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
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
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)
“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
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 receiving the 2016 Carey McWilliams Award from The California Studies Association.
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.
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
Roble Theater: Chocolate Heads rehearsing in Stanford Theater and Performance Studies’ brand new theatre 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 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
(a) the reverse for you: show up clean/leave dirty
(a): Ghosts exist, give them one day/night a week alone in the space
(a) music stands are amateurish
(a) Sharka is an exception to this rule
Especially if they love you
(a) Susan Sontag was a genius
(a) A performance should have a style
your job is to figure out what that is and execute it
(a) maybe it can
if you just ignore one of your stupid rules
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
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
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” 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: 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 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.
