and balance. It requires expert nurturing. And even then, not everyone is looking for it. 

While the corporate design group occupied the ghost theater, it was, although slicked up, still a creative space. It was a refuge for artists, illustrators, craftspeople, writers, and people-whisperers who’d found well-paying jobs and interesting, meaningful work by way of design certificates and user experience degrees and content portfolios. Our ghost theater was a space where we could show up, and where showing up made each of us part of a group who, together, did good work. 

It’s not that the design group’s return-to-work in the ghost theater failed, because in order to identify failure you have to know what success looks like. What’s clear is that in this middling time, it became too difficult to care for the physical and the digital at once and together; too complex to build a virtual space while revitalizing the physical one; too costly to keep the stake in the ground at an uncertain time. While our pandemic experiences doubled down on the fact that theatre exists in person—in retrospect, every live performance over Zoom felt terrible—business is figuring out a new balance. 

Apotheosis 

For the design group, our ghost theater was an exclusive space for us and our invited guests, and the past few years have disrupted exclusivity in progressive ways. And anyway, the space was never ours, it was never the theater group’s, it was never the landlord’s. Other ghosts were there, on the lot and the land, before any of us: according to newspaper archives, there was a discount warehouse with ever-changing inventory, and before that, a family who lived in a stone house and raised rabbits. Perhaps before them there were other homesteaders and farmers; maybe the Caddo or Wichita peoples lived there; perhaps the Comanche, Cherokee, Coahuiltecan, Lipan Apache, Karankawa, or Tonkawa passed through; and of course there were the native plants and animals. The taking and displacing has been one-way and cumulative and systemic. 

While our ghost theater now sits mostly empty, awaiting its next design group, digital agency, or well-funded startup, the vacancy of equivalent space in our arts community has not been filled. It’s not a new story: Austin does not have the kind of history or lack of exploitation that leaves artists a glut of broken-down movie houses waiting to be inhabited. Investors wait to pounce on every crumb of monetizable land. The newest performance spaces I’ve been to over the past several years are much worse in the way of creature comforts than our ghost theater ever was—no lobby, no dressing rooms, no tech booth, no heat (in winter), no A/C (in summer). 

In these gritty spaces, people’s bodies are unplacated, electric, and the unconditioned air cracks with possibility. There are no dusty curtains or creaky hinges, because there’s nothing left to salvage. I sense a tension, as though there are ghosts still standing vigil outside the ghost theater, smoking during perpetual intermission and getting antsy. The artists are tired, tired of the weight of the realities they need to suspend, tired of having to create a place to exist again from nothing and nothing and nothing. 

Business needs spaces to do good work together, but we’ve learned that we don’t need it all. We can flex, we can hybridize, we can accommodate. Will we finally learn to share? We must understand that there is enough. There’s enough space for all our absurdly perceptive bodies, if we design it according to what we really need. 

What do humans need from things? If we are to weather future challenges of the pandemic’s scale, we must learn how to simplify, to get what we need without taking more, to love something—a vibrant neighborhood, a 5,000-square-foot warehouse—and, at the same time, leave it alone. For the design group, the loss of our connecting space humbles us. Here’s hoping our weakened connections and staticky minds leave us open to different ways of thinking, relating, connecting, and including. 

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎