I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, but I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, these LINES dancers aren’t human in the conventional sense, they’re architecture in motion, physics made flesh, extensions that defy the limitations of bone and tendon. The photographer’s dilemma is trying to freeze something that only exists in motion, documenting what was never meant to be still: dramatic level changes, bodies falling and crawling forward, baroque structure meeting contemporary athleticism, Handel’s fugal forms made visible through limbs and torsos. My task was simple and impossible, capture that transcendent moment, preserve what can’t be preserved, make the ephemeral permanent, knowing full well that every photograph is a beautiful lie that tries to remember what it felt like to be in that theater, watching something that existed purely in that moment.
Not just dancers, but devotion.
Not just movement, but meaning.
The full set of frames from that night, all of it, is here.
Go see for yourself.
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.
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a threeday wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. aWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Number 9 Perry Lane. Just to the right of that telephone pole. That’s where Ken Kesey lived from 1959 to ’63 while he was enrolled in Stanford’s Creative Writing Center.
His neighbor, Vik Lovell, a Stanford psychology grad student, had an idea. The CIA was funding research. MKULTRA. Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. They wanted to know what happened when you gave people LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, DMT, all of it. Kesey volunteered. Then he got a job there as a night aide.
Those night shifts, those drugs, that hospital, that’s where Cuckoo’s Nest came from. Published in 1962. Written on Perry Lane.
The parties. Jesus, the parties. Hawaiian luaus spilling into the street. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh playing music.g Black, white, brown, everyone together, which in 1960s Palo Alto was apparently too much for the cops to handle. Racially mixed gatherings. That was the crime.h
The Perry Lane Olympics. A naked woman on the back of a convertible, holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag jammed in the cup, riding up and down the lane like some kind of dionysian torch bearer. That happened.
August 1963: developers show up. Number 9 and the other cottages get bulldozed. Ranch homes go up. Clean. Respectable. Boring.
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pack up and head to La Honda. The party moves on.
Perry Lane becomes just another address. The weirdness, erased.
One RV. One of hundreds in Palo Alto. Families living in these things because rent in Disruption Town is no longer a number that makes sense to anyone who actually works for a living.
State and city laws say they have to move every 72 hours. Can’t get too comfortable. Can’t put down roots. Keep moving, keep moving.
This family? Parked in the foothills. Fifty meters from Tesla headquarters. Fifty meters from SAP. You can practically see the executive parking lot from their window.
Tesla, of course, has since moved its headquarters to Texas. Elon’s a genius like that. Take the tax breaks, the infrastructure, the talent pool California built, then leave when it’s time to give something back. Genius.
Meanwhile, the family in the RV moves again in three days.
The future, they keep telling us. This is the future.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed. Herman Melville
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.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Look at this shit.
Emerson Street, Palo Alto. A driveway. And in that driveway, a lineup of chairs that looks like someone staged an intervention for ergonomic seating and nobody showed up.
They’re just standing there, office chairs, stools, the forgotten furniture of knowledge workers who’ve moved on to standing desks or yoga balls or whatever the hell comes after you’ve optimized your lumbar support into oblivion. No “Free” sign. No prices scrawled on cardboard. No explanation whatsoever. Just chairs. Waiting.
This is pure Ionesco. This is The Chairs relocated from Paris to Silicon Valley, where the absurdist playwright’s fever dream becomes someone’s actual Tuesday afternoon. In his play, an old couple spends ninety minutes arranging chairs for invisible guests who never arrive, building toward a message that’s never delivered. Here on Emerson Street, we’ve skipped straight to the punchline: the chairs themselves, arranged with mysterious purpose, tagged with numbers that signify nothing, existing in a void between utility and disposal.
Who did this? Some engineer who finally cracked? A startup that pivoted into oblivion? Did they sit in these chairs while building the future, coding the disruption, only to discover the future didn’t need their asses in seats anymore?
The photograph captures it perfectly, this quiet surrealism that Palo Alto has mastered. The absurd isn’t performed here; it’s ambient. It’s in the air like eucalyptus pollen. Ionesco would recognize this immediately: objects multiplying beyond reason, systems that organize chaos into more chaos, the creeping sensation that meaning has evacuated the premises but left the furniture behind.
Thoreau said he had three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
These people need a dozen just to process the void.
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
Apple CEO Tim Cook made an appearance at an Apple Store in Palo Alto, California, helping to open the store and welcoming the first people from the queue into the store to pick up their iPhone XS order.
