Suzanne Lacy, Rob Miller, and Rick Lowe, curated by Mary Jane Jacob (Charleston, 2003)

Throughout the spring of 2003, Clemson Architecture students designed a series of 18 concrete block porches to be built on the vacant Ansonborough Field as stages for a civic conversation. These porches evoked the piazzas of Charleston single-houses that were part of Lowcountry social life since the early 19th century. Constructed of yellow block, they were also reminiscent of the Ansonborough Homes, a concrete block low-income housing project that stood here till 1993. In early June, twenty five local architects volunteered to build the porches, each of which was surrounded by a field of white surveyors flags that evoked the haunting absence of (or staked the future territory for?) homes on the field.

A Steering Committee of local partners directed the artists in a search for people who could, from a variety of perspectives and personal experiences, comment on land use, redevelopment, and changes in the Charleston area—from heirs’ property rights to beachfront development to the future of Charleston’s East Side. On Saturday, June 7, seventy five citizens-performers—from Congressman James Clyburn to Mayor Joseph P. Riley to teenagers from rural South Carolina—gathered near Ansonborough Fields in preparation for a series of spontaneous and unrehearsed conversations, informed by the uniqueness of each participant’s experience. It was a gathering like no other in this area, a diversity of rich and poor and middle class, white and black and Filipino, old families and recent immigrants, young and old.

As the excited “performers” were assigned to tables with topics that had arisen during the several month organizing process, gathering storm clouds threatened. Safely tucked under a shelter in Liberty Square, the 90 participants began their conversations under the shelter where they were seated upon arrival, as a thundering summer storm broke.

Meanwhile at The Borough Houses the performance began for an audience of 200 hardy souls who had arrived, umbrellas in hand, for the first Act. Against the haunting background of a saxophone rendition of Summertime by local legend Lonnie Hamilton hidden in the back house, the audience listened to seven former Borough residents reminisce on the porch about the sounds, smells, and experiences of life in The Borough.

Act two, meant to take place in Ansonborough Fields, with theatrical lights setting the performers aglow as they sat on the yellow porches, was diverted to the shelter at Liberty Square. There the audience witnessed highly charged discussions while harried but valiant waitresses weaved through the tables to provide refreshments. Though the formality and visual quality of the planned tableau was interrupted by weather, the heart of the performance--a civic discourse of unusual candor with 300 now-mixed audience and performers in simultaneous and unrehearsed debate—was, in the eyes of several participants, perhaps even more charged by the backdrop of a summer storm.