Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching. H. P. Lovecraft
Nov 19, 2021 | Categories: Industries | Comments Off on La Réunion (again) with LINES Ballet
Translation: Photographer and videographer (but also director, teacher and researcher), Jamie Lyons has been pursuing fraternal companionship for several years with choreographer Alonzo King.
During his first visit to Reunion, he followed the company in its explorations of the wild and basaltic landscapes of our island which inspired the sublime Pole Star . Armed with his camera and a camera, he captured and staged his dancers in the natural settings of the Niagara waterfall, Mafate or Piton de la Fournaise to draw a series of snapshots and sketches where the rock, mist and emerald of great dreams frame the grace and energy of bodies.
A magnificent dance walk in these natural monuments that we rediscover here, more beautiful than ever, through an inspired and unique American perspective.
Gallery Exhibit Dance
How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time. W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity? Seneca the Elder
Sometimes,” I ventured, “it doesn’t occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her… Willa Cather, My Ántonia
It was humanity’s ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more. Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
Jul 04, 2021 | Categories: Solipsism | Comments Off on Seven Week Charlie
I lean all my weight on the porcelain ledge, I draw my face closer until it touches the mirror. The eyes, nose, and mouth disappear. Nothing is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes. A silky, white down covers the great slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it is a geological embossed map. And, in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me. I cannot say I recognize the details. But the whole thing gives me an impression of something seen before which stupefies me: I slip quietly off to sleep. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Jun 10, 2021 | Categories: Industries, Solipsism | Comments Off on The face lights up
If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle. Vincent van Gogh
When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe. Nikola Tesla
May 30, 2021 | Categories: Solipsism | Comments Off on Two Week Charle
Riot of Spring: Inspired by realized and imagined rites of spring, this intermedia Chocolate Heads project interpolates “liveness”, seeks communion and finds love. Rehearsed and filmed partially over Zoom and in landmark locations on the Stanford campus, Riot of Spring is a glowing testament to a compelling and irresistible collaboration. Choreography: Aleta Hayes; Director of Photography and Visual Design: Jamie Lyons; Music: Harriet Brown.
A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
In the world of Peloton, exercise-at-home apps, and dance classes on Zoom, is physical co-location necessary? Join us for a discussion about the ethics of using digital ecosystems for training performance artists.
Working at the emerging intersections of Art + Tech
I’ll be appearing at the Art + Tech: Salon Showcase talking about collaborating with Aleta Hayes and Samer Al-Saber as well as with other diverse Stanford artists, faculty, and practitioners working at the emerging intersections of Art and Technology.
But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks. Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
