I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, but I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, these LINES dancers aren’t human in the conventional sense, they’re architecture in motion, physics made flesh, extensions that defy the limitations of bone and tendon. The photographer’s dilemma is trying to freeze something that only exists in motion, documenting what was never meant to be still: dramatic level changes, bodies falling and crawling forward, baroque structure meeting contemporary athleticism, Handel’s fugal forms made visible through limbs and torsos. My task was simple and impossible, capture that transcendent moment, preserve what can’t be preserved, make the ephemeral permanent, knowing full well that every photograph is a beautiful lie that tries to remember what it felt like to be in that theater, watching something that existed purely in that moment.
Not just dancers, but devotion.
Not just movement, but meaning.
The full set of frames from that night, all of it, is here.
Go see for yourself.