The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness,
of a world which had an eternal value
and the substance of which was divine
had been given back to me today by this friend of mine
who taught me dancing.
Hermann Hesse
This isn’t about pretty. This was never about pretty. What I caught here, what I actually saw and felt, is the moment before the lie, before the performance becomes performance, before anyone gives a shit about what an audience thinks. It’s LINES dancers and the Kronos Quartet in the same room, in the same oxygen, working out the geometry of transcendence, and I’m standing there with my Leica trying not to breathe too loud.
You want to know what’s sacred? It’s not in churches. It’s in the 7th repetition of a phrase that’s almost right but not quite, when the cellist’s bow catches something in the solar plexus of a dancer mid-leap and for three seconds everyone in the room forgets they have bills to pay. That’s the sacrament. That’s communion.
Hermann Hesse knew it, that friend who taught him dancing gave him back the eternal, the divine, the whole substance of what it means to be alive in a body that’s going to die. And that’s what I’m watching through the viewfinder: four musicians who’ve spent forty years dismantling what string quartets are supposed to be, sitting three feet from dancers whose spines have been reconfigured in the service of something Alonzo calls “alignment” but is really about tuning the human form like an instrument.
The thing about photographing rehearsal, and why I’m here instead waiting for the performance, is that this is where the real work happens. This is where it’s ugly. This is where someone’s hamstring is screaming, where the violinist’s shoulder is on fire, where nothing’s working and then suddenly everything works for half a measure and my finger hits the shutter and I’ve captured maybe a thousandth of what I’m actually witnessing.
But you can’t capture it all. That’s the whole fucking point.
I’m trying to document the space between, between the note and the movement, between intention and execution, between the artist’s vision and the body’s limitation. That’s where God lives, if God lives anywhere. In the gap. In the almost. In the relentless, brutal, beautiful process of trying to make something that doesn’t exist yet and might never exist except for that one rehearsal on that one day when the light came through the windows just right and the quartet and the dancers breathed as one organism and I happened to be there with a camera.
That’s what I was chasing. Timelessness. Not pretty. Not polite. Just essential. And some days, precious days like this one, you actually catch a glimpse of it.
Speculation: Alonzo King LINES Ballet
rehearsal Common Ground
with the Kronos Quartet live in the studio.