These photographs. Bodies bent, faces caught mid transmission, that particular quality of light that happens when people stop performing and start doing. This is what happens when you take two traditions that refused to lie and smash them together in a room in San Francisco.
Look at that close up, the woman’s face split open by whatever’s moving through her. That’s not acting. That’s not some MFA showcase where everyone’s angling for the right kind of noticed. That’s someone who’s been doing the work, the daily, unglamorous, ego-murdering work that Grotowski demanded, and Ginsberg’s words aren’t being recited, they’re being lived through.
Grotowski spent decades stripping away every comfortable lie we tell ourselves about what performance is. No costumes to hide behind. No fourth wall to protect you. Just human beings in a room attempting to reach some frequency of truth that makes your average theater look like a fucking shopping mall.
Ginsberg was doing the same demolition job on American poetry. “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” wasn’t metaphor. It was testimony. It was refusing every safe distance between the poet and the poem, between America and its reflection in the mirror.
So when you get people who’ve trained for years in Grotowski’s monastery of presence channeling Ginsberg’s raw American howl, mixing it with Southern calls and shouts… Either you get academic theater that smells like grant applications, or you get something that makes the hair on your arms stand up.
These photos suggest the latter. That ensemble shot: everyone locked in, no one mugging, no one outside it. That’s what happens when years of training dissolve and what’s left is just human animals making sound and meaning in the same gesture.
This kind of work is so rare now because it requires you to mean it. Not seem to mean it. Actually mean it. Most of us are so armored up, so defended, so busy managing our personal brand, that the idea of being genuinely vulnerable in front of strangers feels like suicide.
But that’s what these people signed up for. That’s what shows in these frozen moments. The willingness to risk looking foolish, ugly, broken. The willingness to let Ginsberg’s words use you rather than you using them.
Whether it achieved that lightning strike of genuine transmission, you’d have had to be there. Photos can only show you the aftermath, the bodies still vibrating. But the fact that anyone’s still trying, still believing that something real can happen between human beings in a room…
That’s worth something.
In collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Stanford University, the Performance Art Institute presents the West Coast Premiere of I Am America by the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. I Am America brings the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to life in a visceral performance with language culled from his entire body of work, intermixed with calls, shouts and traditional songs from the American South.