I left a six month old baby at home to chase this thing. Let that sit in your chest for a minute. I walked away from someone who doesn’t understand time yet, who won’t remember my absence but felt it in their bones anyway, to go stand on a volcano half a world away with a dancer and a camera.
So ask I have to ask myself in the most silent, most honest hour I can stomach: was it necessary? Did I have to go, or was I running? Because there’s a difference between necessity and escape, and a six month old can’t tell the difference but I sure as shit can.
Here’s the fear nobody mentions about travel: it’s not just the vague dread of being far from familiar comforts. It’s the specific, named terror of what I left behind. What might happen while I’m gone. What I might miss that can never be retrieved. That shadow I can’t escape? It’s not just my neuroses and my vision problems. It’s also a baby’s face, the weight of their need, the sound they make that only I know how to answer.
I carried that to the Indian Ocean. It was there on top of the volcano whether I want to admit it or not. Every frame I shot, that abandonment was in it. Not abandonment like neglect. Abandonment like the necessary, terrible choice to pursue the thing that commands me even when it costs something irreplaceable.
So when I’m digging into myself for the deep answer about why I make images, I need to include this: Would I leave a six month old to do it? Did I? And if the answer is yes, if I looked at that sleeping baby and still got on the plane, then I better make sure what I brought back was worth it. Not worth it in some marketplace sense, but necessary in my bones. Born from compulsion so deep I’d sacrifice presence for it.
The spiritual testing isn’t just about being far from my habits. It’s about being far from the person who needs me most, who can’t understand why I’m not there. That’s the graver science. That’s what brings me back to myself. Not as some free agent artist pursuing vision, but as someone who chose this hunger over that specific human being, at that specific unrepeatable moment in my development.
The dancer on that volcano was making shapes in space that would disappear. I was capturing moments that would vanish. Meanwhile, a six month old was becoming a seven month old without me there to witness it. I can never get that back. Travel won’t erase that choice. Distance won’t justify it. My shadow knows what I did.
So describe it with humble, ruthless sincerity: what I saw and felt and loved and lost and abandoned to be there. The way volcanic rock felt under my feet while someone else was probably walking my baby in circles at 3 AM. The specific quality of light through jungle canopy while I was missing the specific quality of light through the nursery window at dawn.
If my ordinary life with that baby felt poor compared to the adventure, don’t blame the life. Blame myself. Admit I’m not poet enough yet to call forth the richness of a six month old’s laugh, the tragedy and comedy of a diaper change, the volcanic emotional landscape of early parenthood. Because for a real creator, there’s no poverty in that, no indifferent subject matter.
But I went anyway. And if it was necessity, if I would have died inside if I hadn’t gone, if the impulse to make those images was as demanding as the impulse to care for my child, then build my life in accordance with that truth. Own the brutality of it. Don’t hide behind pretty justifications about art and purpose.
The images that came from this trip are good only if they arose from genuine necessity. Only if they’re worth what they cost. Only if they contain not just the dancer and the volcano and the jungle, but also the ghost of what I left behind. The fear. The guilt. The shadow that followed me there and back.
That’s the only way to judge them. Did they have to exist? Were they worth a piece of my child’s infancy that I can never reclaim? The volcano knows the answer. So do the dancers. So does the baby, in ways they won’t be able to articulate for years.
Francis Bacon painted the shit we’re all too chickenshit to admit we feel at 3 AM when the numbness wears off. Those screaming popes aren’t about religion or some art history circle jerk, they’re about power eating itself alive, about the cage we’re all trapped in whether we’re wearing purple vestments or a stained t-shirt.
He took Velázquez’s smug Renaissance prince and ripped his face off to show us what’s underneath all that authority: pure, howling terror. The mouth open like a wound. And Francis Bacon did it fifty times because once wasn’t enough, because the scream doesn’t stop just because you captured it.
He painted meat because we ARE meat, beautiful rotting gorgeous meat, and all our pretensions about the soul and dignity are just curtains we hang to pretend we’re not livestock. Those transparent cages in Francis Bacon’s paintings? That’s the social contract. That’s civilization.
I can see right through the bars but I’m still stuck inside.
Bacon was a sadomasochist, a drunk, a magnificent disaster who somehow channeled all that damage into something that makes me feel less alone in my own damage. His figures writhe and dissolve because that’s what it feels like to be human when the lies are striped away. No redemption, no hope, no bullshit, just the raw fact of existence screaming back at me from a purple void.
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man.
Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a shit about my feelings or my careful planning. I’m terrified of being the father who fucks this up. Who makes him scared of something beautiful. Who ruins the moment by being too cautious or too reckless or too whatever inadequacy I’m carrying around that day.
But there he is. Sunset light turning everything gold and impossible. The wind’s steady, the boat’s heeling just enough to feel alive, and Charlie’s looking out at the water like he’s seeing the world for the first time. Which, in a way, he is. This is his first time understanding that the horizon is not just a line but a promise. That movement can be silent. That wind has power.
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all. Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman got it: “Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only.” Easy to say when you’re writing poetry, harder when you’ve got a three-year-old who can’t swim yet and his whole life ahead of him and you’re responsible for not being the asshole who traumatizes him before he’s old enough to have real memories.
But here’s the thing: he’s not scared. I’m scared. He’s just… present. Taking it in. The way kids do before we teach them to be afraid of everything, to calculate risk, to worry about all the things that could go wrong instead of just experiencing the thing that’s happening right now.
Monterey Bay at sunset is one of those places that makes you believe in something bigger than yourself, even if you don’t know what that something is. The kelp forests below, the whales that sometimes surface, the cold Pacific water that’s been traveling for thousands of miles just to arrive here, now, at this exact moment when my son is seeing it for the first time.
I’m thinking about all the times I almost didn’t do this. All the reasons not to: too young, too risky, too much could go wrong. All the ways fear masquerades as prudence. All the moments I could have stolen from him by being too careful, too worried, too convinced that my job is to protect him from everything instead of showing him how to navigate it.
The boat heels. Charlie laughs. That’s it. That’s the whole story. A three-year-old laughing because the boat’s tipping and the wind’s blowing and the water’s rushing past and none of the rules that govern his small contained life on land apply out here.
“Reckless O soul, exploring.” Yeah. Reckless. Taking a toddler sailing. Believing that he needs this, needs to feel small against something vast, needs to understand that the world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than the confines of his bedroom or his backyard. Reckless to think that a father who’s made every mistake possible might somehow get this one thing right.
But the light’s fading now, turning everything purple and pink, and Charlie’s still watching the water, still taking it in, and I’m thinking: this is what I’m supposed to give him. Not safety, safety’s a lie we tell ourselves. But this. Experience. The understanding that the world is worth exploring even when, especially when, you don’t know what you’re doing.
Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological beds that moved on their own like some dream of Cronenberg doing Genet.
And Victor Garcia , this mad Argentine genius who’d abandoned medical school and architecture, whose family never forgave him for it, who was 35 years old and already burning through his life like a meteor, Garcia understood what needed to happen. He’d grown up in Tucuman province around indigenous Indians, absorbed their magic, their sense of ritual tied to elemental forces. He studied biology and was obsessed with embryonic life, with creation itself. “I don’t know how to live day-to-day,” he said. “Living kills me.” So he lived through theater, the only place where his particular form of existence made sense.
For Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a play about whores and bishops and generals and the revolution happening outside while people fuck and perform power inside a brothel that’s really a house of mirrors where nothing is real and everything is, Garcia understood you can’t put this on a stage and separate the audience from the action because then you’re lying. You’re pretending you’re not complicit, you’re not the voyeur, you’re not IN the brothel yourself.
Victor Garcia’s production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony
Garcia wanted the audience “suspended in a void, with nothing in front of it nor behind it, only precipices.” So he gutted that old São Paulo theater and made you sit on vertiginous balconies wrapped around this 65-foot pierced tunnel of plastic and steel, 86 tons of it, all handmade, artisanal, built from real materials because Garcia rejected anything fake. His collaborator Michel Launay, son of a blacksmith, welded together old hospital beds scavenged from basements in Coimbra, carcasses of wrecked boats found on beaches, sheep bones cleaned from slaughterhouse carcasses, rusted 2CVs transformed into mechanical bulls that bellowed. Nothing from a theatrical supply shop. Everything real, just repurposed, transfigured.
You weren’t watching theater in that space. You were dangling over an abyss watching actors cling to metal ladders, perform on platforms, scramble along the sides like animals driven insane in zoo cages. Garcia, mime and dancer by training, architect by education, anarchist by soul, created movement like a choreographer, but organic, visceral. He didn’t explain himself through language. He communicated through skin, through sensation. He wanted actors who could give everything, professionals or amateurs, didn’t matter as long as they could strip themselves bare and return to an Edenic state. Bodies without civilization. Flesh speaking directly.
And here’s where it gets real: this was 1969, under Brazil’s military dictator General Garrastazu Médici. Nilda Maria, the actress playing Chantal, the character who leaves the brothel to join the revolution, got arrested for actual anti-government activities. Her children were taken away, sent to Public Welfare. Art bleeding into life bleeding into art. Genet himself, who came to São Paulo in July 1970 to see what this wild man Garcia had done, had to petition the governor’s wife for their release.
The man who wrote the play watched actors perform his revolution inside a steel cage while the actual dictatorship disappeared one of his performers. You can’t write that kind of poetry. It just happens.
And Genet, who was nobody’s easy mark, who spent his life understanding that power is always a performance and revolution is always suspect, called this the best production of his text. The definitive one. An international reference for Genet studies. Peter Brook, who saw Garcia’s Yerma, called it “one of the greatest masterpieces he’d ever seen.” From a production that ran for 20 months, won 13 critics’ awards, and was completely, absolutely impossible to transfer anywhere else.
The thing that kills me, is that Garcia was this “citizen of oblivion,” as the writer Florence Delay called him when he died in 1982 at 48. He passed like a meteor. He hated theater tradition, hated its codes and fakery and the whole pretense of “craft”, he was an “organized anarchist,” a master of stagecraft who used his mastery to destroy convention. He worked from what he called a “secret alchemy,” loved geometry but hated rationality, created cosmic chaos that somehow organized itself.
This thing in São Paulo existed only in that moment, in that city, under that dictatorship, with those specific bodies in that specific space. Commercially unfeasible. Logistically insane. So only São Paulo saw it. Only those people, suspended over those precipices, got to experience what some Iranian professor later called “the Sistine Chapel of Theatre” when he saw the film, a film that a few private collectors guarded jealously for years… left invisible and hardly known.
Célia Helena, Jofre Soares, Ney Latorraca, Nilda Maria, and Garcia’s core collaborators, the French actress Michèle Oppenot, the Spanish powerhouse Nuria Espert who gave herself to his enterprises “with the energy of a Pasionaria”, all those actors didn’t just perform IN this structure, they became part of the architecture of transgression itself. Moving through those 20 vertical meters like human prayer, like obscenity made sacred or sacredness made obscene, which is the same thing in Genet’s universe.
Garcia wanted to mount The Balcony in France but couldn’t find a space at least 30 meters high. Many of his projects aborted, The Screens, François Villon, The Golem, a French Balcony. It took him seven years to mount Gilgamesh. He died planning Lorca’s The Public and Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. He burned through his own life the way he burned through stages and convention and the patience of funding bodies who never quite understood what this Argentine exile, who felt himself stateless, a citizen of the world or of nowhere, was trying to build.
This is what happens when someone decides that the conventions aren’t just wrong, they’re offensive. When craft meets obsession meets a fundamental unwillingness to compromise with comfort. You destroy 86 tons of theater to build 86 tons of truth, even if that truth only exists for a few months in one city under a dictatorship that’s arresting your actors. Even if it kills you.
The audience sitting on those walkways probably didn’t know if they were safe. Good. Safety is the enemy of this kind of art. You’re supposed to feel like you might fall into the machinery, into the mirror, into the brothel, into the void itself. That’s the point.
And then it was gone. All that metal, all that vision, dismantled. Unrepeatable. Perfect.
I met Ruth Escobar many years later, when I was touring Brazil with Mabou Mines doing Gospel at Colonus and Hajj. By then she was a legend, a politician, a cultural leader who’d helped orchestrate Mabou Mines’ invitation. But more than that: she was the woman who’d had the audacity and the resources and the sheer fucking nerve to let Garcia destroy her theater. Who understood that some art requires destruction first.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social media contacts, this is when we gather in a concert hall to watch swans and elephants and kangaroos rendered in flesh and verse.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It never is.
I’m trying to capture something. Something that might matter when we look back at this moment, this strange liminal space between one version of America and whatever fresh hell or hope was coming next. I’m watching bodies communicate what words had long since failed to convey. Grace under pressure. Discipline. The small miracle of humans doing something difficult and beautiful just because they can.
Stanford’s intelligentsia filling the seats, stealing an hour or so from their electoral anxiety to watch art do what art does, remind us we’re more than our worst impulses, our Twitter feeds, our red-or-blue team jerseys.
The performers don’t mention the elephant in the room. They embody elephants instead. Smart. Honest. The only sane response, really.
Carnival of the Animals Wendy Whelan, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Francesca Harper October 27, 202 Stanford Live Bing Concert Hall
Here’s what happened when the Duke walked into God’s house with a swing band and told the congregation to get off their knees:
September 1965, Grace Cathedral, and Duke Ellington’s bringing the whole damn orchestra into this Gothic pile of stone and righteousness like he’s staging a raid on heaven itself. Not asking permission. Not apologizing. Just rolling in with Harry Carney’s baritone sax and that whole gorgeous wall of sound and saying, yeah, we’re going to talk to God now, and we’re going to do it in 4/4 time.
Sacred music… it’s supposed to move you, supposed to grab you by the throat and shake something loose in your chest. The Europeans figured out how to do it with pipe organs big enough to fill a cathedral with sound that pins you to the pew. Duke just said, well, what if we did that but made you want to dance? What if the holy spirit showed up in a rhythm section?
I spent years touring with Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus, and I watched it happen every single night. Saw audience members catch the spirit like it was contagious, and it was contagious. You’d see it start in one person, this involuntary movement, this opening up, and then it would ripple through the house. People who came in buttoned up and skeptical would be on their feet, crying, shouting, completely undone by what the music was doing to them. I once knew a woman who would have an orgasm when she heard Beethoven’s Fifth live at the symphony. Not metaphorically. Actually. The music would take her body somewhere her mind couldn’t follow. That’s not entertainment. That’s not even performance. That’s something older and more dangerous than either of those things. That’s ecstasy in the original sense, standing outside yourself because the sound won’t let you stay where you are.
Watch the faces in that cathedral audience. That’s the look of people realizing their whole framework just got detonated. Because here’s Ellington, this elegant genius who could have played it safe his whole career, who could have kept jazz in the nightclubs where white America felt comfortable with it, and instead he’s claiming this space. Not as a novelty. Not as some cultural outreach program. As a rightful heir to the whole tradition of humans making noise to touch something bigger than themselves.
The clergy’s sitting there in their vestments, probably spent weeks debating whether this was appropriate, whether you could really worship with a trombone section, whether letting jazz through those doors would somehow dilute the mystery. And Duke’s answering them without saying a word: this is prayer. This is devotion. This swagger, this joy, this complicated syncopated beauty, this is what it sounds like when humans try to speak in a language bigger than words.
Here’s the thing about rehearsals that nobody wants to admit: they’re not more truthful because they’re purer. They’re more truthful because the lie hasn’t settled yet, hasn’t hardened into the kind of official story you can sell tickets to.
A rehearsal is where readings collide, actors, designers, text, space, institution, like cars entering an intersection nobody bothered to put lights at, and you can hear the metal crunch, you can smell the burning rubber. Bakhtin called this heteroglossia, a condition where multiple voices insist on speaking at once, refusing synthesis, refusing to shut up and let one voice dominate, and he was writing about novels but he might as well have been writing about rehearsal rooms where actors are advancing incompatible interpretations, designers are arguing with the space, the text is speaking in registers that contradict themselves, sometimes in the same goddamn sentence. Meaning exists here not as a conclusion but as a force field, something generated through friction rather than resolution. Unstable?
Yeah. That’s the whole fucking point.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
But let’s be clear because I’m tired of romanticizing this: rehearsal is not a utopia. Power is everywhere. Someone decides when rehearsal starts and when it ends. Someone decides which experiments get repeated and which are quietly abandoned like embarrassing relatives nobody wants to talk about. Time, money, institutional pressure, these don’t disappear just because we call the space “process,” just because we use words like “exploration” and “discovery.” Rehearsal can lie too. It can hide coercion under the language of collaboration, normalize exhaustion as devotion, mistake hierarchy for necessity, for the natural order of things. The difference is not that rehearsal lacks power but that power is still visible, still contestable, still arguing with itself instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
Actors fuck around with the text, and I mean that reverently but also with full awareness that not everyone is equally free to fuck around. Some bodies are allowed more risk than others. Some failures are forgiven, written off as “trying something bold.” Some are remembered, weaponized, held against you. Treating the text as alive, as something that might bite back, is not a neutral act. It’s negotiated. It depends on who you are, what you look like, how much institutional capital you’ve stockpiled. Barthes‘ death of the Author didn’t abolish authority, it just redistributed it, scattered it around the room like shrapnel, and rehearsal is where that redistribution is felt most sharply, where authorship hasn’t yet been consolidated into a single voice that can pass itself off as inevitable, as what the text “always meant.”
Barthes distinguished between readerly texts that deliver meaning as a finished product, shrink-wrapped and ready for consumption, and writerly texts that demand the reader’s participation in making meaning, that make you work for it. Rehearsal is writerly not because it’s unfinished but because it refuses to pretend that meaning arrives whole, fully formed, handed down from some theatrical Mount Sinai. Performance, at least in its conventional form, tends to reverse that labor. It consolidates. It stabilizes. It packages. It asks the audience to receive coherence as if it were natural rather than manufactured, as if somebody didn’t spend six weeks beating it into shape.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Susan Sontag warned us about interpretation’s hunger to dominate, to reduce art to content, to extract a meaning that can be paraphrased, sold, consumed, forgotten. Rehearsals don’t escape this impulse because nothing escapes this impulse, we’re all trapped in the same late capitalist machinery that wants to turn everything into product. But rehearsals delay it. They allow surfaces to remain surfaces a little longer. They allow sensation, rhythm, awkwardness, contradiction to exist without immediate justification, without having to explain themselves to some imaginary audience focus group. But this delay is fragile, provisional, always under threat. Someone always arrives eventually asking “What does it mean?” and they’re not asking because they’re stupid or bourgeois, they’re asking because institutions require legibility to function, because money needs to know what it’s paying for.
Derrida showed us that meaning is always deferred, always incomplete, structured by différance, that slippage where meaning is always somewhere else, always not-quite-here. Rehearsal makes that visible. You can see it happening. Performance often works to conceal it, not always maliciously, not always consciously, but functionally, structurally. The problem isn’t that performance lies. Everything lies. The problem is that performance claims closure it cannot actually sustain, pretends the argument is over when the argument is never over. Every performance is haunted by the rehearsals it suppresses, by the alternatives it discarded, by the meanings it couldn’t afford to keep alive because you can’t have six different interpretations of the same moment all happening simultaneously in front of an audience who paid money to not be confused.
And this is where my own position becomes compromised, and I need to name that because otherwise I’m just another asshole pretending to stand outside the system while benefiting from it. I am not neutral here. I am making decisions. I am arguing forcefully for one configuration of theatrical value over another. This essay is controlled, cohesive, decisive. That’s not an accident. I’m not letting it sprawl into incoherence just to prove some point about multiplicity. Authority doesn’t disappear just because I critique it. It relocates. It hides in different places. The ethical question isn’t whether authority exists but how it is exercised, acknowledged, and made vulnerable to revision. And I don’t know if I’m doing that well enough. I don’t know if anyone can.
Brecht understood this. His Verfremdungseffekt wasn’t about chaos for its own sake, wasn’t about breaking things just to watch them break. It was about responsibility. Showing the apparatus doesn’t eliminate power, it exposes it, makes it visible, says: these choices were made by people, and they could have been made differently, and you should be thinking about why they were made this way and not some other way. Rehearsal does this by default, by accident almost. Performance has to choose to do it, and most performances choose not to because it’s harder, it’s riskier, it pisses people off.
Gay McAuley’s ethnographic work matters here precisely because it refuses romance, refuses to turn rehearsal into some fetish object of authenticity. She shows rehearsal as procedural, negotiated, contingent, a space governed by different rules than performance but not free of rules, never free of rules because there’s no outside, there’s no pure space untouched by power and commerce and all the compromises we make to get anything done. Failure is permitted, but not infinitely. Experimentation is valued, but within limits, within budgets, within schedules. Rehearsal is honest not because it tells the truth but because it reveals the conditions under which truths are produced and abandoned, chosen and discarded.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Herbert Blau reminds us that theatre is built on impossibility: presence slipping into absence even as you try to grab it, coherence unraveling in time no matter how tightly you stitch it together. Performance tries to mask this with wholeness, with the illusion of completion, with a clean ending that ties everything up. Rehearsal doesn’t overcome impossibility. It works inside it, makes art out of the wreckage. But, and this is crucial, and this is where I have to stop myself from going too far, rehearsal cannot be the end point. If it were, if we just stayed in rehearsal forever, it would become another aestheticized refuge, another fetish of authenticity, another way of avoiding the harder question of how to make performances that don’t lie about what they are.
What I want is not endless rehearsal. What I want is performance that refuses closure.
Not performances that collapse into process porn, that congratulate themselves on being unfinished like that’s some kind of virtue in itself, but performances that retain contradiction as an active force, as something alive and dangerous. Performances that don’t pretend the argument is over just because the lights went down and the audience clapped. Performances that stage decision-making without pretending those decisions are final, without pretending they’re the only possible decisions. Performances that allow meanings to coexist without resolving into a single authorized reading that everyone can agree on and forget about on the drive home.
This means performances that show their seams, yes, but more than that, performances that structurally resist finalization, that build incompleteness into their architecture. That allow audiences to encounter multiplicity not as confusion to be solved, not as a problem the director failed to fix, but as a condition to be inhabited, to be lived with. That don’t hand over interpretation pre-chewed like baby food, but don’t abdicate responsibility either, don’t hide behind “it’s whatever you want it to be” as if that’s not its own form of cowardice.
I don’t want to see what you decided the thing means. I want to see what it’s still struggling to become. I want to see the authority that chose this version and feel that it could have chosen otherwise, that there was real choice involved, real risk, real possibility of failure. I want performances that remember rehearsal not as something they outgrew, not as training wheels they removed once they learned to ride, but as something they carry forward, unresolved, still fighting with itself.
Rehearsal isn’t the last honest room in the building. That was a lie I was telling myself because it was comforting, because it gave me somewhere to hide from the compromises I make every time I walk into a theatre and pretend to know what I’m talking about.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Honesty is harder than that. Honesty is making performances that don’t seal themselves shut, that don’t pretend the mess is over, that don’t package contradiction as coherence and sell it back to us as meaning we can consume and move on from. Honesty is admitting that I want something maybe impossible: performances that function like performances, that have beginnings and endings and tickets and audiences, but that refuse to do the one thing performances are supposed to do, which is resolve, conclude, finish, let you off the hook.
Everything after rehearsal doesn’t have to be advertising. It can be an argument that refuses to end, that follows you out of the theatre and into the parking lot and into your car and keeps arguing with itself while you’re trying to drive home, that won’t let you settle, won’t let you decide what you think because it hasn’t decided what it thinks, because maybe there’s nothing to decide, maybe the point is staying in the discomfort, staying in the question, refusing the comfort of an answer.
But I don’t know. Maybe that’s another romantic lie. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with endings, with commitment, with saying “this is what it is” and standing by it. Maybe what I’m calling honesty is just another form of evasion, another way of avoiding the responsibility of making a claim and defending it.
All I know is I’d rather watch something argue with itself than watch something pretend it has all the answers. I’d rather see the collision than the cleanup. I’d rather leave confused and alive than satisfied and dead.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at me like a song I heard once at 4 a.m. that I’ve been trying to remember ever since. Here’s what keeps dragging me back: these guys had almost zero interest in actual theater (Barthes being the exception), and yet their criticism is absolutely soaked in theatrical logic. They were writing theater without admitting it, which makes it realer somehow.
Take Poulet. His whole method is about inhabitation, about entering what he calls the authorial cogito. You surrender your own moment in time to think as Racine thinks. This isn’t interpretation as some grad school parlor trick, some puzzle you crack to impress your dissertation committee. This is interpretation as a durationalevent, a sustained occupation of another consciousness. You move in. You unpack. You let their furniture rearrange your skull. Bachelard works differently but arrives somewhere similar. He treats imagination not as expression but as architecture, building interior worlds room by room, image by image, each one activated in time by whoever’s paying attention. Before Barthes even gets around to shattering the whole notion of the unified author, these critics are already treating consciousness as something that unfolds, collides, withdraws. Something alive. Something with teeth.
Their analyses don’t read like arguments. They read like performances. Consciousness, in their writing, becomes this mutable field, a space with boundaries that won’t hold still, where images appear, loop back, crash into each other. Vision matters. Rhythm matters. Duration matters. This is theater whether they cop to it or not. A performance happens inside whoever’s reading: images hit their marks, miss them completely, return changed. All of it unfolding in time and darkness, like some song stuck in your head that mutates every time it cycles through.
Barthes eventually just admits the theatricality. His shift away from the unified author toward plurality, grain, pleasure, that’s not abandoning phenomenology. That’s re-staging it. Meaning stops living in some single consciousness you can inhabit and starts living in the event of reading itself, in that live encounter between text and whoever picked up the book. Where Poulet wants coherence, Barthes introduces drift. Where Bachelard constructs rooms, Barthes opens trapdoors and watches you fall.
I don’t think of imagination as something you do. I think of it as somewhere you go. A room with its own weather, its own quality of light. When I work on a play, I’m treating the theater itself as consciousness made physical, a space built to hold and transform psychological processes. A dramatic text isn’t some idea waiting to be illustrated, isn’t a thesis looking for visual aids. It’s a mind under pressure, organized by rhythm, obsession, what it can’t quite say, what it wants too badly. It’s not pure expression. It’s form doing damage control. It’s someone trying not to scream who screams anyway.
Directing is an act of assimilation. I absorb the virtual consciousness embedded in the text, but not through identification. Identification is narcissistic, a mirror game that kills everything interesting about difference. I’m not projecting myself onto the text like some bore at a party making everything about them. You know who you are. I’m creating space inside my own head for the text’s logic to operate. I open the door. I say, come in, burn the place down if that’s what needs to happen. In rehearsal, that logic mutates. It gets bodies, breath, resistance. What comes out the other end isn’t fidelity. It’s variation. A new consciousness assembled from the collision of playwright and director, warped further by designers, actors, the limitations of the room itself. What emerges is bastard consciousness. Hybrid and dangerous and beautiful.
The spectator comes last. If the ideal spectator even exists (I’m not convinced, though I’d love for you to prove me wrong), they don’t receive a message. They receive a situation. What lands isn’t the play but a layered transmission: the playwright’s consciousness filtered through mine, bent again through performance. Consciousness as turducken, excessive and unstable and impossible to fully process. You leave queasy, which means something worked.
Barthes gets closest to naming what happens to the spectator in Leaving the Movie Theater, which is, sidebar, my undergrad film theory students’ favorite essay every quarter. Spectatorship there isn’t about absorption or interpretation. It’s about residue. You don’t exit with meaning locked down. You exit with your consciousness slightly altered, dulled, overexposed, drifting back into the social world at a weird angle. What matters isn’t what you understood. What matters is what won’t leave you alone. What’s in your bloodstream now. Spectatorship as temporal fallout, as consciousness after impact instead of consciousness at attention. Theater, like cinema, does its real work not in the moment you’re focused but in the uneven dispersal afterward. You walk out into the street and the light’s different. Something shifted.
For clarity’s sake, I work with a stripped-down model: three subjects. Playwright, director, audience. This isn’t some ontological truth. It’s a heuristic, a way of tracking how consciousness moves through theatrical form. In reality, every pole fractures instantly. Playwrights are never singular, directors answer to institutions, audiences never cohere into anything unified. But the abstraction lets me ask one precise question: how does subjectivity travel? How does one consciousness reach another without colonizing it, without erasing what makes it separate, without pretending we’re not fundamentally alone in our skulls?
The question matters because I’m not interested in identification. Identification is safe. It’s a mirror game. It’s dead on arrival. Assimilation is riskier, requires hospitality, requires opening yourself to foreign psychological processes without any guarantee of harmony. Sometimes the text refuses entry. Sometimes it colonizes you. Sometimes it cracks open fault lines in your thinking you didn’t know existed. Failure isn’t the problem. Failure is proof something real is happening, proof you’re actually in the room with something that has its own life independent of you.
This is where contemporary theory gets complicated. Hans Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater sees the collapse of unified perspective but often evacuates subjectivity completely, replaces consciousness with systems and effects. Structure with nobody home. Rancière gives us the emancipated spectator but still treats perception as political arrangement rather than phenomenological event. Blau, and I absolutely adore this guy, gets closest when he describes the audience as constitutively missing itself, always out of sync with its own experience. What these frameworks sometimes lack is an account of what it actually feels like for consciousness to move through theatrical time. The sensation. The vertigo. The fact of it in your body.
Phenomenology, for all its blind spots and limitations, gives us that account, especially when you let it be theatrical instead of forcing it to stay theoretical and pure. Theater doesn’t represent consciousness. It stages consciousness. It builds conditions where subjectivities collide without merging, where assimilation is temporary and unstable, where imagination becomes somewhere we enter together but never occupy the same way. We’re there together but we’re not having the same experience. Alone together, which might be the most honest thing two consciousnesses can be.
That instability is the entire point. It’s hospitable. It’s dangerous. It’s the only way any of this works. You have to risk getting lost. You have to risk the text changing you more than you change it. You walk into the darkness not knowing who you’ll be when the lights come up.
We met in prison. San Quentin, to be exact. Which sounds like the beginning of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony. Turns out it was the former.
When we were first dating she’s took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco that everyone else in the city pretends doesn’t exist unless they need somewhere to dump their industrial waste or park their toxic cleanup projects. I’ve got my camera, because I guess that’s what you bring when the woman you’re falling for wants to show you her life’s work.
And the light there. Unbelievable. The light in that part of the city is something else. It’s industrial and ethereal at the same time. It bounces off the Bay, cuts through the ruins of the shipyard, illuminates the contradictions in every frame. Beauty and poison sharing the same golden hour.
We’re walking, and we’re talking, and we’re doing what post docs do when they’re falling in love: we’re sharing our triumphs and our traumas. The writing that works and the writing that don’t. The advisors who get it and the ones who never will. I’m shooting. She’s explaining the impossible project of trying to make sense of environmental racism, of green gentrification, of what happens when a neighborhood finally gets cleaned up just in time to price out everyone who survived the contamination.
And somewhere in there, I capture this image. The one that would eventually become the cover of Toxic City. Her book. Her years of research and resistance and documentation of how Bayview-Hunters Point has fought for cleanup to mean something more than displacement, for environmental justice to be inseparable from reparations.
That cover image isn’t just a photograph. It’s a record of where we started. Not a bad origin story, all things considered.
From the publisher: Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.
Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again.
Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but it’s never the same. Each iteration shaves away another molecule of doubt, adds another layer of intention. It’s meditation. It’s obsession. It’s beautiful and slightly insane.
The light in that studio, harsh overhead fluorescents mixed with whatever San Francisco sunshine manages to sneak through the windows… it’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. But it’s honest. This is the light of work. Real work. The kind that makes your body sing and scream simultaneously.
Photography, that’s the hunt for the single perfect moment. The decisive instant. Cartier-Bresson and all that. You wait, you breathe, you click. One frame that tells the whole story. But video? Or Motion, or whatever you want to call it is something else entirely. It’s the long view. It’s duration and accumulation. You’re not looking for the moment; you’re capturing a process. The sweat building. The adjustment in a shoulder blade. The way a dancer marks through a sequence first, then commits. Then explodes.
You can not cheat with video. The lens sees everything, the stumble, the recalibration, the moment where muscle memory kicks in and transforms effort into grace. The camera sees what the body knows before the mind catches up.
These LINES dancers, working Alonzo’s vocabulary, all that length, that impossible extension, they’re translating something ineffable into flesh and space. And you’re there, camera rolling, trying to honor that translation without getting in its way.
