Steep Ravine in Mount Tamalpais State Park.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Dorothea Lange
The Museum of Performance + Design presents a special staged reading of Oedipus The King for the San Francisco International Arts Festival with Nathaniel Justiniano, Aleta Hayes, Val Sinkler, Tonyana Borkovi and directed by Jamie Lyons.
A moving and vigorous adaptation of Sophocles’s classic text. The tragedy includes a language Burgess invented for the original 1972 production of the play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Oedipus begins the piece as a passionate king, who has freed Thebes from the curse and riddle of the Sphinx. Over the course of the tragedy Oedipus world falls apart. A new cancer appears and he is forced to save his people by rooting out the cause.
Intersection of Performance Architecture and Design: students and Stanford community members perform the culminating project of their Stanford d.school class.
Intersection of Performance, Architecture and Design
Chocolate Heads d.school
Friday, March 10th 3pm/6pm
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you’re perfectly free.
Rumi
Next: performance at the d school. The culminating project of our d.school class “Intersection of Performance, Architecture and Design.” Friday, March 10th 3pm & 6pm.
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce them. Dismantling this infrastructure — which ranges from databases to satellites to models for climate, air, and water — could imperil the public’s right to know, the United States’ standing as a scientific leader, corporate accountability, and environmental protection.
The Revolution introduced me to art,
and in turn
art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
Art and Research: Shinichi Iova-Koga workshop for Aleta Hayes, John Barton and my class “The Intersection of Performance, Architecture &; Design” for Stanford’s d.school
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
In a Winter Garden: A Contemplative Performance Work for Dance, Music, and Sculpture by Diane Frank in Bing Concert Hall’s Gunn Atrium
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form“… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.
Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon, 2001) p 370.
SFO Protest against Trump’s Muslim Ban at San Francisco International Airport.
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
W. H. Auden, “Refugee Blues”, Selected Poems
Oakland Women’s March, 2017.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
William Faulkner
Reinvigorating Community: a gathering to affirm the Stanford University’s and the nation’s founding values through reflection, music and dance with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Talisman A Cappella, and the Chocolate Heads Movement Band.
People don’t come to church for preachments,
of course,
but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut
Stop Sign, Davenport, CA.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
I can’t recall the first time we meet. I remember your laugh at those parties at my parents house; going to see some play you had directed and you asking me (only a child at the time) what i thought and you being genuinely interested in the response. I remember you speaking to me when i was in high school, acting in some grad student’s play, telling me I would have a life in theater. My response was there was absolutely no way that would happen. The time you called my house looking for my father
and asked me if I could drive your wife to a doctor’s appointment, which i did. Then to have her introduce me to everyone we meet as her new boyfriend. There was your Brecht Seminar I took as an undergraduate that made me fall in love with the mechanisms of story telling. As a grad student, hours spent in your office, and the thousands of stories between us.
The last time you saw me act, when you couldn’t really talk to me,
just grabbing my arm, pull me in and say it was like watching the ghost of my father. Then there were the last few years and my inability to generate the emotional bandwidth after experiencing too much loss to be there for you on a consistent basis. Only infrequent phone calls and once a year dinners.
Carl Weber, or Charlie as the old guard called you, in my past, present and future you are important, you are in every project I do.
While I adore Alexander Calder Le Faucon, my favorite piece of Calder’s would be Cirque Calder: a mechanized miniature circus he performed before an audience: “I was very fond of the spatial relations… The whole thing of— the vast space—I’ve always loved it.”
The universe is real but you can’t see it.
You have to imagine it.
Once you imagine it,
you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder Le Faucon (The Falcon)
Stanford Law School, part of the Cantor Arts Center collection
Le Faucon (The Falcon, 1961) was fabricated at the iron works Etablissements Biémont in Tours, located near Calder’s studio in Saché, France. The art work remained in front of his studio from the time of its completion until after Calder’s death in 1976.
Working the wave organ… site specific rehearsing of a fragment from a lost Euripides tragedy: Iota’s Euripides Fragment No. 91
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951
A momentary pause from work in what once was The Little Theater, Stanford Drama….
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
A spectacularly incomplete archive of 16 years in and out of Stanford’s department of Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS) or as some fondly remember Stanford Drama
Dress Rehearsal for Chocolate Heads’ performance to celebrate the re-opening of Roble Hall for Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS)
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, v, 1925
Playing the role of poet Robinson Jeffers in his home Tor House in Carmel, CA with David Schendel directing.
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941