Rush Rehm directs Stanford Repertory Theater’s presentation of Euripides Hecuba/Helen. Chorus as choreographed by Aleta Hayes.
Heterogeneous Spectacles
She Bomb / Science Exchange: Now I Am Become Disruption – Death of a Dry Cleaner
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Robert Oppenheimer: Interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed.
Here’s this pathetic little storefront that used to press some orthodontist’s khakis. Now it’s got a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical startup crossed with a Tinder bio. Science Exchange. Jesus Christ.
I’ve got the Oppenheimer quote sitting here like a neon sign screaming “THIS MEANS SOMETHING,” and maybe it does. These weren’t the guys splitting atoms in Los Alamos, they were splitting market shares, disrupting dry cleaning into obsolescence so they could disrupt everything else.
Oppenheimer at least knew he’d become Death. These assholes? They thought they were becoming Life, man, they thought they were saving the world with APIs and pivot tables and whatever the hell else gets venture capitalists hard. The dry cleaner knew what he was, a guy removing stains. But Science Exchange? They were removing the very concept of limitation, or so they told themselves between funding rounds.
And that’s the real mindfuck: the dry cleaner probably did more actual good for his neighborhood than whatever algorithmic wet dream got funded in his old space. But he didn’t scale. He didn’t disrupt. He just cleaned clothes until he didn’t anymore
She Made Beauty All Round Her or The Getting Dirty Is the Point
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
So here’s the thing about mud that nobody wants to admit because we’re all too busy pretending we’re evolved beings who’ve transcended our animal selves, mud is REAL in a way that almost nothing else is anymore, I mean really real, not Instagram-real or LinkedIn-real or whatever performative reality we’re all participating in like good little consumers of our own lives, but actual earth-and-water-combined-into-this-primordial-ooze-that-makes-you-remember-you’re-just-a-mammal REAL.
And Lindsey gets it, she GETS it in a way I’ve rarely seen anyone get anything, the way she just plunges into this muck like it’s not even a question, like the whole point of having a body is to drag it through difficult terrain and come out the other side covered in proof that you actually existed for those hours, that you weren’t just scrolling or thinking about scrolling or thinking about what you’d say about scrolling if someone asked you about it.
The mud clings to everything, your boots, your calves, your sense of who you thought you were before you started slogging through this beautiful horrible mess, and she’s laughing, actually LAUGHING, like she knows something the rest of us forgot sometime around third grade when we learned that being clean was somehow more important than being alive.
a park, a policeman and a pretty girl
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin
Bodies moving in a public park at whatever-the-fuck-o’clock on a Tuesday is a beautiful fuck you to the entire premise of art as commodity. You’ve got these dancers, trained Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers, the kind who’ve destroyed their feet and their personal lives in the service of something most people will never understand, and they’re just out there in the goddamn bandshell where anyone can stumble across them. Some guy walking his dog. A cop on patrol. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Chaplin knew. Park, cop, pretty girl. The basic elements. Not because it’s simple but because those three things contain every possible human story if you are paying attention. These photos are not trying to sell you on the transcendence of ballet or the purity of the human form or any of that marketing bullshit to get you to buy a ticket. Rather, I’m trying to show you what happens when something as disciplined and unnatural as classical dance collides with the organic chaos of just being outside… in the rain.
That 1900 bandshell, Spreckels Temple of Music, what a ridiculous name, it’s seen everything by now. Seen its purpose get smaller and larger and disappear and return. And now it’s hosting this photoshoot thing, which is nonsense for “we’re doing it here because here matters, because the space is part of the conversation.”
And the conversation is: what the hell are we all doing? These dancers know they’re being watched and not watched simultaneously. Most people will never see this. Well, no…that first image of Adji will probably be on muni buses all over the city promoting LINES Fall Season… But in reality, the right now, it existed for maybe ninety minutes and now it’s gone except for these images, which aren’t the thing itself but the ghost of the thing. The shadow. Which might be all we ever get anyway.
That’s not cynicism, that’s just paying attention.
LINES Ballet in The Music Concourse
Bodies Against Brutalism: Notes from the Wave Organ
The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. It’s like trying to photograph music, which is exactly what I’m doing at the Wave Organ because the whole goddamn place IS music, the slap and gurgle of bay water through those pipes creating this ambient soundtrack that sounds like the earth breathing.
These LINES dancers, they’re not just good, they’re operating on some frequency the rest of us can’t access. Alonzo King trains bodies the way other people train racehorses or fighter jets, all precision and power and something that looks effortless precisely because it’s anything but. I’m standing there with my Leica, waiting, and then a dancer extends into some position that seems to defy structural engineering, backlit by that merciless California light bouncing off the Bay, and I either get it or I don’t.
There’s no retry. The moment passes. The wave breaks. The body reforms.
The honest truth? Most of the shots I captured this day are garbage. The light’s too harsh or too flat, I was too early or too late, my focus was off, or the composition is just slightly off in a way that turns poetry into PowerPoint. But then, maybe once every thirty six frames, something happens. The dancer catches air, the light catches the dancer, and you catch both. That’s the shot that makes me forget the salt spray coating your lenses, the way my back’s screaming from contorting yourself into positions almost as ridiculous as the dancers’.
It’s absurd, really, this whole enterprise. Building a sculpture that turns wave sounds into art. Having dancers perform on slippery rocks for an audience of seagulls and fishermen, or a few bewildered tourists who wandered too far from the Marina. Me, standing there trying to freeze the unfreezenable, to make permanent what only matters because it’s ephemeral. But absurdity, it turns out, might be the whole point. The Wave Organ doesn’t make sense. Dance doesn’t make sense. Photography doesn’t make sense. But put them all together on a Tuesday morning with the tide coming in and something happens that transcends sense entirely.
That’s what you’re after. Not beauty, fuck beauty, but truth. The truth of a body moving through space. The truth of light at a specific angle at a specific moment. The truth that all of this, the dance, the photograph, the wave breaking against concrete, exists and then doesn’t, and that’s what makes it matter.
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
haunted in the city I love
I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
Rebecca Solnit
The fog comes in off the Pacific like it owns the place. Because it does. And somewhere in Sea Cliff, where the money lives quiet and the views cost more than most people make in a lifetime, there are ballet dancers on a balcony.
LINES Ballet. Alonzo King. Bodies that have been broken down and rebuilt, over and over, until they can do things that seem to violate the basic laws of physics. And they’re performing on a balcony. Not a stage. Not a theater. A fucking balcony with the Golden Gate Bridge doing its iconic thing in the background.
This is the kind of San Francisco moment that makes you understand why people lose their minds over this city. The collision of high art and high real estate, human grace against industrial grandeur, fog rolling through it all like nature’s own special effect.
These dancers have sacrificed everything, their joints, their social lives, probably their sanity, to move like this. And here they are, suspended between sky and sea, the bridge watching like some massive steel witness to the ephemeral.
Ghost and haunted, Solnit wrote about San Francisco. Yeah. These bodies, this moment, this city, all of it passing through, all of it already memory.
the end of the land
Sutro Baths: a Site Specific Dance with Alonzo King LINES Ballet.
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
Sylvia Plath
Nature is imagination itself
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake, Letters
I point a camera at human bodies moving through space at the edge of the continent, where the cypress trees grow sideways from decades of wind telling them to get the fuck out of the way, and something happens. Or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground out there at Lands End.
The thing about LINES dancers is they don’t negotiate. They don’t ask permission from the landscape. They just move through it like they’ve got every right to be there, which, of course, they do, and the eucalyptus and the fog and the whole brutalized beautiful geography of that place either submits or it doesn’t.
I’m standing there with my camera, and I realize pretty quick that I’m not in control of anything. Not the light coming off the Pacific, not the way a dancer’s leg cuts through the air at the exact moment the fog decides to roll in like some hungover ghost. I’m just there. Witness to a collision between intention and chaos.
This is not the sterile geometry of the studio. This is bodies negotiating with entropy in real time. Wind, gravity, uneven ground, the whole pitiless machinery of the natural world grinding away, and somehow these dancers make it look like they planned it this way. Like they choreographed the fucking wind.
And I start to understand: the camera doesn’t capture this. It just tries to keep up. I’m scrambling, reframing, losing the shot, finding it again, completely at the mercy of these moments that will never happen again. Not like this. Not with this exact light, this exact gesture, this exact second when everything lines up and I think, yes, this, and then it’s gone.
That’s the whole game. Being present for the unrepeatable.
The William Blake quote about imagination… yeah, okay, fine. But what Blake doesn’t mention is that imagination requires a body. Requires muscle and sweat and the risk of looking absolutely ridiculous. These dancers, out there in the trees at the edge of everything, they’re not imagining shit. They’re doing it. And if I’m lucky, if I’m paying attention, I get to document the evidence.
LINES Ballet: Golden Gate Park (Horizontal Trees)
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
LINES Ballet Chinatown
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.
LINES Chinatown Ballet
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