Aleta Hayes rehearsal of the Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Studio.
The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other.
Judith Malina
Heterogenous Spectacles
Aleta Hayes rehearsal / class
Slacker Hill, Marin Headlands
Backstage: Sunrise Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata prior to the performance of Love is The Fullest Education (Euripides Fragment #91)
The grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never dried all at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.
Eternal sunrise,
eternal dawn and gloaming,
on sea and continents and islands,
each in its turn,
as the round earth rolls.
John Muir, John of the Mountains (1938)
lucky dragons: user agreement
“In 1945, representatives of fifty countries convened in the War Memorial Veterans Building — SFMOMA’s original home — to draft the United Nations Charter, imagining a global system of government designed to produce peace through consolidated power. During the month of October, we will work towards reverse engineering the technologies of peace — treaties, protocols, symbols and systems — in order to learn from what has already been invented, to repurpose and re-contextualize, to create new possibilities for interaction, and to fix existing bugs.”
Lucky Dragons
Lucky Dragons: User Agreement
Lucky Dragons: User Agreement
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA Performance Art
Saturdays and Sundays
October 1–23, 2016
Lucky Dragons: a collaborative comprising artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck.
Betty Reid Soskin at The California Studies Association
Betty Reid Soskin receiving the 2016 Carey McWilliams Award from The California Studies Association.
Betty Reid Soskin
A political activist (raised in Oakland), and currently America’s oldest park ranger, at 94 years, Betty Reid Soskin currently works as an interpretive ranger at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. Her participation and activism in the creation of the park itself was instrumental in the ways Rosie the Riveter incorporates and memorializes the African American history of Richmond and the greater Bay Area region.
Inga Weiss & Chocolate Heads
Chocolate Heads perform Inga Weiss choreography in Roble Gym…
The fight is won or lost
far away from witnesses –
behind the lines,
in the gym,
and out there on the road,
long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammad Ali
New Roble Theater
Roble Theater: Chocolate Heads rehearsing in Stanford Theater and Performance Studies’ brand new theatre in Roble Hall, Stanford University.
Roble Hall Motion
Chocolate Heads in Roble Hall, Stanford University
But we must not forget that all things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another, and that we ourselves and all our thoughts are also a part of nature. It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the change of things; made because we are not restricted to any one definite measure, all being interconnected. A motion is termed uniform in which equal increments of space described correspond to equal increments of space described by some motion with which we form a comparison, as the rotation of the earth. A motion may, with respect to another motion, be uniform. But the question whether a motion is in itself uniform, is senseless. With just as little justice, also, may we speak of an “absolute time” — of a time independent of change. This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle metaphysical conception.
Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development
rehearsing Ghost Architecture
rehearsing Ghost Architecture in Stanford Theater and Performance Studies, Roble Gym
Mirrors in metal, and the masked
Mirror of mahogany that in its mist
Of a red twilight hazes
The face that is gazed on as it gazes.
Jorge Luis Borges, MIRRORS
Rules (Updated)
Rule 1
Never screw over a collaborator
Rule 2
Focus on process, not results
Rule 3
Don’t believe what you’re told
Rule 4
Never be unreachable
Rule 5
Never make excuses
Rule 6
Never waste talent
Rule 7
Always work as a team
Rule 8
Put in more than you want out
Rule 9
Never take anything for granted
Rule 10
Always carry a knife
Rule 11
Talking about work and work are not the same thing
Rule 12
Leave the site exactly as you found it
Rule 13
When the show is over, walk away
Rule 14
Never date a collaborator
Rule 15
Consider everything an experiment
(thank you John Cage)
Rule 16
Never involve lawyers
Rule 17
Bend the lines, don’t break them
Rule 18
Instinct is not the same as impulse
Rule 19
Appreciate failure, this is where growth occurs
Rule 20
It’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission
Rule 21
Protect the time and space in which you work
Rule 22
Always carry a note-book and a pencil
Rule 23
Always carry a camera
Rule 24
Watch those watching
Rule 25
Snacks are surprisingly really important
Rule:26
Always remember we’re doing this because we love it
Rule 27
If you feel like you are being taken advantage of … you are
Rule 28
Avoid wearing shoes, they break your connection with the space
Rule 29
Don’t waste people’s time, and don’t let others waste yours
Rule 30
There is no such thing as coincidence, the universe is telling you something
sometimes it’s saying “no”
Rule 31
Be transparent with your collaborators:
they can do more when they have a complete understanding of what is going on
and very helpful when you do not
Rule 32
Clean up any mess you make
(a) the reverse for you: show up clean/leave dirty
Rule 33
Be the first to arrive and the last to leave
Rule 34
Don’t work on Monday
(a): Ghosts exist, give them one day/night a week alone in the space
Rule 35
Don’t work for free; don’t ask others to work for free
Rule 36
Think twice about picking a site that doesn’t allow dogs
Rule 37
Everybody off book: actors, musicians, stage manager, crew
(a) music stands are amateurish
Rule 38
If you have nothing to say
don’t feel obliged to pretend you do
Rule 39
Respect your performers
Their job is 10 times more dangerous than yours
Rule 40
Never expect dogs, cats, birds, or any other animals to do what you’d like them to do
(a) Sharka is an exception to this rule
Rule 41
Don’t quote other artists or productions unless you have to
Rule 42
Make up for a lack of (financial) means with an increase in imagination
Rule 43
A tight schedule can be difficult…
having too much time is worse
Rule 44
Less make-up is better
Rule 45
Fewer words are always better!
Rule 46
The more you know about “performance”
the tougher it gets to leave that knowledge behind
As soon as you do things “because you know how to do them”
you’re fucked
Rule 47
A “beautiful image”
can very well be the worst thing that can happen to your work
Rule 48
If you aren’t making art
you aren’t an artist
Work
Rule 49
If an idea doesn’t terrify you
if you aren’t fairly certain you will fail
it probably isn’t good enough
Rule 50
Know when your work is shit
Never be afraid to throw it all out and start over
Rule 51
Photographing is easy
Directing is hard
Neither is as hard as real work
So, never complain
No one will give you any sympathy anyway
Rule 52
Embrace mistakes
If you are working with good artists
they will use a mistake
make the work richer and more the stuff of life
Rule 53
Most bloggers are not critics
most are guys who can afford a laptop
Take them as seriously as that
even if they love you
Especially if they love you
Rule 54
A lot of critics are not qualified
they are just guardians of normalcy
(a) Susan Sontag was a genius
Rule 55
Don’t have style
Maybe you do
but you should never know what it is
(a) A performance should have a style
your job is to figure out what that is and execute it
Rule 56
Above everything else, you are a storyteller
Tell the story
Rule 57
When someone tells you something can’t be done
have patience and ask them to try it again
(a) maybe it can
if you just ignore one of your stupid rules
Rule 58
Be grateful
in failure or success
Rule 59
Be brave
if you aren’t brave
you are not an artists
and whether you are artists or not
that’s what you should strive to be
Rule 60
You are never the smartest person in the room
just the luckiest
We Players’ Romeo & Juliet
We Players Romeo and Juliet: a site integrated theatre production of William Shakespeare’s tragedy at Rancho Petaluma Adobe State Park.
My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5
Chocolate Heads: Ghost Architecture (upcoming Fall)
Reopening Roble Gym with The Chocolate Heads: Ghost Architecture, A site specific performance commemorating the Reopening of Stanford University’s Roble Gym. Produced by Stanford Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS)
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
The Sea Ranch
Lawrence Halprin’s The Sea Ranch
Architecture tends to think of open space simply as a foreground or background to buildings and not significant in itself; engineering thinks of it in terms of drainage or road alignment; city planning tends to think of it as undifferentiated green swatches in the beehive of city streets. Landscape architects, however, want to design it in all its detail as the medium within which life occurs: so that we can walk through it, lie on the grass, court our girl friends in the spring and watch the unfolding buds on the spring branches. Open space for us is an end in itself –
Lawrence Halprin, “The Landscape Architect and the Planner” in Landscape Architecture and the Allied Arts and Professions, p 47. ed. Sylvia Crowe. Djambatan: Netherlands, 1961.
Notes to myself on beginning a painting
“Notes to myself on beginning a painting” by Richard Diebenkorn
1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves.
3. DO search.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don’t “discover” a subject – of any kind.
6. Somehow don’t be bored but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.aJane Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, with essays by John Elderfield, Ruth E. Fine, and Jane Livingston. The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997
References
backstage… Nausicaä at Pillar Point
Backstage Nausicaä: in wildflowers for Sophocles tragedy at Pillar Point…
I love all insider memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialized job they have.
David Mamet
wave organ rehearsal…
wave organ rehearsal with these two… Derek Phillips and Lauren Dietrich Chavez are more like childhood play dates rather than work. We just play and explore all the potentialities of the wave organ
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Nausicaä in Windhover
Rehearsing Sophocles‘ Nausicaä in Windhover, Stanford University…
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory