A site specific dance with Alonzo King LINES Ballet in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
At night I dream that you and I are two plants
that grew together, roots entwined,
and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,
since we are made of earth and rain.
Pablo Neruda, Regalo de un Poeta
The thing about catching bodies in motion against those gritty San Francisco Chinatown backdrops, I’m threading this beautiful needle between the pristine and the profane, right? The classical line meeting the cracked sidewalk. It’s not some precious art school contradiction; it’s the only honest collision that matters.
And we’re doing this from on top of a goddamn awning overlooking Grant. Not some comfortable vantage point with safety rails and permits. You’re out there on some canvas stretched over metal, however many feet up, probably feeling it buckle slightly under your combined weight, cars and humanity flowing below like they’re waiting to catch someone who miscalculates.
So there’s this beautiful, unspoken understanding happening: that the dancers won’t fall off. That I won’t fall off. All of us operating on faith, them trusting years of training to hold an arabesque on a surface that was never meant for this, me trusting my footing enough to not look down while I’m framing the shot.
Grant doesn’t care about either of you. The awning sure as shit doesn’t care.
I’m matching their commitment step for step, risk for risk. They’re extending into space that could betray them. I’m leaning into angles that could send me over. All of us chasing something that’ll be gone in a breath, that perfect line, that perfect light, that moment where discipline and danger create something neither could manufacture safely.
The grandmother shuffling past on the sidewalk below doesn’t look up. The delivery trucks don’t wait as I’ lay flat out in the middle of the street to get just the right angle. That’s the real shit, a group of people refusing to play it safe while the world refuses to be a stage.
And the mutual agreement to not fall.
前
不見
古人
後
不見
來者
念
天地之
悠悠
獨
愴然
而涕下
陳子昂
登幽州臺歌
Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng
Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish
Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing
Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moonTwo hands form into yīn and yáng palms
Two palms crossed over for locking jointsWait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes
Create opportunity by following the opponent’s forceWu Jianquan, son of Wu Quanyou (from a didactic poem quoted by his son Wu Gongzao in Wu Family T’ai Chi Ch’uan (吳家太極拳)), Hong Kong, 1980 (originally published in Changsha, 1935)
These bodies in Golden Gate Park, caught mid-gesture, practicing forms that are older than anyone’s grandparents’ grandparents’ bullshit. I stand there with my camera or my stupid fucking aesthetic appreciation and I think I’m getting it, I think I’m capturing something real.
I’m not.
Because what I see are dancers doing T’ai Chi in public space, and what they’re living is something else entirely. The space between intention and execution, between what they mean to do with their bodies and what actually happens, that’s where all the real shit lives. That’s the irony Wu Jianquan was writing about in 1935, except he was being poetic about it: “Wait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes.” What he meant was I can plan all I want, but the world’s going to fuck with my choreography.
I’m documenting something spontaneous, random, which is just another word for trying to get closer to something that keeps sliding away from me. Every photograph here is an admission of defeat. I’m outside their body, outside their experience, and all I can do is point my lens at the surface of what they’re doing and pretend that means I understand the physics of their pain, the geometry of their discipline.
Because that’s the hustle, isn’t it? I consume other people’s art, their struggle, their form, their tragedy, and I tell myself I get it. I don’t get shit. Somebody else’s perfected gesture, their moment of grace captured between the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences, that’s not mine. I can witness it, I can appreciate it, I can even be moved by it, but I can’t climb inside their skin and feel what they felt when they finally nailed that transition from stillness to motion.
The cruel joke is that I keep trying anyway. The dancers keep moving, photographer keeps shooting, and maybe you keep looking at these images thinking maybe this time you’ll break through the membrane and actually know what it’s like. You won’t. The best you’ll get is a beautiful document of your own incomprehension, which, if we’re being honest, is still worth something.
Bodies moving in sunlight, separate tragedies we’ll never fully comprehend, transformed into pixels we can scroll past on our way to the next thing we’ll fail to understand.
Shuaib Elhassan and Michael Montgomery of Alonzo King LINES Ballet
practicing T’ai Chi in The Music Concourse
in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
Love Me. Love my Umbrella.
James Joyce.
I’m standing there in Golden Gate Park with my Leica and two dancers decide to play with gravity under an umbrella built when the last century was still drawing breath, and what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do when two bodies make architecture out of air and Ive got maybe three seconds before the whole thing dissolves into what it was before: just people, just rain, just another Friday getting swallowed by the fog?
The viewfinder. It’s not a window. It’s a trap door. I look through it and suddenly I’m not the one doing the looking, it’s looking at me, demanding something, asking questions I didn’t know I was supposed to answer. The camera doesn’t give a shit about my intentions. It just sits there, this cold gorgoeus mechanical witness, waiting to see if I’m brave enough or stupid enough or desperate enough to let the moment possess me instead of the other way around.
Because here’s what I figured out, what, I think, every photographer who’s worth a damn eventually figures out: Photography is a reflection that comes to life in action and leads to a form of meditation. I see it first, that suspended moment, but it sees me back. Spontaneity intervenes right there in the viewfinder, that fragile instant where everything could collapse or crystallize, and what precedes it is reflection on the subject, what follows is a meditation on finality. And it’s in that exalting, trembling space between a before and an after that the real photographic work happens, the sequencing of images, the syntax of light and shadow and two people dancing under an umbrella who didn’t ask to become permanent.
This requires a writer’s spirit. Has to. Because isn’t photography just writing with light? Except, and here’s where it gets mean, where it gets true, while the writer possesses his words, the photographer is himself possessed by his photos. Possessed by the limit of the real, which he must transcend or become its prisoner.
And that’s the bargain, right? That’s the whole sick, beautiful bargain. These images of Babatunji and Yujin Kim doing their umbrella dance, they’re not about dance. They’re about that millisecond when the world forgets to be the world and becomes something else. Something that demands you look at it, that won’t let you turn away even though you know, I know, it’s already gone by the time the shutter clicks.
Love me, love my umbrella. Joyce knew. The umbrella’s not protection. It’s complicity. It’s saying: yes, I see you, I’m willing to stand under this absurd canopy with you while everything else pretends to make sense. And I was there with my camera, getting possessed, getting written on, letting the light do what light does when I shut up long enough to let it speak.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art.
Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.
Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal.
That is the whole truth.
William Saroyan
The Wave Organ’s this crumbling concrete jetty that some madman stuck pipes into so the bay could gargle its own tidal bullshit at tourists, and here I am hauling these LINES dancers, Shuaib, Babatunji, Yujin, out there like I’m staging some kind of beautiful hostage situation with the city itself. These bodies are all geometric impossibilities and controlled abandon, threading themselves through that rubble strewn amphitheater while Alcatraz squats in the background like a chaperone at a rave. The whole enterprise reeks of doomed romanticism, this compulsion to jam the most refined human movement into the most indifferent architectural accident San Francisco ever coughed up, and somehow it works because the collision is the point. I’m not documenting dance, I’m catching the friction between what bodies can become and what cities leave behind, all those angles and extensions fighting against barnacled stone and bay water that doesn’t give a damn about line or form or any of my precious compositional concerns.
Painters have canvas and pigment, writers have words and delusions, musicians have strings and wood and air. But dancers? They’ve got meat and bone and the ticking clock of their own deteriorating ligaments. Every arabesque is a negotiation with gravity and mortality. You can’t separate the art from the artist because the artist is the medium, and the medium is already dying, has been dying since birth, and will stop working sometime before they’re ready.
That’s the rawness of it. That’s what makes it real. That’s the geometry of dying.
And here it is happening inside a museum, that mausoleum for dead things made permanent, with Bank of the West’s logo somewhere in the credits, because everything beautiful needs a sponsor now, everything ephemeral needs corporate backing to justify its existence. But the bodies don’t care about any of that. They’re just doing what bodies do when someone finally gives them permission to transcend the mundane machinery of getting from point A to point B.
The thing about these photographs is they’re lies. Beautiful lies, but lies. Because you can’t photograph dance any more than you can photograph music. You’re just documenting the aftermath, the crime scene. The real thing happened in real time and then it was gone, and these images are just evidence that something occurred, somewhere, when specific people inhabited specific geometries in space for reasons that made sense in the moment.
But we need the lies. We need the documentation. Because otherwise how do we prove to ourselves that it happened at all? That for a few minutes, some humans decided to use their bodies for something other than sitting in traffic or staring at screens or slowly calcifying in office chairs?
Dance is the art that reminds you that you have a body, that the body can do things, that it can mean things without needing to explain itself in a podcast. It’s the art form that says: this is temporary, this is fragile, this will never happen exactly this way again, and that’s not a bug, that’s the whole fucking feature.
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Three photographs of dancers backstage in Chinatown, bodies caught in that liminal space between the real and the performed, and Barthes sitting there like some existential sniper waiting to blow your comfortable relationship with reality clean out of the water.
That bit about “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time”: that’s the whole goddamn hustle right there, isn’t it? These LINES Ballet dancers in their rehearsal gear, caught in some alley or backstage nowhere, they’re not actually there when you’re looking at the image. They’ve already moved on, sweated through another rehearsal, gone home, lived entire other lives. But the photograph insists, with the stupid, mute insistence of all photographs, that this happened. That this precise configuration of light and muscle and urban grit actually existed in space-time.
It’s the same brainfuck you get when you’re looking at any documentation of the ephemeral. Dance, music, performance: they’re supposed to disappear. That’s the whole point. They exist in this ecstatic present tense and then they’re gone, leaving nothing but memory and sweat stains. But the photographer shows up like some vampire, trying to trap the thing that was never meant to be trapped, creating this “bizarre medium” that’s simultaneously a lie and the only truth we’ve got left.
Those dancers in Chinatown, bodies torqued into these impossible geometries against fire escapes and graffitied walls: the photograph says “they were beautiful” but really it’s saying “they were beautiful and now they’re gone” and really really it’s saying “you weren’t there, you missed it, and this image is both your consolation prize and your punishment for not being present when it mattered.”
The hallucination isn’t that we see them. The hallucination is that we believe we know them, that we participated in something just because we witnessed its ghost. Barthes knew: every photograph is a kind of evidence at a trial we can never attend, testimony about an event that’s already been buried by time. And here we are, staring at these dancers, chafed by reality, trying to resurrect something that was already dead the moment the shutter clicked.
May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions.
We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition literally poisoned the earth, where someone’s “path of steady success” left behind carcinogens and heavy metals in the soil. The irony isn’t lost on us, it’s the whole fucking point.
We staged a fragment. One of Euripides‘ lost tragedies, no one knows which one anymore, because history is a hungry thing that eats most of what we make. Five minutes of ancient Greek warning delivered to maybe fourteen people, maybe sixteen, on land that’s still sick from progress. We called it Path of Steady Success, which suddenly feels less like a title and more like an indictment.
The fragment itself? Pure Greek darkness dressed up as wisdom. It’s a warning shot across the bow of anyone who thinks they’ve got it figured out: The gods get bored. That’s the message. You’re riding high, everything’s golden, you think you’ve earned it, you’ve deserved it—and somewhere up on Olympus, the divine is filing its nails, yawning, thinking, “Yeah, we’re done here.”
It’s about hubris, obviously. That Greek obsession with pride that comes before the fall. But it’s more specific than that, it’s about the shelf life of success. The universe doesn’t hate you; it’s just indifferent, and that indifference has an expiration date. Even divine favor has its limits. The gods won’t prop up the same winner forever. They get tired of the same old story.
And here we are, performing this ancient warning on contaminated ground, proof that they were right. Fortune isn’t permanent. The heavens got tired of propping up whoever poisoned this place. Success ran out. What’s left is us, and a few people willing to stand on toxic earth to hear words that are 2,400 years old and still true.
This is what we’re doing with IOTA: resurrecting the scattered fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the plays that didn’t make it. The warnings that got lost. Bringing them back to life in places like this, site-specific theater, where the water meets the poisoned land and everything feels both temporary and permanent in the worst possible way.
Because that’s the point, isn’t it? Nothing’s permanent, not success, not luck, not even the plays themselves. But the damage? That sticks around. The ground remembers what we’d rather forget.
For five minutes on a Wednesday afternoon, in front of a handful of people who showed up during their lunch break, these ancient words lived again. A warning about hubris, delivered on a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.
The Fragment
The man on the path of steady success
should not think that he will enjoy
the same luck for ever,
for the god—
if one should use the name ‘god’—
seems generally to grow weary
of supporting always the same men.
Mortal men’s prosperity is mortal;
those who are arrogant
and assure themselves of the future
from the present
get a test of their fortune
through suffering.
Location
Two Superfund sites. In a residential neighborhood. Bay Street, East Palo Alto. And here’s the kicker, neither one is on the EPA’s National Priority List. Because apparently, some poisoned ground is more of a priority than other poisoned ground.
1990 Bay Street. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List, Inc. used to make pesticides there. Arsenic-based pesticides, because of course. Zoecon Corp. bought the place in ’72, kept making agricultural chemicals. They say no contamination traces back to Zoecon’s operations, which is corporate-speak for “don’t look at us, look at the other guys.”
Then there’s 2081 Bay Road. Romic Environmental Technologies Corp. Twelve-point-six acres of what they called a “chemicals processing plant.” What it actually was? A toxic waste recycling facility. They took the nasty shit from companies like Hewlett-Packard, you know, the printer people, and did God knows what with it. Started in 1956. Ran for fifty years until they finally shut it down in 2007 after, and I quote, “a series of environmental and safety violations.” Which is like saying the Titanic had “a minor leak problem.”
The monitoring wells? Contaminated. Arsenic. Lead. Cadmium. Mercury. Selenium. It’s like a greatest hits album of things that shouldn’t be in your water. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: approximately 58,000 people depend on wells within three miles of this site as their source of drinking water.
Fifty-eight thousand people. Real people. Families. Kids. Living their lives on poisoned ground, drawing water from poisoned wells, because someone decided East Palo Alto was a good place to park their toxic waste.
This is what success looks like from the other side. Someone made money. Someone made pesticides and processed chemicals and built a business. And when the gods got tired of propping them up? They left. But the poison stayed. It always does.
Collaborators
Daniel Guaqueta Drummer. Electronica artist. A guy who grew up split between Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Bogota, Colombia, two worlds that shouldn’t fit together but somehow do in his music. He’s got cumbia in his blood and Delta slowness in his bones. The kind of musician who hears rhythm in everything: bicycle chains, truck engines, the way waves break on a shore.
When he was in college in Mississippi, studying classical music and jazz, getting into Megadeth and Firehose, he stumbled on a Mermen album (note: if Santa Cruz had an official band it would be the Merman). That album, Be My Noir, begins with the sound of waves. He put the needle down and everything changed. Now most people, when they discover a band they love, they buy the t-shirt, go to a few shows. Daniel? He started his own surf-rock band, even though he’d never surfed. And later, after Daniel moved to Palo Alto, he became a Mer-sideman, filling in on drums when they needed him.
The guy’s a true artist. A Mississippi native who makes electronic music that blends ambient avant-garde with pop, who understands that music isn’t just notes on a page, it’s texture, it’s atmosphere, it’s the space between the sounds. A sonic landscape.
For this performance on the toxic shore, this five-minute warning about hubris delivered to maybe sixteen people on poisoned ground, Guaqueta brought his 5 gallon bucket of a drum, his understanding of rhythm and space, his willingness to stand in a place that America forgot and made something beautiful anyway.
He’s the kind of collaborator you want: someone who gets that this isn’t just about the music. It’s about where you make it. Why you make it. What it means to resurrect ancient warnings in a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.
John Cage Ten Rules for Students and Teachers
originates not from John Cage,
but artist and teacher Corita Kent
who created the list as part of a project
for a class she taught in 1967-1968
at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
I spent most of my life pretending I knew what the hell I was doing. And then one day, somewhere along the line, I stumbled across these rules, technically Corita Kent’s, not Cage’s, but whatever, and realized I’d been doing this backwards the whole goddamn time.
“Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.” That’s the one that gets me. Because trust is the hardest thing, isn’t it? We’re all so busy performing, so terrified of looking stupid, that we never actually commit to anything long enough to let it work on us. We’re tourists in our own lives.
The rule about pulling everything out of your teachers and fellow students, that’s about hunger. Real hunger. Not the polite kind where you raise your hand and ask permission. You take what you need. You steal techniques, ideas, the way someone holds their body when they’re thinking. That’s not plagiarism; that’s survival.
And “nothing is a mistake”? Jesus, if I’d understood that at twenty-five, even thirty-five instead of forty-five, imagine the neuroses I could’ve avoided. I’ve spent so much energy constructing elaborate narratives about my failures when I should just be making the next thing.
But Rule Seven, that’s the one that matters. Work. Just fucking work. Not when I feel inspired or when the moment is right. Work when I’m tired. Work when I’m hungover. Work when I think everything I’m making is garbage. Because the people who show up every day, who do the tedious, unglamorous labor of their craft, those are the ones who eventually make something worth a damn.
The last rule, though, breaking all the rules, leaving room for chaos, that’s where life happens. In the X quantities. In the spaces between what you planned and what actually occurred. That’s where you find something true, something that might outlive you. Everything else is just static.
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence.
Zakir Hussain doesn’t play the tabla. He doesn’t perform. He demolishes the space between intention and sound, between mathematics and ecstasy. And when he’s creating for dancers, it’s not accompaniment. It’s combat. It’s seduction. It’s a conversation happening at a frequency that bypasses your brain and goes straight to your spine.
Every time you step out on to the stage,
you learn something which helps you grow and be a better communicator.
It’s not like you’re the master.
You’re always a student.
The dancers are already moving before he strikes the drum, they’re moving because they know what’s coming, what’s inevitable, the way you flinch before the thunder when you see the lightning. And he sees them, tracks them, builds something that’s simultaneously ancient and being invented in real-time. Every note is a choice. Every silence is violence.
And I’m there with a camera, trying to freeze something that exists only in motion, trying to capture proof of magic for people who weren’t there and won’t believe it anyway. The privilege isn’t the access. The privilege is understanding, for those moments, that you’re watching someone operate at a level of mastery that most humans never even glimpse. That you’re witnessing the thing itself, not a representation of it.
It ruins you. In the best way.