Here’s the thing about Glass hauling Disney’s corpse onto the stage at Teatro Real, it’s got that particular American genius for taking something everybody thinks they understand and then shoving it into the meat grinder until nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore.
The Madrid premiere went up in January 2013, and you’ve got to appreciate the chutzpah of debuting your twenty-fourth opera about the guy who weaponized anthropomorphic mice. Glass at 75, still grinding those arpeggios like he’s got something to prove, which maybe he does. The minimalism’s gotten warmer, less like staring at fluorescent lights in a waiting room, more like those lights are actually trying to tell you something about mortality and American mythos and what happens when you realize you’re not immortal after all.
The piece adapts Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel, which imagines Disney as a power-hungry figure in his final months, and what Glass does with it, what Dennis Russell Davies conducted, what Phelim McDermott staged with all those scrims and animated sketches flickering like half remembered dream, is construct this fantasy where Uncle Walt gets to wrestle with an animatronic Lincoln and admit he’s a racist. That scene alone, shit. Disney trying to fix his robot Abraham and realizing he doesn’t share Honest Abe’s views on, you know, basic human dignity. It’s theater of the absurd meets American civil religion meets dying man’s confession booth.
The Teatro Real orchestra apparently handled Glass’s relentless pulse, because it’s always a pulse with him, always that motor running underneath, with real grace. Christopher Purves singing Disney captured the charisma, arrogance, and humanity without turning it into caricature, which is the tightrope you’ve got to walk when you’re playing a guy who everybody already has seventeen opinions about. Some critics found it too tame, too commercial for Glass, not weird enough. Others thought the whole enterprise was a fascinating mess, all concept and no dramatic through line.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Disney spent his life making everything neat and controlled, every duck quacking on cue, every princess finding her prince. Glass gives us Disney dissolving, fragmentary, haunted by an owl he killed as a kid, talking to Warhol about American iconography while dying of lung cancer in a hospital bed. The man who sold happiness as a commodity confronting the one thing he can’t animate away. That’s some Twilight Zone material right there, except it’s real, or realish, or as real as opera ever gets.
The production embraced that surrealism, cartoon sketches on graph paper coming alive behind the singers, Mickey Mouse gloves floating in the darkness during the death scene. Madrid gave it all the baroque theatrical treatment, which seems appropriate for a piece about a man who built an empire on fantasy. Whether it works as opera or not almost feels beside the point. It’s a document of our relationship with the guy who taught us what to dream about, dissected and set to Philip Glass’s perpetual motion machine. That’s worth something, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Especially if it makes you uncomfortable.
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet1.Prologue
Three frames of Romeo and Juliet playing dress-up.
The first shot, Romeo alone, backlit, all brooding silhouette, clutching that jug of milk like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to earth, wants you to believe in solitude, in the pure ache of romantic longing. And the milk, Christ, the milk. That primal, infantile hunger for the breast, for sustenance, for the thing you can’t name but would die without. That’s the longing that makes you stupid and reckless. The second gives you Juliet in close-up, and suddenly the whole story pivots, becomes hers, becomes about the interior life we project onto that face. The third? Both of them together, and now it’s about the space between bodies, the tension, the whole doomed machinery of desire and death. Three pictures. Three realities. All true. All bullshit.
My camera: it doesn’t capture jack shit. What it does, and this is the magic of my camera (really all cameras), the filthy gorgeous magic, is it makes you believe it captured everything. The whole moment, the complete truth, all wrapped up and delivered. You look at one of these shots and your brain goes, “Yeah, that’s it, that’s the whole story,” and you stop questioning. You move on satisfied.
But stack three of them together from the same afternoon, same location, same two bodies in absurd costume, and suddenly that sense of completeness shatters. You see what the frame included and what it left out. You see the choice, this angle not that one, this instant not the one three seconds later. What you’re looking at isn’t some objective record of what happened; it’s my editorial decision, my instinct about what mattered in that specific sliver of time. It’s atruth, one version, one take, one way of seeing not the truth that somehow contains all the others.
What photography really did, what it continues to do when we’re not too lazy or too scared to admit it, is prove that reality isn’t some fixed catalogue of facts we can measure and pin down like dead butterflies. Reality is a roiling ocean of relationships, shifting, bleeding into each other, refusing to hold still. Every frame is a decision about what matters right now, and the next frame will contradict it, and they’ll both be right.
These aren’t documents. They’re arguments. They’re three different people trying to convince you of something real, something that mattered, something worth freezing in silver and light. And the beautiful, terrible thing is: maybe we did.
So here we are, in the courtyard of this 96,000-square-foot monument to interdisciplinary aspiration, and the dancers are turning Brancusi’s old line, “Architecture is inhabited sculpture”, into something that bleeds and sweats and refuses to be theoretical.
The McMurtry Building wants to be unified, wants its art practice and film studies and documentary programs to play nice under Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s geometry. But the courtyard, this negative space between the Cantor Arts Center and a parking structure, that’s where the truth lives. Where bodies become the sculpture inhabiting the sculpture, where the rehearsal is the thing itself, not some prep for the real event.
The lens catches what the architects couldn’t plan for: the way a dancer’s spine contradicts a wall, how movement exposes what 96,000 square feet of “integration” really costs. Those screening rooms and the Experimental Media Art Lab humming inside, they’re watching through glass while we’re out here making the courtyard confess what it actually is.
This isn’t gallery bullshit where everyone nods politely. This is architecture getting inhabited by the one thing it can’t control: bodies that remember they’re mortal, that know October 2015’s dedication ceremony will be just the beginning of the building’s real education.
No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Here’s what Hull’s doing in those recordings, and why it matters: He’s a religious education professor, right, teaches people how to teach people about God, and in 1983 his eyes just… quit. Detached retinas, failed surgeries, the whole deteriorating nightmare, and he’s got this Sony cassette recorder and he starts documenting what happens next, not because he thinks it’ll be profound but because he’s terrified he’s going to forget what forgetting feels like, if that makes any sense, and what he captures is this SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE of the self, where first you lose the images but you’ve still got the memory of images, you can still conjure your wife’s face, your kids’ faces, the way light hits a room, but then, and this is the part that should keep you up at night, those memories start to dissolve too, they just… fade like old photographs left in the sun, and three years in he can’t remember faces anymore, can’t remember what his own children LOOK like, and he’s honest enough, raw enough, to say this isn’t some beautiful journey into enhanced perception, this is LOSS, this is grief, this is standing at your own funeral while you’re still breathing.
But here’s where it gets weird, where it gets truly strange: Hull doesn’t just mourn what’s gone, he starts EXPLORING this new territory, this place past vision that most of us will never know, and he discovers that rain, simple, boring, utilitarian rain, becomes this incredible ARCHITECTURE of sound, where he can suddenly perceive the entire landscape, the buildings, the trees, the empty spaces, all of it revealed through acoustic texture, and he’s walking through Birmingham hearing the world paint itself in his ears, except it’s not compensation, it’s not his other senses “heightening” like some bullshit superhero origin story, it’s that his CONSCIOUSNESS is restructuring itself, the whole thing is liquid, rebuilding from the ground up, and he’s documenting it in real-time with this unflinching precision that would make Beckett weep.
The recordings, and Oliver Sacks lost his MIND over these recordings, they capture something nobody’s ever captured before: what happens to identity when you pull out one of its major load-bearing walls. Because Hull realizes, and he SAYS this, that the continuous sense of self we all carry around, this precious feeling of being the same person from moment to moment, it’s mostly a CONSTRUCTION, it’s neurons firing and memory playing telephone with itself across decades, and when you lose vision you don’t just lose seeing, you lose visual THINKING, visual DREAMING, the whole edifice crumbles and something new, something genuinely OTHER, starts to build itself in the ruins, and he’s there with his tape recorder going “here’s what it feels like when the person you were slowly becomes someone you don’t recognize but who still has your name, your history, your wife, your kids.”
And the documentary doesn’t flinch, doesn’t beautify, doesn’t do that inspiration-porn thing where disability becomes a learning experience for the abled. It just LISTENS. It sits with Hull in the dark, and it IS dark, the film is mostly black screen with these recordings playing, his voice coming out of the void – and it lets him describe what it means to lose not just sight but the IDEA of sight, to enter what he calls “deep blindness” where you’re not a blind person who used to see, you’re something new entirely, unmoored from the visual world the rest of us are drowning in without even knowing it.
That’s the thing that gets me: we’re all stumbling through existence half-blind anyway, building our little models of reality out of the poverty of our senses, and Hull loses one sense and suddenly he’s forced to admit what we all know but can’t face, that the self is permeable, that consciousness is contingent, that everything we think is solid is actually fluid, AND YET, and this is what saves it from being nihilistic, there’s also this strange beauty in the reconstruction, in rain becoming revelation, in the self that emerges from the wreckage still capable of love, still capable of thought, still trying to make sense of being alive in a body on a planet spinning through space.
Hull died last month. The recordings remain. The darkness speaks.
Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of this numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. and since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover and take on a new definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train.” Eldridge Cleaver to Beverly Axelrod Soul on Ice, 1968
I’m not going to bullshit you about what happens when you walk into San Quentin once a week with a lesson plan and good intentions, because good intentions are exactly the kind of currency that gets you nowhere in a place where time itself has been weaponized against human dignity. You show up thinking you’re going to make a difference, maybe save someone, and what actually happens is you realize you’re the one who needs saving from your own comfortable delusions about how the world works.
But first, I wait. I wait at the gate with my co-teacher while Officer Wood checks my IDs with the speed and enthusiasm of a man who’s figured out that minor cruelty is the only power he’ll ever have. He knows my names by now, seen me every week for the last year, but he still makes me wait, still scrutinizes my credentials like I might be smuggling contraband in my twenty white sheets of paper.
In that liminal space between the free world and the locked one, while Wood takes his sweet time, we start talking. Small talk at first, bullshit about traffic, about the reading list, about nothing. But day after day, waiting becomes ritual, and ritual becomes intimacy. Then comes the walk. That long, impossible walk from the outer gate through the yard to the education building, and this is where it happens. This is where I learn that she’s from San Diego, an Oberlin grad who thought she could change the world and then actually went out and tried. Geography PhD from Berkeley studying environmental racism in cities, the kind of work that requires you to look directly at how America poisons its own people along carefully drawn racial lines. She tells me about mapping toxic sites in San Francisco neighborhoods, about chemical biomonitoring, and I realize she’s spent years documenting the slow violence nobody wants to talk about.
The yard stretches out around us, men in blue moving through their circumscribed lives, and we’re both just passing through, but together.
She’s at the front of the room explaining James Baldwin to a guy doing twenty-to-life like it’s the most natural conversation in the world, and I’m supposed to be teaching but instead I’m watching the way she pushes her hair back when she’s thinking, the way she doesn’t flinch when someone tells her about the violence they’ve done. She’s got this thing, this complete lack of performance, that makes everyone else in the room look like they’re acting, including me.
Maybe it’s because she knows something about death that most people her age don’t or shouldn’t. Her mom, cancer. Her uncle, AIDS, back when that was still a death sentence wrapped in stigma and silence. She doesn’t talk about it like tragedy porn, doesn’t wear her grief like some badge of authenticity. But it’s there in the way she listens to the students, in how she refuses to look away from hard truths, in her absolute intolerance for bullshit that pretends suffering is an abstraction. Inside San Quentin, you can’t hide behind your degrees or your theories about rehabilitation. You’re just there, present, vulnerable in ways that make you understand why Cleaver wrote those letters to Beverly Axelrod with such desperate honesty.
And then after class, we walk it all back, through the yard again, through the checkpoints, but we don’t stop talking. We end up in the parking lot under those cold sodium lights, the prison lit up behind us like some industrial cathedral, and we’re still going, still processing what just happened in there, what’s always happening in there. She’s leaning against her car talking about moving to UC Santa Cruz next year, about her book manuscript on environmental inequalities, about the California Studies Association board she serves on, and I should be congratulating her but all I can think is that she’s leaving, that these walks are numbered, that the parking lot conversations have an expiration date.
This is where it really happens, not in the classroom, but in these in-between spaces. The waiting while Wood makes me feel like a criminal for trying to teach. The walking. The refusing to leave even when we should. These cold parking lot debriefs that stretch from fifteen minutes to an hour, neither of us willing to be the first to say goodbye, to get in the car, to drive back to our separate lives that suddenly feel like lies we tell ourselves about who we are.
I’m falling for her in the worst possible place, the most complicated circumstances, and every rational part of my brain is screaming about ethics and boundaries and power dynamics. But the heart doesn’t give a damn about institutional guidelines. It just keeps hammering away in my chest every time she laughs at something one of the students says, every time we debrief after class and she sees right through whatever intellectual posturing I’m doing that day, every time we’re walking through that yard and her shoulder accidentally brushes mine and the whole damn world contracts to that single point of contact.
She’s this brilliant fucking force, postdoc mapping poison in poor neighborhoods, teaching Baldwin to lifers, surviving losses that would break most people, and somehow she’s chosen to spend her evenings in a prison parking lot talking to me about Gramsci and grief and the impossibility of justice in a country built on inequality.
This isn’t romance. It’s recognition. Two people trying to do difficult work in an impossible place, and somewhere in the fluorescent-lit margins, in the waiting and the walking and the standing in cold parking lots talking about everything except what’s actually happening between us, finding something that feels more real than anything on the outside ever did.
I’m not going to pretend this makes sense. I didn’t drive Elena’s stuffed animal to a maximum-security prison because I was thinking clearly. I did it because sometimes the only honest response to the world is to lean into the absurdity until it cracks open and shows something true.
San Quentin sits there on the bay like a broken tooth in a beautiful mouth. All that water, all that light, and right there, this monument to every way we’ve failed each other. The thing about taking a fox puppet to prison is that nobody asks me to explain yourself. The guards see weirder shit before breakfast. I’m just another California eccentric with too much time and not enough sense.
Mister Fox didn’t ask for this. He’s a prop, a stand-in for childhood innocence or theatrical whimsy or whatever the hell we project onto these inanimate witnesses we drag through our lives. And maybe that’s the point. We’re all just being dragged places we didn’t sign up for, past razor wire and into the sun, trying to maintain some dignity in the face of the cosmic joke.
The Golden Gate was obligatory. Every doomed thing gets its postcard moment. The yacht club was for contrast, because if I’m going to document a stuffed animal’s descent into the California prison-industrial complex, I might as well show the other California first. The one with money and sailboats and people who’ve never had to think about what happens when society gives up on you.
I should’ve just returned him. Driven straight to Elena and said, “You left this.” But that would’ve been boring. That would’ve been sensible. And sensible doesn’t photograph well, doesn’t burrow into your brain at 1:58 AM when you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life.
Sometimes you’ve got to take Mister Fox to prison. Sometimes the only way to process the darkness is to document it, to bear witness with whatever tools I have, even if that tool is a stuffed animal and a camera phone. It’s not therapy. It’s not art. It’s just… necessary. Like screaming into a void that occasionally screams back.
The thing is, I did return him eventually. Elena got Mister Fox back. But we both knew, me and Mister Fox, we’d seen something. Something about beauty and brutality existing in the same frame. Something about how we’re all just one bad decision away from the wrong side of that fence, and how thin the line is between the absurd and the profound.
Or maybe I’m full of shit and just wanted to take weird photos.
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).p.117
Okay, so now we’re talking about something else entirely. Now we’re in the territory of obsession, of the kind of commitment that makes normal people uncomfortable at dinner parties.
She’s out there in her underwear. On a rock. In the Pacific. Scouting locations for a play that barely exists anymore. For Sophocles‘ Nausicäa, the lost one, the ghost play, the one that survives only in fragments and marginal notes and the wet dreams of classicists. We’re building a tragedy from shards. From the iota of what remains. And Angrette’s out there communing with Poseidon for it.
This is what I’m talking about. This is the difference between someone who “works in theater” and someone who serves it like some kind of fevered priest. Most people won’t even get their shoes wet for art. Angrette’s out there basically naked, exposed to the elements and the universe, because she understands that to reconstruct something that’s been lost for 2,500 years, to position Poseidon correctly in a play Sophocles wrote and the world forgot, you have to strip away everything that isn’t essential. You have to be as vulnerable as Odysseus was when the sea tried to erase him, as vulnerable as the text itself, which barely survived two and half centuries.
There’s something almost ritualistic about it, like she’s making an offering not just to this production, but to Sophocles himself. To the ghosts of Athens. To everything that’s been lost and might be found again.
The best collaborators don’t just show up. They offer themselves up. And I, putting together IOTA, resurrecting fragments, building worlds from whispers, I found someone who understands that great work demands a certain kind of madness.
That’s not just talent. That’s devotion. That’s grace.
I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole enterprise.
RAWdance, Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein’s athletic truth telling machine, took their piece Through my fingers to the deep and scattered it across three simultaneous locations like they were trying to choreograph the very idea of paying attention. You had to choose. You had to miss something.
Joel St. Julien’s score presumably did something, though you wouldn’t know it from the silence of this still photograph, which is exactly my point about documentation being its own weird necrophilia. But that bird, that accidental collaborator, reminds you that the performance happened in real air, real time, real space where seagulls don’t give a shit about artistic intentions.
Unlike reproductions of other types of artworks, photographs of performances, by virtues of their focus on artist’ body, allow the viewer to engage with the artist in a haptic, as well as a visual sense. Encountering the shared ontology of the band makes the viewer mindful of his or her own physical presence as witness to the pictured event (even if it well after the fact. Kathy O’Dell, Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
I nailed this shot because of the bird. Bodies intersecting with architectural lines, wildlife intersecting with human choreography, the gardens becoming complicit in all of it, proving that downtown San Francisco still has enough feral energy left to let chance collaborate with control. The image works precisely because it admits what it isn’t. It’s not the thing, it’s the ghost of the thing plus an uninvited guest, and maybe that’s all documentation ever wants to be.
Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
