How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time.
W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre
Adji Cissoko, moving through a gallery of my photographs that are themselves images of dancers moving through volcanic rock and waterfall mist, which is the kind of recursive loop that should feel like performance art bullshit but somehow doesn’t, because somewhere in there is something real, something that matters, even if I’m too jaded or too tired or too fucking smart for my own good to admit it.
I’ve spent years, years now, following these bodies as they defied gravity and geology, staging them against basalt and fog like I was trying to prove something about permanence and impermanence, about flesh against stone, about grace as a middle finger to entropy. And now one of those bodies is back, dancing among the evidence of its own former dancing, creating new ghosts in a room full of captured ghosts.
The Somerset Maugham quote at the top is almost too perfect in its modesty: “art and all that isn’t really waste of time.” Almost. Because what I’m really talking about here is the compulsion to document the undocumentable, to freeze what only exists in motion, to make monuments out of moments, and then, in some dream of meta-textual brilliance, to put a living dancer back into the frame, to prove that the original impulse wasn’t dead, wasn’t just nostalgia, wasn’t just another gallery opening with wine and cheese and people pretending to give a shit.
Translation: Photographer and videographer (but also director, teacher and researcher), Jamie Lyons has been pursuing fraternal companionship for several years with choreographer Alonzo King.
During his first visit to Reunion, he followed the company in its explorations of the wild and basaltic landscapes of our island which inspired the sublime Pole Star . Armed with his camera and a camera, he captured and staged his dancers in the natural settings of the Niagara waterfall, Mafate or Piton de la Fournaise to draw a series of snapshots and sketches where the rock, mist and emerald of great dreams frame the grace and energy of bodies.
A magnificent dance walk in these natural monuments that we rediscover here, more beautiful than ever, through an inspired and unique American perspective.
Gallery Exhibit Dance