Mirrors in metal, and the masked Mirror of mahogany that in its mist Of a red twilight hazes The face that is gazed on as it gazes. Jorge Luis Borges, MIRRORS
Light poured through those high windows like it had somewhere to be, turning everything gold, everything impossible. The mirrors, smudged, honest and ancient, caught it all, multiplied it, made the whole room feel infinite. And Judy. She moved through that light like she’d been forged in it, all muscle and grace, her bodyreading the space with an instinct you can’t fake, can’t learn. Every gesture felt deliberate and dangerous, an invitation and a threat, all in the best way.
My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5
We’re all so fucking scared of being earnest that we’ve turned every production into a knowing wink, a deconstructed joke we’re all in on together. But then you drag Shakespeare’s most adolescent, hormonal, genuinely stupid tragedy out to some crumbling adobe in Petaluma, and suddenly you remember why any of this mattered in the first place. You’re walking through doorways at sunset, you’re standing in dirt, and when Juliet says “my only love sprung from my only hate,” you’re not sitting in velvet darkness pretending you’re not there. You’re there. You’re implicated. The ground under your feet is the same ground the actors are bleeding all over, metaphorically speaking, and you can’t pretend you’re just observing some museum piece about how people used to feel things before Netflix.
The death march at sunset, that’s not stagecraft, that’s just acknowledging that tragedy works better when the light is actually dying around you. When you can feel the temperature drop and smell whatever’s growing in the California dirt. It’s almost too obvious, too easy, except it works because we’ve been sitting in stinky black boxes for so long we forgot that the Greeks already figured this shit out two thousand years ago: context matters. Architecture matters. Whether you can leave matters.
And Romeo and Juliet, God, what a choice. Everyone thinks they know this play because they were forced to read it at fifteen when they were exactly as hormonally fucked up stupid as the protagonists. But put it in a space that has its own history, its own ghosts, and suddenly you realize the play was never about romance. It was about what happens when passion meets architecture, when the intensely personal collides with the immovably institutional. These kids are dying because buildings, families, structures, adobes, don’t bend.
I get it. They did what they always do, what they’ve been doing to everything worth a damn since some MBA sociopath figured out you could monetize nostalgia and sell it back as “progress.” They took something old, something with actual soul (remember soul?), something that had earned every water stain, every crack in its walls, and they scrubbed it clean. Full corporate colonoscopy. Now it’s gleaming surfaces and motivational slogans that mean nothing, probably smelling like eucalyptus and institutional wellness, which is just the smell of death pretending to be life. A place where people come to feel virtuous while feeling hollow inside.
It’s a gym that could be anywhere. Palo Alto, Bethesda, some soulless suburb of Phoenix. It doesn’t matter, man. Standardized, optimized, smooth, frictionless, calibrated so nobody has to feel anything real, anything that might actually wake them up from the consumer coma.
But here’s the thing, here’s the ONE FUCKING THING they can’t touch: the light.
That’s what destroys me about these photographs. Light pours through those massive western windows like liquid gold, like some kind of benediction. God or whatever passes for God saying, “Forget your renovation, forget everything,” flooding the space the same way it did twenty years ago, fifty years ago, the same way it will in twenty more when someone tears it down again. It doesn’t care about budgets, consultants, or LEED certification or any of the bullshit we tell ourselves matters. It just IS. And it’s magnificent in a way that makes everything else look like the sad joke it is.
I remember being in this exact space, back when learning happened without intending to, before we optimized spontaneity into an app. I showed up as the only guy in Susie Cashion’s Afro-Peruvian dance class. Forty women. You do the math: six-foot-five me, tallest woman maybe five-five. Ridiculous at first. Absolutely absurd. But the movement got into my body, the rhythms made sense in a way words never could, and suddenly the women stopped seeing me as the awkward outsider. They saw someone trying, someone learning, someone actually present.
Years later, at a wedding in Peru, those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons meant something entirely new. I was no longer the gringo doing that apologetic shuffle at the edge of the dance floor. I was IN IT. I knew the steps, the rhythm, and the grandmas (man, the GRANDMAS) they adored it. That belonging, that cross-cultural connection, happened because the space was real enough, lived-in enough, beat-up enough, to teach something true.
Places like this hold memory, transformation, the ghosts of everyone who learned, failed, bled, got back up. The corporate renovation erased that. Sanded down the history like it was graffiti instead of scripture. Made it safe, generic, neutral, which is just another word for dead. Now you can’t tell if anything real ever happened here. It’s every-place, which means it’s no fucking place at all.
Except for the light. EXCEPT FOR THE LIGHT.
Look at that light blazing through the windows, reminding everyone with their yoga mats and good intentions what actually matters. It doesn’t give a shit about budgets or aesthetic consultants or any of the metrics we use to measure everything except what’s real. It comes through day after day, relentless, turning amber and gold even on sterile, optimized surfaces. It makes the space sacred for a few hours, despite itself, despite everything.
That’s California light. Western light. You can’t franchise it. You can’t package it. You can’t turn it into a subscription service or a wellness brand. It belongs here, at this angle, at this time, hitting these floors.
The one thing they didn’t ruin, the one thing they couldn’t touch.
The gym’s different now. Better by every measurable metric, which tells you everything about our metrics and nothing about what matters: climate controlled, ADA compliant, energy efficient. All the things we tell ourselves matter. But something essential has been lost. Something we don’t even have words for anymore because we’ve been convinced that new is always better, clean is always superior, progress requires erasing the past like it’s a typo instead of the only thing that ever mattered.
All we can do is stand here and let the impossible light pour through. Remember. Feel a little angry, or a lot angry, it’s the same anger. Grateful, somehow, in that bittersweet way that’s the only kind of gratitude left to us, that at least this remains. That at least something here is still real, still beyond the reach of the optimization algorithms. That light reminds us that authenticity survives in the smallest, untouchable ways. It survives in memory, in movement, in moments of belonging, in the simple truth that some things can’t be sanitized, optimized, or sold. Not yet, anyway, though God knows they’re trying.
July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play that’s been dead for two and a half thousand years.
Two fragments. That’s it. That’s all that survived from Sophocles’ Nausicaa. Just two lines:
You know the story, or at least Homer’s version. Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia, out doing laundry with her girls on the beach. Shipwrecked Odysseus washes up on shore, naked, half drowned, covered in salt and desperation. She doesn’t run. She gives him clothes, food, directions to her father’s palace. She saves his ass. Pure, helpful innocence meeting a man touched by gods and cursed by fate. Hospitality as salvation. A pivotal moment, without her, there’s no journey home to Ithaca.
Sophocles saw that scene and thought: there’s a play in there. He wrote Nausicaa (some call it Plyntria aka The Washerwomen), a full tragedy built around that encounter, exploring hospitality, appearance versus reality, the collision of the heroic and the human. And here’s something: according to Athenaeus (ancient Greek rhetorician and grammarian), Sophocles himself played the part of Nausicaa. The great tragedian in drag, playing the princess.
The play is gone. Lost to time like so many others. What remains are those two fragments, echoes of something larger.
This site specific performance, 65 minutes, 47 people watching, is part of IOTA, a mad, necessary project to resurrect the fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To give voice to the ghosts. To stand on a beach and speak what little survived into the salt air and see what happens.
That’s what we did at Pillar Point that Sunday afternoon, with Mavericks at our feet.
The Fragments… …to weave robes and tunics made of linen…
The wave passed me by then slowly sucked me back
Location…
Long before any of this, the surfers, the bootleggers, the Spanish missionaries with their crosses and their certainties, this was Ohlone land.
The Ohlone told stories. Sacred narratives that weren’t just entertainment; they were instruction manuals for how to be human. Coyote, the trickster, clever, wily, lustful, greedy, deeply irresponsible. Everything we are and shouldn’t be. He’d compete with Hummingbird, who despite being tiny, regularly handed Coyote his ass. There was Eagle too, watching from above.
In the beginning, according to Ohlone creation stories, the world was nothing but water except for one peak: Mount Diablo. Coyote, Hummingbird, and Eagle stood on it, looking out at everything and nothing. Humans? We’re descended from Coyote. Which explains a lot, actually.
Then the Europeans showed up.
October 28-29, 1769. The Spanish Portolá expedition rolled through, heading north. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí took notes. Lots of geese here, he wrote, so the soldiers called it the plain of Los Ansares. He described the rocks jutting out like “two thick Farallones of an irregular and pointed shape.” Pretty, sure. Historic, absolutely.
Also the beginning of the end.
By the time Mission Dolores was founded in 1776, the land was being used for grazing mission livestock. The Ohlone? Reduced to less than ten percent of their original population. Genocided by disease, forced labor, and the tender mercies of Christianity.
After the missions were secularized in 1834, the land got carved up into ranchos. This area became Rancho Corral de Tierra, “earthen corral”, granted in 1839 to Francisco Guerrero by Governor Pro-Tem Manuel Jimeno. Guerrero got murdered in San Francisco by some guy named Francis LeBras in 1851.
They buried him at Mission Dolores cemetery.
Guerrero Street in San Francisco is named after him, which is something, I guess.
October 17th, 1876. The three masted Welsh ship Rydal Hall crashes in the fog right off this beach. Nine men die. The cargo, a total loss. The ship just sits there on the rocks for almost a month, broken, bleeding tons of coal into the water and onto the sand before finally cracking apart. Salvage? Have you seen the waves? Impossible.
Fast forward to the 1920s. Prohibition. The beach becomes a bootlegger’s paradise. Rum ships offshore, unloading millions of dollars’ worth of illegal booze under the stars.
World War II rolls around, and the army sets up shop here to protect against Japanese invasion and bombing raids that never come.
Then, early March 1967. Three surfers, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Knottmeyer, paddle out. Matienzo’s roommate’s white haired German Shepherd comes along. The dog swims out to them, which is sweet but dangerous, so Matienzo ties him up on shore. They surf overhead peaks about a quarter mile out, eyeing the bigger outside waves and deciding they’re too suicidal even for them.
Jamie Lyons (concept and direction) Aleta Hayes (choreography and Artistic Director of The Chocolate Heads) Timothy Lee (Poseidon)
Arthur Jongebloed (Athena) Benjamin Cohn (Odysseus)
Judy Syrkin-Nikolau (Nausicaä) Amber Levine (Maiden/Cyclops)
Look at her. Lindsey sitting there in that fourth frame like she’s the only thing holding the world together, like she’s the reason the wind bothers to blow across that grass. You know what I’m talking about, that particular quality certain people have where they don’t just occupy space, they complete it. The Halprins knew. Lawrence and Anna, they fucking knew that landscape isn’t backdrop, isn’t set dressing for the human drama. It’s the other actor in the scene.
“Open space is an end in itself,” Halprin wrote. Which sounds like designer bullshit speak until you see what he meant, those frames of raw California coast, all that wind-carved grass and those weathered fence posts leaning into eternity, and then her, and then that sunset bleeding out like the world’s last confession. This is what happens when I stop trying to conquer nature and start listening to what it’s been screaming at me all along.
That sunset in the last frame, that’s not photography, that’s evidence. Evidence that beauty isn’t gentle, isn’t polite. It’s violent and brief and it’ll wreck you if you’re paying attention. The Halprins built Sea Ranch to frame these moments, to catch them like lightning in a bottle, except they knew you can’t bottle it. You can only sit there, like Lindsey Dillon sits there, and let it happen to you.
Some spaces demand your presence. Not your commentary. Just your presence.
Architecture tends to think of open space simply as a foreground or background to buildings and not significant in itself; engineering thinks of it in terms of drainage or road alignment; city planning tends to think of it as undifferentiated green swatches in the beehive of city streets. Landscape architects, however, want to design it in all its detail as the medium within which life occurs: so that we can walk through it, lie on the grass, court our girl friends in the spring and watch the unfolding buds on the spring branches. Open space for us is an end in itself – Lawrence Halprin, “The Landscape Architect and the Planner” in Landscape Architecture and the Allied Arts and Professions, p 47. ed. Sylvia Crowe. Djambatan: Netherlands, 1961.
Diebenkorn’s got these ten rules pinned to his studio wall like he’s some kind of recovering perfectionist at an AA meeting. “Tolerate chaos.” “Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.” The guy’s basically giving himself permission to fuck up, systematically, with method. It’s beautiful, really.
Now you want to ask me about Artaud? That magnificent lunatic didn’t have rules, he had lightning bolts and screaming nerves and the Theatre of Cruelty happening in his skull 24/7. Van Gogh? His rule was simple: paint what burns you until you’re consumed. One rule. The only one that matters when you’re that far gone. And Sid? Jesus, Sid’s rule was that there were no rules, which is itself a rule, the most adolescent, boring rule of all. He was a roman candle… bright, loud, over quick.
But the thing nobody wants to admit: rules can be acts of courage. Diebenkorn’s telling himself “attempt what is not certain” because certainty is the death of art. It’s the death of directing, and with photography too. Hell, it’s the death of anything worth doing. He’s building a cathedral out of doubt, which takes discipline most of us don’t have.
The romantic myth says the artist should be pure id, all instinct, no restraint. Bullshit. Even jazz musicians know the scales before they blow them apart. The rules aren’t chains, they’re the high wire. Without them, you’re not flying free, you’re just falling.
Diebenkorn knew: freedom without structure is just flailing. Structure without freedom is just death.
Here, in the weeds behind the curtain, where ancient Greek tragedy meets California wildflowers. Judy moving through that grass like she’s already halfway to Phaeacia,
This is what you never see: the in-between, the breath before the dive.
The wildflowers don’t give a shit about your PhD or that you’re at capacity. They just bloom. And she’s there, in it, pure and temporary as theater always is. This moment, trampled grass, salt air, fragments of a dead playwright, this is where the truth lives. Not in the polished performance but in this, following someone through flowers at Pillar Point, chasing fragments of something 2,500 years old that somehow still bleeds. Theater at the edge of the continent, where the Pacific crashes and nobody’s safe and the whole thing could fall apart any second. That’s honest. That’s real. Ancient Greeks knew: you perform at the mercy of the gods and the weather and your own fragile mortality.
I love all insider memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialized job they have. David Mamet
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. Alan Watts
The stones are wet and the tide’s doing its thing through those organ pipes, some modernist’s fever dream of what happens when concrete meets the Bay’s restless mouth. I’m out here with Derek working sound, Lauren as the performer, Dylan’s costumes catching the wind, all of us breathing life back into dead words, fragments that survived because some medieval monk needed scratch paper or because fate’s a capricious bastard.
Sophocles wrote maybe 120 plays. We got seven. The rest? Gone. Burned, rotted, recycled, forgotten. But you found a piece, some ragged scrap about fate or hubris or the terrible weight of knowing, and Lauren’s speaking it at this bizarre acoustic monument where water becomes sound becomes something almost holy.
The Wave Organ doesn’t give a damn about your iambic pentameter. It’s gurgling and moaning with the Pacific’s rhythm, utterly indifferent to dramatic timing. Which is perfect, actually. Those Greek amphitheaters weren’t silent either. Wind off Aegean hillsides, birds, the shuffle of 15,000 bodies waiting to see what fresh horror the gods had cooked up.
Derek’s chasing the organ’s chaos with his mics. Lauren’s finding those Sophoclean moments when everything crystallizes into awful clarity. Dylan’s fabric moves like it knows something about tragedy. You’re all working words that maybe nobody’s spoken aloud in 2,400 years.
There’s something beautifully absurd about it. Performance as archaeology. Lauren’s voice against the tide’s voice. The fragment incomplete, the organ unpredictable, the fog rolling in like it owns the place. You’re not recreating anything. You can’t. The original’s dust. You’re making something new from the wreckage, right here where the city meets the water, where sound plays tricks, where ancient grief might echo weird and true through modern plumbing.
I’m going to tell you something that’s going to sound like complete bullshit coming from a guy who’s made real money with a camera: I fucking hate documentation.
Here I am. Supposedly a photographer, though don’t call me that, seriously, someone who’s shot work for Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Ron Athey, Alonzo King. Someone who ground it out at Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer, who actually made theater for years before somehow cranking out commercials and branded content for the tech overlords. And I’m telling you: documenting bores me to death.
Here’s why: documentation is about recording facts. And facts? Facts are not particularly interesting. Facts are the death of art. Facts are what accountants deal with. Facts are for Wikipedia and grant applications and those academic papers that make you want to put a gun in your mouth.
But it’s worse than boring.
Photographing performance might be inherently violent.
Even when I’m shooting my own work, my own site-specific pieces, I worry about the displacement that happens. The severing. You take something that exists in time and space, something alive and breathing and unrepeatable, and you kill it. André Bazin got it: photography embalms time. Roland Barthes said it even better: every photograph is a little death.
And then there are the other photographers. Fuck me, the other photographers. The ones I see at shows, at openings, performances, wielding their cameras like they’re storming fucking Normandy. Machine-gunning the performers. Rapid-fire shutter clicks. Spray and pray. Hoping that somewhere in those thousand frames, one will capture something.
This is violent.
This is the opposite of witnessing.
This is extraction.
Theft.
Susan Sontag warned us decades ago: the camera can be a weapon, a tool of appropriation, a way of asserting control over what you’re seeing. She was right. One shutter click too many and you’ve colonized someone’s gesture.
And yet. A point of view? That’s interesting. Feelings, impressions, the particular alchemy when one consciousness slams into another, that’s fascinating. That’s what I’m after. Honestly that’s the only thing worth a damn.
So here’s my truth: I don’t actually consider myself a photographer. I’m a theater director who uses a camera the way a novelist uses a typewriter. It’s a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Part of a broader practice.
Think about it. A writer might draft something by hand one day, type on her laptop the next, dictate into her phone the day after. The tool changes. The practice doesn’t. She knows her fountain pen bleeds a little, knows her laptop keyboard has a wonky spacebar, knows her dictation software can’t handle her accent. Quirks of the tool.
Same with me. I know my 35mm lens vignettes like crazy when I shoot it wide open. I know my Leica’s focus confirmation is shit in low light (I’m pretty sure this is only because I’ve dropped it numerous times). Facts of the current condition of the instrument. And I use this mechanically magnificent, aesthetically gorgeous yet deeply flawed, imperfect tool to try to express something I’m still struggling to understand.
I capture images for myself. Sketches in a work journal. Visual notes. The only thing these photos document, if they document anything at all, is my own response. My own feelings. When I look back at my work, that’s what I see. Not what happened, but what I felt about what happened. Not the performance, but my experience of the performance.
And this takes time. I don’t rush in and rush out, parachuting in for the shoot and disappearing before the applause dies. It takes time for me to understand anything. To form feelings, attachments, relationships, not just with people, but with the space, the environment, the whole ecology we’re all inhabiting together.
When I collaborate, and that’s what this is, collaboration, not documentation, I usually show up with some general understanding. I’ve read the script (if there is one), imagined how it might manifest. But I learned long ago, probably when I was still Anna Deavere Smith’s production assistant, still young and stupid and full of ideas: preconceived notions are poison. They’re my ideas projected onto someone else’s work. They prevent me from being present. They blind me to what’s actually happening.
Truth comes to me little by little. Sometimes suddenly, yeah, there are flashes. But mostly it’s gradual. An accumulation. A slow burn. Truth is temporal. It shifts. What was true yesterday might not be true tomorrow. José Esteban Muñoz reminds us that queerness itself is a horizon, a thing glimpsed but never fully reached. Performance truth feels the same: fugitive, atmospheric, always slipping through your fingers.
Those sudden moments of truth? They only happen when I know the collaborators. When I’ve breathed with them over time. When there’s trust. Judith Butler writes that vulnerability isn’t a private condition, it’s relational. We’re vulnerable to each other. We’re interdependent. Truth requires that interdependence.
When we reach that place, the images become something more than personal sketches. They capture some semblance of truth in the performance. Not the truth. I don’t believe in a singular truth. But a truth. Something honest. Something that feels real.
Bert O. States argues that theater’s power lies in its doubleness: the real body and the fictional body occupying the same space. Photography threatens to collapse that, to freeze it into a single plane. Henri Cartier-Bresson thought there was a decisive moment where form and content aligned, but I think the decisive moment isn’t found, it’s cultivated through relationship, presence, and exposure to risk.
Then there’s Gordon Parks, who said he used his camera as a weapon against everything he hated about America: poverty, racism, discrimination. I think about that constantly. The idea that the camera can harm or heal depending on the hand that holds it. That a weapon can also be a way of making space for someone else’s humanity. That the violence of the image isn’t inevitable, it’s a matter of intention, trust, and care.
For me, it all comes down to trust. The ability to capture anything resembling truth depends entirely on trust. The game of yes. You open yourself up to another person. You make yourself defenseless. You surrender.
Joyce understood this in the last lines of Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s endless affirmation. Yes as surrender. Yes as recognition. Yes as trust.
“…I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. “aJames Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 edition
That’s the only condition under which I see anything approaching truth. Not facts. Not documentation. But truth. Whatever the hell that means.
And maybe it means nothing. Maybe I’m full of shit. Maybe all of this, the theory, the philosophy, the carefully constructed rationale, is just justification for something I do because I can’t help myself. Because I need to. Because it’s the only way I know how to be in the world.
But I don’t think so. I think there’s something here. Something worth pursuing. Something that matters, even if I can’t articulate it fully. Even if I’m still, after all these years, struggling to understand.
That struggle. That not knowing. That perpetual searching. That’s the only honest position I know.
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9–16.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. Verve, 1952.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
Parks, Gordon. A Choice of Weapons. Harper & Row, 1966.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. University of California Press, 1985.
