Standing in the wings at YBCA, Leica in hand, watching Alonzo King’s dancers move through Handel like light through water. When you’re backstage you’re seeing the machinery of transcendence. The sweat. The breath. The moments before and after the magic happens.
Brodovitch knew this. Those ballet photographs of his weren’t about perfection, they were about the blur between effort and grace, the space where bodies become something else entirely. He understood that the interesting stuff happens in the margins, in the wings, in the split-second before or after the moment everyone came to see.
LINES dancers, they’re not just executing steps. They’re translating Handel’s mathematical precision into human flesh and bone. And from where I’m standing, you see the cost of that translation. The strain. The beauty. The absolute commitment to something that exists for seconds and then disappears forever.
That’s what I’m hoping to capture. That moment when a dancer’s line becomes architecture, becomes music made visible.
I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart. Gérard de Nerval
That’s the first thing I need to understand. This isn’t my world. These aren’t my people. I’m a tourist with a golden ticket, a voyeur granted temporary access to a place most people never see, never even know exists. And I should be grateful for it.
It’s three hours before curtain at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the LINES dancers are warming up for Common Ground. Not the kind of warming up you do before your morning jog: touching your toes, maybe a sad little hamstring stretch. This is something else entirely.
This is ritual. This is prayer.
The stage smells like rosin and sweat and that particular brand of determination that only comes from people who’ve chosen to destroy their bodies in pursuit of something beautiful. Adji is doing something with her leg that shouldn’t be anatomically possible. She’s not grimacing. She’s not even breathing hard. This is just Thursday for a LINES Ballet dancer.
They never look bored. Never look like they’re just going through the motions. Every single repetition is attacked with the same fierce attention, the same commitment to getting it exactly, precisely, impossibly right.
On another part of the stage the Kronos Quartet is doing their own version of the same dance. Four people, four instruments, and between them, about two hundred years of collective experience making music at the absolute highest level. They’re the string quartet that redefined what a string quartet could be, that took an eighteenth-century chamber music format and dragged it kicking and screaming into the now.
They’re working through a particularly thorny passage, something that exists at the intersection where classical music meets the rest of the world. Kronos doesn’t do pretty Mozart. They commission new work, they collaborate, they find common ground between traditions that were never supposed to speak to each other.
There’s no conductor here. No one telling them what to do. Just four masters of their craft, in constant dialogue with each other and the dancers and the music, chasing something that exists somewhere just beyond their reach. The pursuit is everything.
The crew are going through their checklist. Lights. Sound. Cues. Everything has to be perfect because there are no second takes here, no post-production fixes. What happens on that stage is all there is. The only version. The only truth.
What always gives me pause, what should give you pause is…
These artist are about to do something that requires years of training, decades of dedication, countless hours of physical and mental discipline, something that pushes the absolute boundaries of what human beings can do with their bodies and instruments. They’re going to make it look effortless.
The audience, some of them, anyway, will sit there and watch and think, “That’s nice.” Most will never know what they’re actually witnessing. The sacrifice. The obsession. The sheer bloody-minded refusal to be anything less than extraordinary.
But I know. Because I was here. Because I saw them sweat and strain and repeat and refine. Because I watched them transform from tired human beings into something else entirely: into artists, into athletes, into alchemists who turn discipline and pain into moments of transcendent beauty.
It’s tense, yes. Charged, absolutely. Alive in a way that makes everything else feel a little bit dead by comparison.
And it’s a privilege. Not just to watch, but to understand, even for a moment, what it costs to make magic look easy. To find common ground not in the comfort of agreement but in the crucible of excellence.
The house lights dim. Out front, the audience is settling into their seats at Yerba Buena. Programs rustling, phones (supposedly) silenced.
Back here, in the wings, there’s a moment of perfect stillness.
We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment — bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra
There it is, Columbus Avenue, that greasy artery pumping tourists and nostalgia through what used to be the beating heart of something real, something dangerous, something that mattered before it got freeze-dried and packaged for the bridge crowd clutching their Ferlinghetti paperbacks like permission slips to feel bohemian for an afternoon.
These frames, and understand, this is composition, this is theater in two dimensions, they capture the essential paradox of North Beach as performative space. The Transamerica Pyramid looming like a corporate middle finger to everything Ginsberg howled about, while Big Al’s neon promises the same commodified transgression the Mitchell Brothers sold before capitalism digested even that. Artie and Jim knew something about spectacle, about bodies as sites of contested meaning, about performance that wasn’t performing but was instead some raw excavation of American appetite and shame.
North Beach is now a stage where authenticity comes to die nightly at 8 PM with a two drink minimum. You can almost see the ghosts in these black and whites: Kerouac stumbling past where Starbucks now squats, Cassady rapping his knuckles on hoods of cars that don’t exist anymore, the whole beautiful doomed carnival of Beat consciousness now reduced to a walking tour you can book on TripAdvisor.
City Lights still stands, sure, like a museum to when books could change your fucking life, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti wasn’t a brand but a provocation. But walk that street now and count the selfie sticks, the bachelorette parties slumming it before their Marina apartments, the theater of fake rebellion performed by people who’ll be back at their tech campuses Monday morning.
Ginsberg wrote “Sunflower Sutra” as an act of radical seeing, of finding beauty in industrial grime. What would he make of this sanitized decay, this performance of history? The dirt here now is nostalgic, curated, safe. The locomotive’s gone. Only the tourism remains.
This city used to be where you could fuck around and find out. Not in some precious way, but in the way that actually meant something, where a choreographer could look at a quartet that’s been demolishing the boundaries of what four strings can do for decades and say, “Yeah, let’s see what happens when bodies move to that.” And Kronos have been at this since the ’70s, commissioning pieces from composers nobody’s heard of yet, playing Hendrix arrangements, dragging chamber music kicking and screaming into the present tense.
Alonzo’s the same way with bodies. You watch LINES and it’s not ballet in that Swan Lake sense, it’s ballet like Coltrane was jazz, which is to say it respects the form enough to take it somewhere it’s never been. There’s a rigor there that cuts deeper than technique. It’s spiritual without being wishy-washy about it, which is almost impossible to pull off.
The collaboration thing, that’s where most art dies, honestly. Two egos in a room, everyone protecting their precious vision, some committee-designed compromise nobody believes in. But when it works, and you can tell just watching these guys talk that they’ve figured something out, it’s because both parties are secure enough to blow up what they thought they knew. You bring the chaos of your discipline to meet someone else’s chaos, and if you’re lucky and you’re good and you’re willing to get uncomfortable, something emerges that neither of you could have birthed alone.
San Francisco being strip-mined by money, turned into a theme park version of itself, and the only resistance that matters is the one that keeps making genuinely dangerous, uncompromising art. Not dangerous like shocking-for-its-own-sake, but dangerous like it might actually change how you view the world. Dangerous like it demands something from you. Something more than you just sharing it on your social media feed to your 113 followers.
These two institutions have been at it long enough to know the score. They’ve survived the business cycles and the critics and the indifference and the changing tides, and they’re still here making work that doesn’t pander.
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing. Hermann Hesse
This isn’t about pretty. This was never about pretty. What I caught here, what I actually saw and felt, is the moment before the lie, before the performance becomes performance, before anyone gives a shit about what an audience thinks. It’s LINES dancers and the Kronos Quartet in the same room, in the same oxygen, working out the geometry of transcendence, and I’m standing there with my Leica trying not to breathe too loud.
You want to know what’s sacred? It’s not in churches. It’s in the 7th repetition of a phrase that’s almost right but not quite, when the cellist’s bow catches something in the solar plexus of a dancer mid-leap and for three seconds everyone in the room forgets they have bills to pay. That’s the sacrament. That’s communion.
Hermann Hesse knew it, that friend who taught him dancing gave him back the eternal, the divine, the whole substance of what it means to be alive in a body that’s going to die. And that’s what I’m watching through the viewfinder: four musicians who’ve spent forty years dismantling what string quartets are supposed to be, sitting three feet from dancers whose spines have been reconfigured in the service of something Alonzo calls “alignment” but is really about tuning the human form like an instrument.
The thing about photographing rehearsal, and why I’m here instead waiting for the performance, is that this is where the real work happens. This is where it’s ugly. This is where someone’s hamstring is screaming, where the violinist’s shoulder is on fire, where nothing’s working and then suddenly everything works for half a measure and my finger hits the shutter and I’ve captured maybe a thousandth of what I’m actually witnessing.
But you can’t capture it all. That’s the whole fucking point.
I’m trying to document the space between, between the note and the movement, between intention and execution, between the artist’s vision and the body’s limitation. That’s where God lives, if God lives anywhere. In the gap. In the almost. In the relentless, brutal, beautiful process of trying to make something that doesn’t exist yet and might never exist except for that one rehearsal on that one day when the light came through the windows just right and the quartet and the dancers breathed as one organism and I happened to be there with a camera.
That’s what I was chasing. Timelessness. Not pretty. Not polite. Just essential. And some days, precious days like this one, you actually catch a glimpse of it.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
Tim Cook showed up to bless the product launch at the Apple Store in Palo Alto like some corporate pontiff, anointing the faithful who’d lined up to hand over a grand for a phone that’s basically last year’s phone with a slightly better camera. This is Palo Alto, baby: Disruption Town, where revolution is a marketing term and resistance is something you do with exercise bands.
That Terry Eagleton quote hanging there like a severed finger pointing at everyone? Yeah. Because nobody’s resisting jack shit. They’re queuing up, credit cards out, ready to genuflect at the altar of incremental upgrades. The iPhone Xs. Not even a new letter, just plural now, like we needed options on inevitability.
Look at this: the storefront glowing like a suburban temple, the crowd pressing in, desperate for their fix of newness that feels exactly like oldness but costs more. Cook’s there working the line like a politician, hand shaking his way through people who think they’re buying innovation but are really just buying into something. Brand loyalty masquerading as identity. Consumption pretending to be choice.
And Palo Alto is the perfect setting for this theater: a town so high on its own supply of disruption speak it can’t see it’s become the thing it claimed to be destroying. Everything’s been optimized, streamlined, made frictionless, including the part where you think for yourself. The inevitable wasn’t inevitable until everyone stopped asking if maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need another fucking phone this year.
But hey, it’s sleek. It’s minimalist. It’s curated. And that’s what passes for rebellion now.
It’s the corpse of the thing, the empty bottle, the setlist scrawled on a napkin after the venue’s already been bulldozed. This Craig quote: “one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen”, that’s the whole sick joke of it. You can’t record what happened in that room. The electricity, the dread in that title playing out in real time, the way bodies move through space when everything’s charged with intent and menace.
I, the photographer see it, sure. Freeze the moment. But the seeing more and the recording more are two different animals eating each other’s tails. What I’ve left you with is evidence of an event you’ll never attend, proof of something that only existed for the people breathing that air. The rest of you just get the crime scene photos and the theater’s assertion that yeah, harm was definitely meant here.
If you need more proof that you weren’t there, that you missed the whole goddamn thing, ☞ click here☜ for the rest of the autopsy photos.
The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd; ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd; ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
Sutro Bathsbroken concrete pools don’t give a shit about me or my romanticized notion of Victorian grandeur. They just are, salt-scarred, graffitied, filled with seawater and broken glass and the honest stink of kelp and bird shit rotting in the sun. And that’s exactly why SophoclesPhaedra belongs here.
Sophocles understood something we keep forgetting: tragedy isn’t about villains. It’s about people making terrible decisions in terrible moments because panic short-circuits everything we think about being human. Phaedra, not some lascivious foreign bitch but a mother trying to protect her kids when she thinks her husband is dead, reads the room wrong, Hippolytus reads her wrong, and suddenly everybody’s drowning in their own misunderstanding. Nobody’s evil. Everybody’s fucked.
To stage these fragments in some pristine proscenium theater with perfect acoustics and comfortable seats? Please. That’s for plays where things make sense, where motivations are clear, where the architecture itself promises resolution.
But here, these ruins… These pools that were built to hold something civilized and now hold nothing but Pacific chaos twice a day. The tide comes, it goes out. And what was built to contain it? Just ghosts and geometry.
That’s the frame for Phaedra’s panic. That moment when she realizes Theseus isn’t dead, that her political proposal to Hippolytus can be misread as sexual, that she’s trapped, that’s the tide coming in. And her accusation, that desperate lie to save herself that destroys everyone? That’s not wickedness. That’s someone drowning in real time. That’s the human animal thrashing, making it worse, making it deadly.
That late afternoon light coming in low off the Pacific, raking across the broken concrete at angles that turn every crack into a shadow, every pool into a mirror of sky and violence. This isn’t romantic. This is forensic. The light at Sutro doesn’t flatter, it reveals. Every flaw, every mistake in judgment, every place where structure failed and gave way to entropy.
The golden hour at the edge of the continent is not gentle. It’s desperate. It’s the sun clawing its way toward the horizon while the fog bank waits offshore like patient dread. That’s when Phaedra makes her proposal to Hippolytus. That’s when the light makes everything look possible for exactly twenty minutes before it all goes dark.
The fog is a chorus. Not metaphorically, literally. It’s Sophocles‘ web of misunderstanding made physical. Actors vanish into it. Voices come from the wrong directions. Hippolytus hears accusation where Phaedra meant alliance because the fog eats context, leaves only tone, only fear.
The ruins are Theseus. Not a character walking around, the whole damn structure is him. Solid. Imposing. Built to contain the chaos of the ocean and utterly failing at it. Those seven pools at different levels, connected by channels that don’t connect anymore? That’s his empire, his legacy, his family, all compartmentalized, all supposedly controlled, all collapsing into each other as the tide comes in.
Phaedra starts on the upper tier, the one closest to the road, the parking lot, the civilized world of traffic and tourists. That’s Athens. That’s the throne she’s trying to protect for her children. It’s also the least interesting part of the ruins, and that’s perfect. Political power is boring. Safety is boring.
Hippolytus I imagine lives in the lowest pools, the ones that flood first, the ones nearest the cave mouths where seals sometimes haul out and cormorants nest in the cliff face. He’s not civilized. He’s not political. He’s at home with the edge, with the wild, with things that bite. When Phaedra descends to meet him, every step down is a step away from control, from calculation, from the lie she’ll eventually tell.
The site isn’t neutral. It’s not a black box waiting for a vision. It’s got its own weather, its own tides, its own structural decay happening in real time. It’ll upstage actors. It’ll ruin blocking. And if I’m doing this right, I’ll let it. Because Phaedra isn’t a play about people controlling their circumstances. It’s about circumstances obliterating people who thought they had a plan.
The fragments Sophocles left us are enough. More than enough. Because the real tragedy was always in the gaps anyway, in what isn’t said, what can’t be taken back, what the ocean and time have eroded to its essential truth:
