I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment,
and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes,
it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united.
Yes, yes, yes, yes!
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Chocolate Heads
Bird’s Eye View
McMurtry Art Building
Stanford University
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It just is.
What I love about Snake River is how honest it is about time. Goldsworthy knows this thing is falling apart from the moment it’s finished. The stones will shift. Moss will grow. Weather will have its way. He’s okay with that, no, he’s counting on it. That’s the work. Not the construction, but the slow, inevitable decomposition. The collaboration with entropy.
There’s something deeply human about building something beautiful knowing it won’t last. We do it anyway. We have to. Whether it’s a stone wall or a relationship or a moment of clarity at 3 AM when everything finally makes sense, we grab it, knowing it’s already slipping away.
That’s not pessimism. That’s the deal. Goldsworthy just made it visible.
We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate
from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature,
we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
Andy Goldsworthy
Snake River, 2001: Cantor Art Museum, Stanford University.
There’s something obscene about freezing a body mid-flight against all that falling water, obscene in the best way, the way that makes you understand why cameras were invented in the first place. Ive got these LINES Ballet dancers, people who’ve turned their spines into questions and their limbs into arguments, and I’ve set them against something that doesn’t give a shit about line or extension or any of the precious bullshit I pretend matters.
That waterfall was there before ballet, before photographs, before anyone decided the human form should be disciplined into something transcendent. And here I am, catching these two, Babatunji, Madeline, doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do, which is to make the impossible look like it’s the only reasonable response to gravity, to air, to being alive at all.
The thing is, it works. It shouldn’t, but it does. Because what I’m really documenting isn’t dance or nature or the collision of the two, it’s that moment when something rehearsed and artificial becomes realer than real. When all those hours in the studio, all that muscle memory and controlled breathing and pointed feet, when all of that dissolves into pure gesture.
Not performance. Necessity.
Reunion Island, Indian Ocean. Middle of nowhere, which is another way of saying middle of everywhere that matters.
I did not just fall in love.
I made a parachute jump.
Zora Neale Hurston
The broom thing, this gorgeous, stolen-back piece of history that slavery couldn’t kill, sitting there at a wedding where half the guests have sleeve tattoos and the other half are wearing dashikis from Ashby flea market, where there’s no church, no traditional anything except this one deliberate moment when they choose to reach back and grab something that means resistance. That means we’re still here. That means to hell with you, we decide what’s sacred.
Now maybe the couple met at a noise show or a protest or some coffee shop on Telegraph, and maybe their vows mentioned anarchism or healing from capitalism, but when they take each other’s hands and jump, really jump, not some polite hop, over that broom, there’s this electricity, this connection to something that television and Pinterest and the wedding industrial complex can’t package or commodify or bleach clean.
“To Honor Surfing” Statue by Thomas Marsh Lighthouse Point, Santa Cruz.
Telephone Archaeology: Seaside Pay Phone
The trouble with superheroes
is what to do between phone booths.
Ken Kesey
Telephone Archaeology: Santa Cruz Payphone
Don’t use the phone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry.
Jack Kerouac
Shooting this production felt like documenting a beautiful corpse. And I mean that with all the love and heartbreak that implies.
The students were great, of course they were great. They always are. Committed, sweating under those lights, believing in every goddamn note. That’s not the problem. The problem is watching a department that once made me question what theater could be, what performance meant, reduced to mounting competent, perfectly adequate productions of shows that third string touring companies do better in their sleep.
TAPS, Theater and Performance Studies, for fuck’s sake, used to be the place where the lunatics ran the asylum. Where I’d walk into some repurposed basement or courtyard and have my understanding of what constitutes theater completely dismantled. Site-specific work in toilet stalls under the Quad that made you feel something genuine and strange. Experiments that failed gloriously. Graduate students doing weird, uncomfortable, necessary things with their bodies and voices that I couldn’t unsee.
Now? Now they’re doing Cabaret. Which, fine, Cabaret’s a masterpiece. In 1966. On Broadway. Directed by Harold Prince. But here, in 2019, on a campus drowning in student theater groups doing the exact same thing? Ram’s Head has been cranking out musicals with bigger budgets, tighter production values, and more joy for decades. They know what they are. They’re not pretending to push boundaries while playing it safe.
And yeah, I get the institutional defense: “We’re not a conservatory.” No shit. Nobody’s asking you to train the next generation of Broadway belters. But you’re not supposed to be the goddamn English Department either, analyzing texts from a safe academic distance while the students do all the actual making somewhere else.
There’s supposed to be a third way, a place where rigor meets risk, where scholarship informs practice, where the question “what is performance?” actually matters enough to pursue it into uncomfortable territory. That’s the whole fucking point of a research university theater department. Otherwise, you’re just running a shittier version of Juilliard with better reading lists. Making mediocrity your selling pitch is pathetic while coasting on institutional prestige; producing work that’s indistinguishable from every other community college theater program in America. “Perfectly adequate” is not a mission statement. It’s a surrender.
And sure, I’m capturing beautiful composition. The lighting’s moody, the choreography’s solid, the costumes kinda work despite being so busy Timmy’s going to have an epileptic seizure during one of the light changes. But where’s the danger for everybody other than Timmy? Where’s the thing that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you think? The whole fucking point of Cabaret, the Weimar decadence, the creeping fascism, the willful blindness, feels neutered when it’s presented as just another musical, another entertainment, another line on a someone’s resume.
I kept thinking: this is the department that gave us directors and performers who went on to reshape American theater. What happened? When did institutional survival supersede artistic risk? When did the fear of empty seats trump the possibility of revelation?
Every click of the shutter felt elegiac. For what was. For what could have been. For the raw, messy, vital work that nobody asked for but everybody needed.
The saddest part? The production was fine. And that’s exactly the problem. TAPS settling for “fine” is like watching Coltrane play “Happy Birthday” at a kid’s party. Sure, he can do it. But Fuck me, is that really what Stanford theater aspires too?
I left with a card full of images that’ll look great in someone’s portfolio. Professional. Clean.
Utterly forgettable.
Just like the future of experimental theater at this place, apparently.
Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths in Green Library, Stanford University.
He who loves practice without theory
is like the sailor who boards ship
without a rudder and compass
and never knows where he may cast.
Leonardo da Vinci
Green Library, Stanford University.
A performance as part of the “Leonardo’s Library” Exhibit Reception,
a celebration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s 500th Birthday.
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal.
You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket.
You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.
Patti Smith
These Polaroids of bodies caught mid-leap off Reunion Island’s volcanic rock, they’re not documentation, they’re evidence of a crime against physics. In those original packets you got twenty shots, as Patti Smith says, so each shot becomes a world, and what world is this? It’s the province between what is and what might be, where dancers hang suspended in chemistry and light before gravity reasserts its authority and drags everyone back to earth.
That frontier country, that’s where the real shit happens. It’s not the pirouette and it’s not the photograph. It’s the half-second where the dancer’s weight transfers and the shutter opens and the chemicals start their slow crawl across the film stock, turning light into lie, turning motion into monument. The physical body, all sinew and sweat and the brutal mathematics of momentum, colliding with something else… call it spirit, call it the ineffable, call it whatever lets you sleep at night, but there’s a transaction happening in that space that commerce can’t touch.
Polaroids know this better than any medium. They develop in your hand like a secret revealing itself, unreliable and gorgeous and already dying the moment they exist. Perfect for dance, perfect for that in-between country where artists make their stand. Because what is a dancer but someone who’s decided that being earthbound is negotiable? They’re provincials who’ve set up camp on a border that shouldn’t exist, trafficking in moments that can’t be sustained, building entire careers on the half-second between launch and landing.
The metaphysical isn’t some gauzy abstraction here, it’s as real as ligaments tearing, as concrete as the white border forming around these images while they’re still warm. It’s the space where intention meets execution, where training becomes transcendence, where you stop asking “how did they do that” and start asking “what the hell just happened to physics?” That’s the province. That’s where the artist doesn’t live but exists, perpetually caught between what the body can do and what the spirit demands.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Reunion Island
Polaroid Dance Photographs