At 1:08 p.m. on July 10th, 2016 we performed a site responsive theater piece of the only two fragments that remain from the lost Sophocles tragedy Nausicaä at Pillar Point (Mavericks).
Heterogeneous Spectacles
Aeschylus Danaids
At 4:45pm on November 19th, 2018 we performed a site specific theatre piece of the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo county.
Sophocles Laocoön
On the evening of March 9th, 2020 we performed a site specific production of a fragment from the lost tragedy Laocoön by Sophocles at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Sophocles Laocoön is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the fragments for the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The Man Who Knows No. 2
At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies with a site responsive approach to Environmental Art and Public Art (The statue: To Honor Surfing Statue) on Santa Cruz’s Westside. Informally, the piece is called The Man Who Knows. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The Man Who Knows No.1
At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies with a site responsive approach to Environmental Art and Public Art (The statue: To Honor Surfing Statue) on Santa Cruz’s Westside. Informally, the piece is called The Man Who Knows. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Ecumenica: Performance and Religion.
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
I’ve shot a thousand bodies contorted in a thousand supposed acts of transcendence, and most of it’s performative horseshit, people pretending to feel something because they’ve read the right books and know the right poses. But then you see something that kicks you in the throat, something real, and you remember why you picked up a fucking camera in the first place.
Getting your frame on the cover of Ecumenica: Performance and Religion isn’t some vanity metric, some notch on your belt next to the local arts weekly garbage. This journal actually gives a damn about where the body meets the divine, where sweat and spirit collide in ways that make comfortable academics squirm. They’re not interested in your polite gallery openings or your safe, sanctioned rituals. They want the raw nerve, the genuine article, the places where creativity and faith get tangled up and dangerous.
And Raegan Truax’s Citation, Christ, there it is. The cover shot captures something that most photographers spend their entire lives chasing: that moment when the performer stops performing and becomes a conduit for something bigger, something that makes your hands shake on the shutter release. Truax moves through this durational piece with a grace that’s almost unbearable to witness, her body simultaneously fragile and absolutely indestructible. The beauty isn’t in some conventional aesthetic, it’s in the commitment, the willingness to be completely present and utterly exposed for hours. That kind of endurance isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual warfare, and she executes it with a dignity that’ll haunt your contact sheets forever.
A peer-reviewed journal, Ecumenica regards performance and religion as overlapping and often mutually-constituting categories, preferring no particular form of creative expression, and privileging no particular religious tradition. The journal’s very aim is to consider the variety of modes in which creative and religious impulses might be realized.
Ecumenica’s interdisciplinary premise welcomes all critical approaches to such topics as performance art, theatre, ritual, contemplative and devotional practices, and expressions of community. The journal expects that performance and religion scholarship can add many more topics to this list.
Grave 4 x 6 Open Edition
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A 4″ x 6″ open edition of the complete Grave set to date (26 images total). Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Site Specific Theater Bibliography
Here’s what this thing is actually trying to do, and why it matters:
I’m not talking about phenomenology as some pristine moment of pure experience, that whole “unmediated presence” thing is academic horseshit and we all know it. This is about phenomenology as a verb, as something you do: you tune yourself to what’s actually happening, you orient yourself in space that’s already rigged, already political, already fucked in specific ways, and you let it change you. Or at least I try to.
The texts are organized to show how performance doesn’t represent reality, it reorganizes it. It messes with your perception, your body, your attention span. Theatre happens in real space and real time between real people, sure, but that space isn’t neutral. It’s produced. Contested. The everyday isn’t some innocent backdrop, it’s structured by systems that have already decided who gets to move where and how fast.
Site-specific or site-responsive or site-integrated and environmental work gets treated here as a practice, not a concept. Not “what does it mean?” but “what does it do?” Duration. Movement. The way sound hits you before you understand it. The sensory assault that interrupts your nice clean interpretation.
The political stuff, the participatory frameworks, they’re here not as solutions but as tests. Because performance can redistribute what’s visible and sayable, but that doesn’t automatically empower anyone. You don’t get to assume the work is doing good just because bodies are moving together in space.
And documentation? That’s not where performance lives. That’s its ghost. Its unresolved afterlife. Stop trying to make it the real thing.
Bottom line: site-specific theatre doesn’t ask you to figure it out. It asks you to transmit it, to stage it, to be altered by it. Comprehension is a luxury. Alteration is the point.
I. Phenomenology, Presence, and Event
(Foundational methodological axis: experience as alteration, not meaning)
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
———. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. Routledge, 1992.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Routledge, 2008.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2004.
Halling, Steen. Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openness in Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. U of Michigan P, 1995.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. U of California P, 1985.
———. “Performance as Metaphor.” Theatre Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1–16.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.
II. Space, Place, and Orientation
(Phenomenology of site without symbolic essentialism)
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Penguin Books, 2014.
Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Indiana UP, 1993.
Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. Pion, 1976.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.
Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1995.
III. Spatial Production, Rhythm, and Everyday Practice
(Counter-pressure to naïve phenomenology; space as produced, lived, and contested)
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, pp. 50–54.
———. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1994.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.
———. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, Continuum, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, edited by James D. Faubion, New Press, 1997, pp. 175–185.
IV. Movement, Walking, and Mobility
(Site as event produced through movement and duration)
Heddon, Dee, and Cathy Turner. Walking Women: Interviews with Artists on the Move. Triarchy Press, 2022.
Hunter, Victoria. Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance. Routledge, 2015.
Mock, Roberta, editor. Walking, Writing and Performance. Intellect, 2009.
Pearson, Mike. “Special Worlds, Secret Maps: A Poetics of Performance.” Staging Wales, edited by Anna-Marie Taylor, U of Wales P, 1997, pp. 95–106.
Wilkie, Fiona. Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
V. Site-Specific and Environmental Performance Practice
(Theatre as attunement, exposure, and spatial interference)
Birch, Anna, and Joanne Tompkins. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Hill, Leslie, and Helen Paris. Performance and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Houston, Andrew. Environmental and Site-Specific Theatre. Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.
Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. Routledge, 2000.
Pearson, Mike. Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. Routledge, 2001.
VI. Sound, Sensation, and the Sensorium
(Phenomenology with material consequence)
Banes, Sally, and André Lepecki, editors. The Senses in Performance. Routledge, 2007.
Brown, Ross. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan UP, 1961.
Kendrick, Lynne, and David Roesner, editors. Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1994.
Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Ablex, 2001.
VII. Genealogies of Event-Based and Environmental Art
(Historical ballast, not ontological grounding)
Halprin, Lawrence, et al. Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space. Spacemaker Press, 2009.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. Abrams, 1965.
———. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, U of California P, 1993.
Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack D. Flam, U of California P, 1996.
VIII. Politics, Participation, and the Distribution of the Sensible
(Politics as reorientation, not pedagogy)
Berlant, Lauren. Intimacy. U of Chicago P, 2000.
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge, 1992.
———. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Pluto Press, 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009.
———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2004.
IX. Mediation, Documentation, and Afterlives
(Acknowledged, constrained, unresolved)
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.
Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, editors. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Intellect, 2012.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003.
Solipsism on dreary beaches… grown almost ugly
So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was no Friday anymore, just an endless Tuesday that tasted like despair.
The beard wasn’t a choice, not really. It was surrender with a capital S, man. It was waking up one morning in month three, or was it seven?, and realizing the razor had become some artifact from a civilization you used to belong to, like ties or punctuality or giving a shit about what your jawline looked like. The beard grew because everything else stopped. Time. Ambition. The illusion that any of this mattered.
The thing nobody tells you about isolation is how it turns you feral and boring simultaneously. You’re Crusoe without the survival skills, the Protestant work ethic, or the eventual rescue. Just you and your increasingly questionable facial hair, contemplating the dreary beach of your own face, that “immutable low horizon” of days bleeding into each other, and thinking: at least the beard is epic, even if everything else has gone to hell.
When she was like this, when no smile filled her eyes or opened up her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Quarantine Blues on Santa Cruz’s Westside…
Here’s the thing about paradise during the apocalypse: it makes me feel like an asshole for even having the thought that I might be suffering.
The Westside’s giving you everything, that relentless California sunshine hammering down like some kind of cosmic joke, the Pacific doing its eternal churn six blocks away, and I’m sitting there in my Craftsman Bungalow with the peeling paint and the landlord who hasn’t fixed anything since 1987 (me BTW) , wondering if this is enlightenment or just another form of solitary confinement with better production values.
Every morning the surfers are out there, these wetsuited prophets bobbing in the lineup like they’ve figured out something the rest of you missed. Maybe they have. Maybe the answer to everything was always just paddling out past the break, waiting for the next set, keeping my distance because that’s what the water demands anyway. Social distancing as spiritual practice. The ocean’s been teaching that lesson forever, respect the space, read the current, don’t be a kook.
La vida loca to the accompaniment of the Stars Wars theme. Steamers Lane, Santa Cruz
The music’s different now. I’m spinning records alone, or streaming some DJ set from Berlin or Brooklyn or wherever, and everyone’s in their own little bunker doing the same thing, this weird synchronized isolation where we’re all listening but nobody’s dancing together. It’s like punk rock without the pit, like rock and roll without the sweaty communion of bodies pressed against the stage. All the transcendence, none of the transmission.
And the weather, Christ, the weather won’t quit. Day after day of this Chamber of Commerce perfection while the world’s falling apart elsewhere. Lindsey, Sharka and I take our socially-distanced walk through the neighborhood, past the bungalows and the overgrown gardens, and everywhere there’s this cognitive dissonance between the golden light and the dread in your gut.
Paradise has always been suspect. Paradise with nowhere to go, nobody to see, nothing but time and beauty and anxiety? That’s a special kind of purgatory the brochures never mentioned.