Heterogenous Spectacles
Witches Full Moon
First Witch:
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch:
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch:
That will be ere the set of sun.
First Witch:
Where’s the place?
Second Witch:
Upon the heath
Third Witch:
There to meet with Macbeth.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The Three Witches (Weird Sisters) under a Full Moon
at We Players Macbeth at Fort Point
pre show circle ritual
As on the smooth expanse of crystal lakes
The sinking stone at first a circle makes;
The trembling surface by the motion stirr’d,
Spreads in a second circle, then a third;
Wide, and more wide, the floating rings advance,
Fill all the watery plain, and to the margin dance.
Alexander Pope. Temple of Fame
We Players‘ pre show ritual
Backstage Lady Macbeth
Backstage Lady Macbeth: Ava Roy as Lady Macbeth in We Players Macbeth at Fort Point, 2013…
O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch;
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5
underneath the bridge
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder
Margaret Tedesco
Margaret Tedesco’s performance at the Performance Studies international conference at Stanford University.
Captain Ava
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
Henry David Thoreau
Out of Water at Fort Funston
Out of Water: A Site Specific Performance at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference.
Baker Beach
He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
PSi 19
Performance Studies Stanford University hosting the Performance Studies international conference #19.
I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around for longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event and see them only as symbols or indicators of what went on.
Chris Burden
Luciano Chessa
Luciano Chessa Stanford University: performing at Performance Studies international conference.
Luciano Chessa
Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scenaand Lo
Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (Variations on a Prop, 2002/05/07), for piano and stuffed toys. Var. XXII (Valsugana) Var. XI (Maridemi mi) Var. I (Reposare) Louganis (2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo (video by Terry Berlier)
PSi 19 downtime
Solipsism at Performance Studies international, Stanford University
It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is replaced by a solipsism en deux in the I-thou relationship. As a relationship between Dasein and Dasein this has its possibility only on the basis of being-in-the-world. Put otherwise, being-in-the-world is with equal originality both being-with and being-among.
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing
Collected Works John Cage Lecture on Nothing. PSi, Stanford
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.
John Cage
Garden of Memory : Chapel of The Chimes
The Garden of Memory held every June 21st to celebrate the solstice at The Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, California
I do not write experimental music.
My experimenting is done before I make the music.
Afterwards, it is the listener who must experiment.
Edgard Varèse
Grandma
Brain Yarish as Grandma: Franconia Performance Salon.
My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.
The Guermantes Way