Jamie Lyons

Geographies

Every performance I’ve ever staged, every frame I’ve ever captured, it happens somewhere. That somewhere isn’t just scenery. That somewhere is a collaborator. Sometimes that somewhere is the whole goddamn point.

The geography you’ll find indexed here isn’t some abstract academic concept. It’s the actual ground beneath our feet, the abandoned shipyards where I stage Greek tragedies, the toxic Superfund sites that become unexpected amphitheaters. It’s about how we humans make meaning in the spaces we inhabit, and how those spaces make us… me.

This index is a map of obsessions: the theaters and ruins I’ve turned into stages, the cities and forgotten corners where culture collides with itself, the specific sites that change everyone who enters them. From floating villages in Cambodia to decommissioned military installations in the Bay, from Aeschylus performed on a nineteenth-century tall ship to Genet staged in an old treasury building, each location isn’t backdrop. It’s text.

Then there are the ghosts, Beckett and Baudelaire, Genet and Grotowski, Susan Sontag and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Anna Halprin dancing on beaches I’d photograph decades later. These poets, playwrights, photographers, and madmen didn’t just influence my work. They built the internal landscape I carry everywhere. They taught me how to see a ruin, how to frame a body in space, how to find the sacred in a toxic wasteland. Artaud showed me ritual. Benjamin taught me about fragments. Edward Weston made me understand what light could do to a coastline. They’re all here in this index because they’re part of my personal geography, the map I navigate by, whether I’m in Moscow or a forgotten corner of the Presidio