The word itself tells you everything: speculari, to observe, to look at. Not to know. Not to nail down. To fucking look. The act of seeing without the certainty of understanding, which is basically the job description for anyone trying to make something that doesn't exist yet.
It's not romantic. It's repetitive and most days you're grinding against the same wall you ground against yesterday, but you're speculating, in the oldest sense, the truest sense. You're observing what happens when you throw yourself at the problem from a slightly different angle. You're buying futures in ideas that might bottom out completely. You're trading in probabilities, not certainties.
And here's where it gets interesting: somewhere between the medieval "pursuit of truth by means of thinking" and the 1794 market sharks playing the spec game, speculation became a dirty word. Mere conjecture. Like thinking without guaranteed returns is somehow wasteful. Like observation without immediate payoff is frivolous.
But repetition is speculation. Every time you run it again, you're investing time, ego, energy in the possibility that this iteration reveals something the last one didn't. You're observing yourself observe. You're looking at how you look at the problem. Meta as hell, and twice as disorienting.
The risk escalates because you can't speculate safely. The market trading sense had it right: you're buying and selling positions, trying different configurations, hoping for value to emerge from volatility. Some days you're chasing truth through contemplation. Other days you're trafficking in conjecture, throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.
But Spinoza nailed it: in practical life we follow probability; in speculative thought we chase truth. The rehearsal room is where those two collapse into each other. You're pursuing truth through repeated observation while simultaneously playing the odds, betting on which approach might yield something real.
Sometimes something cracks open. Some door swings wide because you looked at it long enough, from enough angles, with enough varied light. That's not luck. That's speculation in its purest form: the disciplined practice of looking until you finally see.
Speculation 2021
Roble Dance Rehearsal
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.Friedrich Nietzsche Chocolate Heads’ rehearsal in Roble dance studio…
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Speculation 2021
Light as Speculation, Memory as Movement
Look at this video. Vince Evan Pane dancing with a busted street lamp globe like it means something. And here’s the thing that’ll piss you off: it did mean something. In his hands, anyway. We shot this at three in the morning in the Stanford Quad. Three AM. Empty campus. Just us and the […]
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Laocoön Rehearsal at BAMPFA
What we’ve got here is me hauling a fragment of a lost Sophocles tragedy into BAMPFA like I’m smuggling contraband across time itself, rehearsing in the actual space where this thing’s going to live or die. Babatunji’s wrestling with Laocoon, not the marble version sitting in the Ufizzi, the breathing, screaming one, while Aleta’s working […]
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Cinematics / Industries / Speculation 2019
The Deep Art: Rehearsal as Sacrament
The deep art… That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money… Like a dope addict would his dope… Like a lover with their love. Alonzo King What I’ve got here is the real raw nerve ending of creation caught mid spasm: dancers drilling themselves into some kind of […]
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Speculation 2018
Anna Halprin Rehearsal: Planetary Dance at the De Young
Our culture is in the throes of crisis: I have a vision of dance working in the service of healing. I invite you to join me in this quest. Anna Halprin I caught something most people can’t see even when they’re staring right at it. Not the performance, fuck the performance, anyone with a decent […]
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Speculation 2018
Backstage LINES Ballet Handel
Standing in the wings at YBCA, Leica in hand, watching Alonzo King’s dancers move through Handel like light through water. When you’re backstage you’re seeing the machinery of transcendence. The sweat. The breath. The moments before and after the magic happens. Brodovitch knew this. Those ballet photographs of his weren’t about perfection, they were about […]
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Speculation 2018
Backstage Pass: Common Ground
I don’t belong here. That’s the first thing I need to understand. This isn’t my world. These aren’t my people. I’m a tourist with a golden ticket, a voyeur granted temporary access to a place most people never see, never even know exists. And I should be grateful for it. It’s three hours before curtain […]
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The sacred sense of beyond
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 […]
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Speculation 2018
Son De Los Diablos
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez Saturday, September 8th, at 2pm The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the […]
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Speculation 2018
The Baths, The Fog, The Lie: Notes on Drowning Phaedra at 6 PM
Sutro Baths broken concrete pools don’t give a shit about me or my romanticized notion of Victorian grandeur. They just are, salt-scarred, graffitied, filled with seawater and broken glass and the honest stink of kelp and bird shit rotting in the sun. And that’s exactly why Sophocles Phaedra belongs here. Sophocles understood something we keep […]
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Speculation 2018
LINES Ballet Behind The Scenes: The Music Concourse
Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moon Two hands form into yīn and yáng palms Two palms crossed over for locking joints Wait for […]
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Speculation 2018
San Francisco itself is art
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. William Saroyan The Wave Organ’s this crumbling concrete jetty that some madman stuck pipes into so the bay could gargle its own tidal […]
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The Geometry of Dying
Painters have canvas and pigment, writers have words and delusions, musicians have strings and wood and air. But dancers? They’ve got meat and bone and the ticking clock of their own deteriorating ligaments. Every arabesque is a negotiation with gravity and mortality. You can’t separate the art from the artist because the artist is the […]
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Speculation 2018
The Hallucination on Grant Avenue
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so […]
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Speculation 2018
Your whole life is a rehearsal
Tremble: your whole life is a rehearsal for the moment you are in now. Judith Malina Look at him, Babatunji is DESTROYING himself in that studio and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give because destruction is the only path to the real shit, not the performance, not opening night where everyone […]
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Speculation 2017
Rehearsing Wounds: Philoctetes in Fragments
Philoctetes, that poor bastard marooned on Lemnos with nothing but his festering wound and his famous bow, becomes this perfect metaphor for anyone who’s ever been discarded by the machinery. The Aeschylus fragment’s almost gone, just scraps really, which makes it even more tragic because we’re left rehearsing ghosts under some absurd totem pole like […]
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Speculation 2017
Oedipus and Tiresias
Oedipus and Tiresias (Nathaniel Justiniano and Tonyanna Borkovi) rehearsing for a site specific staged reading of Anthony Burgess’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus The King to be performed in the Fort Mason Chapel for the San Francisco International Art Festival and produced by the Museum of Performance and Design Oedipus and Tiresias walk into a Japantown […]
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Chocolate Heads: Ghost Architecture (dress rehearsal)
Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads are building Ghost Architecture, and I’m here trying to capture what happens when sculptural performance becomes something between séance and construction site. It’s ephemeral by design, chocolate edifices that exist in that sweet between solid and melting, between here and gone, like memory made tactile. This is the kind […]
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Speculation 2016
Aleta Hayes rehearsal / class
Aleta Hayes rehearsal of the Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Studio. The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other. Judith Malina Stanford Theater and Performance Studies‘ lecturer Aleta Hayes leads The Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Gym
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Speculation 2016
She Made Reflection Look Like Destiny
Mirrors in metal, and the masked Mirror of mahogany that in its mist Of a red twilight hazes The face that is gazed on as it gazes. Jorge Luis Borges, MIRRORS Light poured through those high windows like it had somewhere to be, turning everything gold, everything impossible. The mirrors, smudged, honest and ancient, caught […]
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Speculation 2016
backstage… Nausicaä at Pillar Point
Backstage Nausicaä: in wildflowers for Sophocles tragedy at Pillar Point… Here, in the weeds behind the curtain, where ancient Greek tragedy meets California wildflowers. Judy moving through that grass like she’s already halfway to Phaeacia, This is what you never see: the in-between, the breath before the dive. The wildflowers don’t give a shit about […]
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Speculation 2016
wave organ rehearsal…
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. Alan Watts The stones are wet and the tide’s doing its thing through those organ pipes, some modernist’s fever dream of what happens […]
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Roble Gym Rehearsal
Roble Gym Rehearsal, Stanford University with Judy Syrkin-Nikolau The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. Émile Zola
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Speculation 2016
Nausicaä rehearsal: Poseidon vs. Odysseus
rehearsing Sophocles Nausicäa in Stanford TAPS Prosser Studio Poseidon god of the earthquake launched a colossal wave, terrible, murderous, arching over him, pounding down on him, hard as a windstorm blasting piles of dry parched chaff, scattering flying husks… The Odyssey, Robert Fagles trans.
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Speculation 2016
Elena working magic at rehearsal
There’s something nobody tells you about being a kid at rehearsal. How the adults stop being adults for a minute. How they shed all that bullshit, the mortgage anxiety, the careful professional face, the parental authority, and become something else entirely. Something rawer. Something that plays. I grew up in rehearsal spaces. Theaters that smelled […]
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Speculation 2016
Savage Blasts at Dawn, or Why We Freeze Our Asses Off for Dead Greeks
Speculation: Rehearsing Sophocles #116. Fantastic rehearsal/experimentation/playing/imagining with amazing people at sunrise under a full moon… for Sophocles Savage Blasts. Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the […]
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Speculation 2016
Savage Blasts at Low Tide: Derek Phillips vs. Sophocles at the Edge of the Bay
Derek isn’t here to make pretty ambience; he is hunting for the frequency where ancient violence meets the Pacific’s indifference, and somehow in this process the conceptual exercise transforms into something I can actually feel in my chest, the kind of site responsive work that doesn’t explain itself or apologize, that just exists in a […]
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Rehearsing Under the Wings of Dead Men
You’re sitting there with your muse and your muse is telling you something and you’re following it, and you end up the next day looking at it and thinking “what the hell was the muse saying to me?” Nathan Oliveira I rehearse in a room built for someone else’s kestrels, someone else’s vision of transcendence, […]
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Speculation 2016
Slacker Hill Earned Its Name (Until We Showed Up)
Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata running Euripides fragment #91 (we’re calling it Love is The Fullest Education) on this windswept chunk of rock […]
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Speculation 2016
Windhover
Speculation in The Windhover, Stanford University I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a […]
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Speculation 2015
What We Do In The Ruins
It should feel ridiculous. People howling Shakespeare at the Pacific wind inside concrete walls built to kill other people, it’s the kind of high-concept art project that makes regular humans roll their eyes so hard they can see their own brain stems. But it doesn’t feel ridiculous. It feels necessary. Dying is not romantic, and […]
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Speculation 2015
Carmen from Genet’s The Balcony
Backstage: Ryan Tacata as Carmen in The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint. Entering a brothel means rejecting the world. Here I am and here I stay. Your laws and orders and the passions are my reality. Jean Genet, The Balcony
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Site specific dance rehearsal
Speculation: Site Specific Dance Rehearsal as the Chocolate Heads‘ rehearse at McMurty Art Building, Stanford. It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing […]
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FalseArt / Speculation 2015
Somebody Has to Stand There
Nobody wants to cop to this, but here’s the raw nerve: when you’re watching someone up there, flayed down to what the program notes call their “truth,” you’re not getting some uncut vérité feed. You’re getting a setup. A con job so clean you mistake it for catharsis. Not some fever dream, not wish fulfillment, […]
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Speculation 2015
inhabited sculpture
Architecture is inhabited sculpture. Constantin Brancusi So here we are, in the courtyard of this 96,000-square-foot monument to interdisciplinary aspiration, and the dancers are turning Brancusi’s old line, “Architecture is inhabited sculpture”, into something that bleeds and sweats and refuses to be theoretical. The McMurtry Building wants to be unified, wants its art practice and […]
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Speculation 2015
On Rocks and Fragments: What Real Devotion Looks Like
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense […]
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Speculation 2015
Trojan Horse
Here’s some deadwood resurrected into myth: The thing squats there in the mudflats like prophecy rotting in real-time, all salt-bleached femurs and vertebrae of piers that gave up the ghost decades ago. We dragged this trash out of the bay’s digestive tract and said, “Yeah, this is how you sneak doom into a city.” Driftwood. […]
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Waiting for the Lie: Penny’s Costume at the MP+D
Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal Here’s the thing about Genet that nobody wants to admit at a museum opening with the wine and cheese: the motherfucker understood that we’re all whores. Not metaphorically … actually. We’re all selling some version of ourselves, […]
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Speculation 2015
These enunciatory operations
Speculation: exploring a new performance space… Euripides‘ Andromeda? Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All the modalities sing a part in the chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory […]
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Speculation 2015
Titus Andronicus at Sutro Baths
Sutro Baths, these magnificent corpse pits of concrete and rebar where the Pacific chews on what’s left of a San Francisco Belle Époque dream. And there, in the ruins, someone’s staging a reading of Titus Andronicus. That play. The one that makes Hamlet look like a fucking therapy session. Vengeance is in my heart, death […]
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Speculation 2015
the power to open man up
Speculation: how we work backstage at San Francisco’s Old Mint putting together a site specific theater production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony at Old Mint with Derek Phillips and Tonyanna Borkovi. Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others – priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior […]
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Speculation 2014
Rehearsing King Fool in a Graveyard
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Truth? About getting to the marrow of what Shakespeare actually meant? Then get your ass out of those antiseptic black box […]
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We Players King Fool Rehearsal, part two
We Players Lear Rehearsal at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied–Ha! waking? ’tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Shakespeare, King Lear, […]
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Speculation 2014
Rehearsing Happy Days in a Los Feliz Sweatbox: A Play Nobody Will See
I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does. The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried […]
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Speculation 2014
Beautiful lies
Speculation: Backstage We Players Macbeth at Fort Point, 2014 Backstage We Players Macbeth at Fort Point So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author’s words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb […]
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Speculation 2014
Macbeth at Fort Point Rehearsal
Speculation: We Players Macbeth Rehearsal at Fort Point… MACBETH Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor Therein the patient […]
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Speculation 2014
Actor Notes: The Fragile Art of Taking Direction
I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. Alfred Hitchcock Here’s the thing about getting notes: it’s the moment where every actor or crews carefully constructed self mythology gets shredded like wet newspaper. I’m standing there, I’ve just done what I thought was brilliant work, […]
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Playing with Lear & Cordelia
Lear is a play [that] contains a great deal of veiled social criticism — but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness. In his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark. George Orwell, in Lear Rodeo […]
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Speculation 2013
Circles Under the Bridge
There’s something that happens when people form a circle. Something primal. Something we’ve been doing since we figured out fire wasn’t just for warmth but for gathering around. The circle says: we’re in this together. No hierarchy. No front or back. Just us, acknowledging the shared madness of being human. And rituals? Rituals are the […]
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Speculation 2013
Life or Theatre Rehearsal
Looking at this rehearsal documentation, what strikes me is how Astrid understands that authenticity isn’t some precious thing you excavate from your soul like a goddamn archaeological dig. It’s messier than that. It’s the collision between what you’re trying to say and the violence of actually saying it. Her piece traffics in that space between […]
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Speculation 2013
repetition or what happens when theorists never step into a rehearsal room
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
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