Alonzo King LINES Ballet hosted an evening of music, dance, and discussion highlighting the company’s upcoming Spring Season world-premiere of SUTRA. Held at the Taube Atrium Theater, Wilsey Opera Center
Heterogeneous Spectacles
Your whole life is a rehearsal
Tremble: your whole life is a rehearsal for the moment you are in now.
Judith Malina
Look at him, Babatunji is DESTROYING himself in that studio and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give because destruction is the only path to the real shit, not the performance, not opening night where everyone pretends they understand what they’re seeing. This. The repetition. The muscle memory. The same goddamn sequence until your body finally admits defeat and does what your mind has been screaming at it to do for the last two hours.
Your whole life is a rehearsal, Malina said, but what she didn’t say is that the rehearsal IS the thing, the performance is just the echo of all these private moments of absolute commitment to something bigger than your own tired bones and screaming tendons. This is what separates the real ones from the pretenders: the willingness to annihilate yourself where nobody’s keeping score. No cameras, no critics, just the brutal honesty of your own limitations staring back at you in the mirror saying “not good enough, again.” And he DOES. He tries again. That’s the whole game right there, not inspiration, not passion, just the grim acknowledgment that excellence is built in moments exactly like this one, when quitting would be so much easier than whatever the hell he’s doing to himself right now.
The rehearsal never ends because the moment you stop rehearsing is the moment you start dying as an artist.
Jasper Ridge
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…
Robinson Jeffers
Stanford, that great monument to disruption, that factory of future-makers and world-shapers, that gleaming campus of kids who believe they’re gonna code their way out of mortality, has this reservoir dam squatting on Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve like a middle finger to the whole enterprise. Jeffers called it decades before the venture capital even showed up. “A concrete dam far off in the mountain”, the only thing he thought might outlast all our iron-age horseshit. And there it sits, proving him half-right already.
The preserve is supposed to be pristine, untouched, a laboratory for studying what the world looks like without us. But that dam says different. That dam says: we were here, we moved water, we made our mark, and this mark will outlast every pitch deck, every algorithm, every fucking innovation that came out of the quad. While the Server farms overheat and the startups implode and the stock options expire worthless, that dumb slab of aggregate and rebar just… persists.
It’s the perfect monument for a place that doesn’t believe in monuments. Stanford’s whole theology is disruption, obsolescence, creative destruction, but here’s this stolid bastard that won’t be disrupted, that’ll be standing there long after the Campus closes.
Jeffers knew. The cities become rust stains. The people become thigh-bones and poems. And somewhere, quiet and patient as geology, a concrete dam waits to have the last word. Not with a bang. Just with the slow, grinding, beautiful indifference of entropy doing what entropy does.
That’s the joke nobody’s laughing at in the innovation capital of the universe.
Women’s March San Francisco 2018
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
Audre Lorde
Women’s March, 2018
San Francisco
Aeschylus Mysians
The Garden Isle. Land of chickens running wild through parking lots, where the roosters crow at three a.m. like they’re announcing the apocalypse, and the trade winds smell of plumeria and possibility.
The Mysians. Three lines remain. “Hail, Caïcus and ye streams of Mysia!” That’s the opening. The hook. The ancient Greek equivalent of “Once upon a time,” except Telephus has just rolled up to his new home in Mysia, speechless because he murdered his maternal uncles, as one does, and he’s got blood guilt hanging over him like a wet beach towel.
Aristotle himself, commented on the unique portrayal in Aeschylus‘ The Mysians of Telephus arriving in Mysia without speaking, highlighting its dramatic elements. The old philosopher recognized something radical in this choice: silence as active presence, muteness as thunder. A character who enters not with grand speeches but with the weight of everything unsaid pressing down on him like atmospheric pressure before a storm.
Site-responsive theatre isn’t about apologizing for what we don’t have. It’s about what is there. And on Kauai, what’s there is everything. The island gives you rivers, the Wailua, flowing down from sacred mountains where chiefs and priests once performed ceremonies that would make Dionysian rites look like a PTA meeting. It gives you ocean. It gives you the kind of volcanic rock that feels older than memory, because it is older than memory. And it gives you an audience that includes chickens. They’re everywhere.
So you start with geography. The Caïcus River in ancient Mysia? We’ve got something better: a stream cutting through forest where the light falls in those cathedral shafts that make atheists reconsider their life choices. The priest of Caïcus’ stream? We’ve got that too, minus the chiton, plus aloha shirt, because we’re in the only place where they are cool.
The production, more a moment, happened at dawn. That’s when Kauai shows off, when the light is still negotiating with the darkness, when the temperature is perfect and the world feels like it’s holding its breath. Telephus emerged from the treeline, silent as the text demands. And here’s what Aristotle understood that we’re only rediscovering: that silence, that speechlessness, becomes its own language when you give it space to breathe. This wasn’t mime, wasn’t pantomime. This was a man carrying blood guilt like luggage he can’t set down, and every gesture, every hesitation, every way he held his body against the landscape told the story louder than words ever could.
Aeschylus Mysians
SFMOMA: Desire Lines – Retrofit
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s
Desire Lines: Retrofit
If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,
I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.
Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
DESIRE LINES: RETROFIT
SFMOMA Performance
thru January 13th
Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hawaiian Automobiles
Stories: Hawaiian Automobiles (all crashed) on the island of Kauai
Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203, The Paris Review, #192, Spring 2010
Kauai Chickens
Stories: the Wanderlust of Kauai Chickens…
We all like chicken
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
They’re everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Like a feathered occupying army that won the war and now they’re just rubbing it in. Parking lots. Golf courses. The tarmac at the goddamn airport. These aren’t your industrialized, factory-farmed abominations pumped full of antibiotics and regret. These are feral. These are the descendants of birds that said “fuck you” to Hurricane Iniki and every subsequent attempt at containment, and they won.
And then there’s me. Lying face-down in a Safeway parking lot at 2 PM, camera pointed at a rooster who couldn’t care less about my creative vision. Hot asphalt burning through my shirt. Some tourist family stepping around me, wondering if you’re having a medical emergency or just another mainlander who’s lost the plot.
I’m both, probably.
But I need that shot. That perfect angle. Ground-level. Eye-to-eye with a creature that has more dignity in its ridiculous comb than you do sprawled out like a crime scene outline between a Corolla and a shopping cart return.
They crow at 3 AM. They crow at noon. They crow when they feel like it, which is always, because they know something I don’t: this is their island now. Everyone else is just visiting. And apparently, I’m visiting while prostrate in the street, trying to capture their magnificence.
The tourists photograph them standing up, like cowards. Tik-Tok them from a safe distance. Think it’s charming. Give it a day. Maybe two. That charm wears off right around the time you’re trying to sleep off your jet lag and some rooster with a Napoleon complex and a voice like a car alarm decides it’s time to announce the dawn. At 4:15 in the morning.
But here’s the thing, and you knew there’d be a thing, they’re kind of magnificent in their refusal to give a shit. They’ve achieved what we all dream about: total freedom from the system, complete autonomy, and unlimited range. They are literally free-range, in the most literal sense possible.
Maybe that’s why I’m down there on the pavement, looking ridiculous, trying to get their portrait. Because deep down, I recognize something. A kinship with anything that refuses to be domesticated, that persists despite every logical reason not to, that announces itself loudly and without apology to a world that mostly wishes it would shut the fuck up.
They’re a reminder that nature doesn’t ask permission. That wildness persists. That sometimes the chickens actually do come home to roost, everywhere, perpetually, and without apology.
I respect that. Even at 4:15 in the morning. Even from the pavement of the Safeway parking lot.
Brecht Knew You Were Full of Shit: On the Work and the Wreckage
So here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem, and here’s the thing: where he says acting, plug in whatever the hell you’re actually doing… writing, painting, fucking, dying, making breakfast, making art, making sense of the wreckage. And that instant he’s talking about? That’s whatever you’re trying to bring into the world before it crushes you. Same rules apply. Same disease. Same impossible cure.
Helene Weigel in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, 1949
Whatever you portray you should always portray
As if it were happening now. Engrossed
The silent crowd sits in the darkness, lured
Away from its routine affairs. Now
The fisherman’s wife is being brought her son whom
The generals have killed. Even what has happened
In her room is wiped out. What is happening here is
Happening now and just the once. To act in this way
Is habitual with you, and now I am advising you
To ally this habit with yet another: that is, your acting should
At the same time express the fact that this instant
On your stage is often repeated; only yesterday
You were acting it, and tomorrow too
Given spectators, there will be a further performance.
Nor should you let the Now blot out the
Previously and Afterwards, nor for that matter whatever
Is even now happening outside the theatre and is similar in kind
Nor even things that have nothing to do with it all – none of this
Should you allow to be entirely forgotten.
So you should simply make the instant
Stand out, without in the process hiding
What you are making it stand out from. Give your acting
That progression of one-thing-after-another, that attitude of
Working up what you have taken on. In this way
You will show the flow of events and also the course
Of your work, permitting the spectator
To experience this Now on many levels, coming from
Previously and
Merging into Afterwards, also having much else now
Alongside it. He is sitting not only
In your theatre but also
In the world.Bertolt Brecht, John Willett, trans.
Poems Brecht wrote between 1947-1953.
Bertolt Brecht understood what most of us spend our entire fucking lives trying to avoid: you’re always performing, and the performance is always a lie, except when it isn’t. Which is all the time. See the problem?
This Bertolt Brecht poem, it’s him doing what he did best, which was taking the thing everyone thinks they understand (in this case, acting, but swap in “living” or “writing” or “creating anything that matters”) and showing you how you’ve been doing it wrong because you’ve been doing it without thinking about doing it. The Verfremdungseffekt, that alienation effect he was always on about, wasn’t some academic parlor trick. It was survival equipment for maintaining your soul in a world designed to steal it through comfort and routine.
The Now, this immediate, authentic, raw moment we’re all supposedly chasing, is horseshit if you pretend it exists in a vacuum. Your Now is built on ten thousand Befores and it’s rotting into a million Afters, and if you’re not holding all of that in your head simultaneously, you’re just another schmuck pretending to be present while actually being nowhere at all.
Brecht says make the instant stand out without hiding what you’re making it stand out from. Translation: be here now, but remember you’re also there then, and the person experiencing your work is sitting in their own shit-show of a life, not just in your theater. Don’t let them forget the world outside is burning. Don’t let them forget they’re complicit. Don’t let yourself forget.
I get it, this idea that whatever task I’m performing, whatever instant I’m creating, it’s happening in the flow of everything else. The habitual and the revolutionary, happening at once. I’m working it up, showing my process, letting the seams show because the seams are where the truth lives. The polished surface is where meaning goes to die.
Everything else is just ego and commerce wearing an artist costume, hoping nobody notices it’s already dead inside.