There’s this thing that happens when you strip away everything you think you know about a piece of art, when you stop genuflecting at the altar of tradition and just look at what’s actually there, raw and pulsing and strange. Robert Wilson gets this. He gets that Shakespeare’s sonnets were never meant to be polite […]
Continue Reading →December 19, 1958. The Palais Garnier. You want to talk about a moment when the universe temporarily stopped fucking around? This might have been it. Maria Callas didn’t just perform that night. She walked into that gilded Belle Époque monument to French self-satisfaction, all those marble staircases and chandelier’d horseshoe balconies where the bourgeoisie had […]
Continue Reading →
Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the […]
Continue Reading →
At 4:45pm on November 16th, 2018, a cold, gray, 54 degree afternoon, we staged the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus‘ Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo County. Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with here: Aeschylus’s Danaids trilogy is mostly gone. Lost to time, fire, neglect, pick your poison. What […]
Continue Reading →
Look at this beautiful goddamn relic. A payphone. At a boat launch in Palo Alto, ground zero for the tech apocalypse that murdered these things. There’s something almost obscene about it standing there, isn’t there? This monument to a slower, dumber, better world. Back when “faith backed by dollars” meant stringing copper wire across America […]
Continue Reading →
The great ones don’t teach you a damn thing. Not directly. They just sit there in the tenth row and call out the truth until you stop flinching. Carl Weber sat in that tenth row for Brecht. He sat in it for Kushner. He sat in it for me. The man watched the most radical […]
Continue Reading →The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all […]
Continue Reading →