Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Alexander Calder: Le Faucon

The universe is real but you can’t see it.
You have to imagine it.
Once you imagine it,
you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Alexander Calder

Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in its own impossible geometry. You want to talk about truth? Here it is: twenty tons of it, painted that arterial red-orange that Calder loved because it didn’t apologize for being seen.

The Falcon. Le Faucon. And it’s not some delicate mobile twitching in the breeze like the precious little darlings everyone associates with Calder’s name. No. This is the other side of the man, the side that understood weight, permanence, the brutal honesty of iron forged in a French foundry where guys with actual dirt under their fingernails bent metal to his will.

You walk past this beast every day on your way to tort law or constitutional theory or whatever the hell they teach in there, and maybe, maybe, you glance at it. Maybe you don’t. Because that’s what happens when you institutionalize art, when you plant it on a manicured lawn and pretend it’s decoration. It becomes wallpaper. Background noise. The sculptural equivalent of Muzak.

But Calder didn’t make wallpaper.

He made this thing that sat outside his studio in Saché for fifteen years. Fifteen years. It watched him work. It watched him die. And then someone had the good sense to bring it here, to California, to this place where future lawyers would theoretically learn to parse truth from bullshit, which seems fitting, because that’s exactly what this sculpture does. It strips away all the academic horseshit, all the interpretive frameworks and post-modern whatever, and just exists in space with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it is.

Calder said you have to imagine the universe before you can reproduce it. And what he imagined wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t comfortable. It was angular, aggressive, alive in the way that predators are alive, efficient, purposeful, absolutely itself.

That’s the falcon. That’s the art.
And most people will walk right past it checking their phones.

Alexander Calder Le Faucon (The Falcon)
Stanford Law School, part of the Cantor Arts Center collection

Dec 19, 2016 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Artists, Cantor Arts Center, Public Art, Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

Bodies That Refuse to Be Forgotten

The thing about Ghost Architecture: A Palimpsest is that it understood what most commemorative performances miss entirely, that a building isn’t just bricks and sweat stains, it’s every body that ever moved through it, every kid who learned to fail there before learning to fly. Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads took that renovated gym, all shiny and amnesia-bright, and made it remember.

They started in the courtyard making you earn the inside, making you walk the same threshold those dancers and athletes crossed for decades. Then they hit you with layers: contemporary movement bleeding into ghost gestures, stories from teachers who’d aged out, students who’d moved on, all of it happening simultaneously like a radio dial spinning through stations that refuse to die.

This is what renovation doesn’t get, you can’t just slap fresh paint on history and call it progress. Aleta choreographed the argument itself: see these bodies now, but see through them to the bodies before, and the ones before that. A palimpsest of sweat and ambition and the particular loneliness of late night practice sessions when you’re trying to become someone you’re not yet.

The Chocolate Heads made the gym confess. They excavated its memory through movement, turned commemoration into confrontation. Because what’s the point of celebrating a reopening if you’re going to pretend the place was ever really closed? Those walls held everything. Aleta just made the walls speak in the only language that matters, bodies refusing to be forgotten.

Ghost Architecture: A Palimpsest a site specific performance by The Chocolate Heads in Roble Gym for Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies with support from Stanford Arts, Stanford Historical Society
and Institute for Diversity in The Arts

A performance installation by Aleta Hayes’s “The Chocolate Heads” that commemorates the reopening of Roble Gym. Starting in the Courtyard before moving into Roble Dance Studio, the performance embraces memories, stories, and movement from former teachers and students, while also revealing simultaneous layers of dance, contemporary movement, and social organization.

Nov 09, 2016 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Site Specific Dance, Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

Chocolate Heads: Ghost Architecture (dress rehearsal)

Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads are building Ghost Architecture, and I’m here trying to capture what happens when sculptural performance becomes something between séance and construction site. It’s ephemeral by design, chocolate edifices that exist in that sweet between solid and melting, between here and gone, like memory made tactile. This is the kind of work that doesn’t apologize for being strange or temporary or impossible to collect; it just is, fully committed to itsown beautiful impermanence. Aleta and her collaborators, including me, are constructing fragile monuments to absence, to the structures we build and lose and mourn. You want to see what happens when art stops trying to last forever and starts living hard in the moment? ☞ Here’s the evidence ☜ It’ll be gone soon enough, but right now it’s everything.

Dress Rehearsal for Chocolate Heads’ performance to celebrate the re-opening of Roble Hall for Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS)

Nov 08, 2016 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Site Specific Dance, Stanford University, T.S. Eliot | Leave A Comment »

Hauling Granite: Notes from Tor House

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941

The stone holds everything, every failed marriage, every dead child, every moment Jeffers stared at the Pacific and decided humanity was small change. This house, Tor House, was built by a man who wanted to physically touch permanence, who hauled granite because words weren’t enough of a monument to his misanthropy.

Playing Robinson Jeffers in this film means inhabiting the contradiction: the guy loved humanity enough to mourn its stupidity. He built this fortress on a bluff in Carmel not to hide but to witness, to watch the hawks and the waves and know they’d outlast every Senate hearing and stock ticker and love affair. This tower isn’t quaint. It’s a middle finger to comfort, to ease, to the lie that progress means anything at all.

And I’m here, walking through rooms where he wrote Shine, Perishing Republic, and the Pacific is doing its thing, indifferent, gorgeous, and I realize the performance isn’t about mimicry. It’s about standing in this space and letting the stones recalibrate my frequency. Jeffers didn’t perform hope. He performed clarity. The kind that makes people uncomfortable at dinner parties.

The crew’s setting up lights, checking sound, the David Schendel the director is giving notes, and meanwhile the cypress trees are twisting in that wind that never stops, the same wind that bent them when Robinson Jeffers mixed mortar with his bare hands. I’m supposed to be “acting,” but really I’m just trying not to flinch from the truth he built this place to announce: that beauty and brutality are the same currency, and the ocean spends it without sentiment.

Nov 03, 2016 | Categories: Individualism | Tags: Architecture, Iphone, Sunset, Writers Against Forgetting | Leave A Comment »

Aleta Hayes rehearsal / class

Aleta Hayes rehearsal of the Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Studio.

The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other.
Judith Malina

Stanford Theater and Performance Studies‘ lecturer Aleta Hayes leads The Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Gym

Oct 29, 2016 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

lucky dragons: user agreement

What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took the UN Charter, born in the museums original building back when we still believed in collective salvation, and tore through it looking for something salvageable, something that might actually work.

“In 1945, representatives of fifty countries convened in the War Memorial Veterans Building — SFMOMA’s original home — to draft the United Nations Charter, imagining a global system of government designed to produce peace through consolidated power. During the month of October, we will work towards reverse engineering the technologies of peace — treaties, protocols, symbols and systems — in order to learn from what has already been invented, to repurpose and re-contextualize, to create new possibilities for interaction, and to fix existing bugs.”
Lucky Dragons

The whole operation comes across like someone trying to debug humanity’s operating system. There’s “The Pattern,” this labyrinth you walk through to process your own bullshit thoughts, supposedly achieving “Positive Peace,” which sounds like something from a corporate wellness seminar but turns out to be about actual structural justice. Then there’s “The Tangle,” a gorgeous mess acknowledging that peace isn’t some static nirvana but constant management, endless vigilance, the Sisyphean grind of keeping the knots from reforming.

The cynic in me wants to dismiss it as museum sanctioned radicalism, art that pretends to danger while remaining perfectly domesticated. But there’s something rawer here, more desperate. It’s performance art that knows performance won’t save us but tries anyway, acknowledging the futility while refusing to shut up. Peace as perpetual failure, perpetually attempted. Not redemption, just relentless, stubborn work.

Lucky Dragons: User Agreement

Oct 24, 2016 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Artists, Performance Art Photography / Documentation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | Leave A Comment »

Performers Under Stress Black River Falls

Performers Under Stress presents the West Coast Premiere of BLACK RIVER FALLS by Bryn Magnus.

Oct 18, 2016 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Performers Under Stress, Theatre Photography | Theatre Documentation | Leave A Comment »

Betty Reid Soskin at The California Studies Association

Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four, ninety-four, standing there receiving an award named after Carey McWilliams, and the only thing more beautiful than the image is knowing she didn’t wait for permission to make history happen. She made it happen, hustled it into existence, because that’s what you do when the official story is a lie by omission.

Betty Reid Soskin

She grew up in Oakland when Oakland meant something different, lived through Richmond when the shipyards were screaming with wartime production, watched Rosie the Riveter get turned into a whitewashed myth, and said no. Not on her watch. This woman looked at the National Park Service, the National Park Service, that monument to official narratives and carefully curated memory, and pushed them to tell the truth about Black women who built ships and raised families and made America work while America pretended they were invisible.

The California Studies Association giving her the McWilliams Award is perfect because McWilliams understood California was never the golden dream they sold you, it was blood and labor and stolen land and brilliant resistance all tangled together. Betty Reid Soskin gets that. She lived that. And instead of writing bitter memoirs or fading into comfortable retirement, she put on a park ranger uniform and became America’s oldest working ranger, standing in that Richmond park every day telling uncomfortable truths to tourists who came expecting simple nostalgia.

That’s the thing about authenticity, it doesn’t retire. It doesn’t smooth over the rough edges for the sake of consensus. Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four is still fighting to make the record honest, still showing up, still refusing to let history be sanitized. That’s not activism as performance art. That’s life as resistance.

Oct 11, 2016 | Categories: Individualism | Tags: National Parks, Photographic Portraits | 1 Comment »

The Adventuress: How Inga Weiss Crossed the Wall and Made Dance Mean Something

The fight is won or lost
far away from witnesses –
behind the lines,
in the gym,
and out there on the road,
long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammad Ali

Inga Weiss was the real deal in a world drowning in polite academic horseshit. This woman looked at post-war Germany, her good parents in Ansbach, the comfortable life, all of it, and said fuck that noise. She went to East Germany. You hear me? During the Cold War, this adventuress packed her bags and crossed over to study with Mary Wigman, the woman who basically told ballet to go screw itself and created something visceral and true and absolutely terrifying.

And Wigman didn’t just teach her steps. She broke her open. Transformed her. You don’t study German Expressionist dance because you want to be pretty. You study it because you need to understand what the body can scream when words are lies. Wigman knew what it meant to move through darkness, and she passed that knowledge to Weiss like a virus, like a sacrament.

What Inga Weiss did afterward at Stanford, that wasn’t empire-building. That was evangelism. For more than 25 years, she stood in front of students and demanded they stop performing and start existing in movement. She founded the contemporary dance program not because the university needed another department or program, but because she understood that dance was about confronting the void, about finding meaning in the meat and bones and breath of being human.

When Stanford launched its master’s degree program in dance in 1976, Weiss wasn’t just there, she was the gravitational force pulling it into existence. She took everything Wigman had burned into her soul and translated it for a generation of American dancers who didn’t know they needed saving from their own timidity.

Legacy? Her legacy was teaching people that dance isn’t decoration. It’s survival. It’s the only honest language we have left.

Chocolate Heads performing Inga Weiss’ choreography in Roble Gym

Before Anyone Fucked It Up: Christening Roble’s Virgin Stage

Look at them. Amber and Judy. First ones on the Roble Theater stage (now the Harry J. Elam Jr. Theater) in this space that still smells like fresh paint and possibility. You know what that means? That means there’s no roadmap. No one’s fucked it up here yet. No one’s nailed it yet either. Just empty space and two people willing to step into it.

Aleta’s there, pushing them. “Go further,” you can almost hear her saying. “Push the boundaries.” Because that’s the thing about being first, you have to push. There’s no trail to follow, no safe path worn smooth by a thousand feet before yours. You’re making the path. You’re the path.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about being first: history matters. Not the kind in textbooks, the kind that seeps into the walls, into the floorboards, into the fucking air of a place. Every theater, every stage, every performance space has a memory. And these two? They’re writing the first line of this one’s story.

Maybe nobody remembers their names in a few years. Maybe there’s no plaque, no mention in the program notes. Maybe Aleta, Amber and Judy become a footnote, if that. But that mark they’re leaving right now? It doesn’t give a shit about being remembered. It’s already there. In the marlay floor, the wood grain. In the way the light hits at this angle. In the molecules of sweat and fear and ambition that are settling into this space right fucking now.

That’s the thing about places, they remember even when the assholes who hold the keys to the place don’t. Every performer who comes after, whether they know it or not, they’re walking on ground these two broke. Breathing air these two charged with something. Standing in the gravity well of this first moment.

There’s a kind of terror in that, if you think about it. But also a kind of freedom that most people never get to taste. Everything that happens after, every performance, every stumble, every triumph on this stage, it all comes back to this moment. To these two. To the first marks made on an unmarked canvas.

Sep 22, 2016 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

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