By Justin Hayford
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Steger was doing the kind of work most everyone on the performance scene was doing in those days: disjointed, heady, aggressively antitheatrical. But while many of his contemporaries seemed satisfied to demonstrate their familiarity with postmodern performance theory, Steger never let theory overwhelm his practice. Despite his daunting intellect and penchant for academic musings, he couldn’t help but entertain.
I had hoped to gain some insight into his method that night; in those days I was making performance pieces myself and saw Steger’s work as a model of efficient ambiguity. We didn’t talk much shop, however, perhaps because we were too busy drinking and sizing up the crowd around us. By the time we got to Manhole, groping our way through the half-light (and pawing my ex-boyfriend by accident), I realized that nothing intrigued Steger as much as darkness. It was in the shadowy realm of unnamed fears and unacknowledged impulses that he came to life. For him, darkness was a portal to a world of creative possibilities.
It was as if the artist couldn’t muster enough energy to maintain interest in his own material, making for a ludicrous and lamentable spectacle. That wry ennui gave all his major pieces an alluring sadness, perhaps none more so than his biggest project, The Swans, which premiered at Randolph Street Gallery in 1995 and then traveled to Glasgow. This elaborately hokey semicinematic calamity–a failed movie script onstage– attempted to tell the stories of Gilles de Rais (aka Bluebeard) and King Ludwig II, men who squandered fortunes hoping to keep themselves forever in a state of artificial ecstasy, only to have their kingdoms come crashing in on them. Steger’s fascination with passion’s brevity only increased after he learned about his HIV status. “How do I sustain interest in a world that I’m scheduled to not be part of very soon?” he wondered while preparing a revised version of The Swans for the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996.
