Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the frame isn’t there to make things pretty, it’s indifferent, functional, a reminder that the world keeps moving whether you nail this moment or not.
But Lauren and Derek are out there anyway, bodies committed in ways that would look insane if you tried to explain it to someone who wasn’t there. You can see it in the images, the full physical throw of it, reaching, extending, inhabiting these ancient savage blasts like they might actually mean something if you’re willing to look foolish enough, vulnerable enough, to find out.
That’s the thing about fragments. Sophocles didn’t leave us a manual. Just shards. Broken pieces of rage and grief and whatever passed for catharsis when people actually believed theater could change you. And here are these people, at an hour when sensible humans are still asleep, trying to reconstruct something that can’t be reconstructed. Only discovered. Maybe.
The moon’s still up, fat and fading. The light is that specific blue-gray that only exists for twenty minutes at sunrise on the water. Everything feels temporary, which is maybe the point. You’re working with language that’s been dead for millennia, in a space designed to amplify the sound of waves through pipes, with people who showed up because something about this particular configuration of madness felt necessary.
You look at these images later and think: that happened. We were actually there. Not performing for anyone, just doing the work because it demanded to be done. That’s the blessing. Not the result, the fact that anyone gave enough of a damn to show up in the first place.
In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth. Baruch Spinoza, The Letters
The body is living art.
Your movement through time and space is art.
A painter has brushes.
You have your body. Anna Halprin
The city that gave us the Beats and the Summer of Love is turning into an open-air dormitory for software engineers who make more in a year than most families see in a decade. Something’s dying. Something important.
She runs the Museum of Performance + Design, this improbable little operation down in SoMa dedicated to preserving things that were never meant to be preserved. Dance. Theater. Performance. The stuff that happens once and then vanishes. She’s protecting an archive of ghosts.
So she calls and asks me to photograph Anna Halprin leading a walk through lower San Francisco. A “sensory walk.” From the California Historical Society over at Mission and 3rd, winding through Yerba Buena Gardens, ending at the museum on Folsom and 5th. Not a long distance. Maybe twenty minutes if you’re walking with purpose. But this isn’t about getting somewhere. It’s about being somewhere.
Anna Halprin is in her nineties. She’s been making dance for longer than most people have been alive. And her whole philosophy boils down to this: your body moving through space is art. You don’t need training. You don’t need talent. You just need to be alive and willing to pay attention.
Which sounds like hippie bullshit until you actually see it happen.
The day of the walk, maybe forty people show up. Dancers, sure, but also civilians. Office workers. Students. Curious locals. Halprin designated leaders guide the group through the city like a pied pipers, but slower. Gentler. They cue these musical moments, these pauses, these invitations to feel the wind or notice the light or move in ways bodies don’t usually move in public.
I’m there with my camera trying to document the undocumentable. Because that’s the thing about performance: it exists in time, in bodies, in a specific moment that can never be repeated. The photograph is always a lie. It flattens everything. Freezes what was meant to flow. But it’s the lie we have. It’s how we remember.
People on the street stop and stare. Some laugh. Some look uncomfortable, the way Americans always look uncomfortable when confronted with bodies doing anything other than moving efficiently from Point A to Point B. A few join in. Most don’t. The city keeps moving around this little bubble of deliberate presence.
This is what Muriel understands. That in a city obsessed with innovation and disruption and moving fast and breaking things, someone needs to remember that people used to make art here. That weird, uncommercial, beautiful things used to happen in public space. That Anna Halprin could lead strangers through downtown San Francisco and for twenty minutes they could all agree that being alive and moving and feeling was enough.
The walk ends at the museum. The exhibition is called “Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin.” Scores, like sheet music, but for movement. Instructions for how to be present in your body. How to create meaning without words.
I take my photographs. They’re incomplete, like all photographs of performance. They miss the sound, the temperature, the feeling of being there. But they’re what we have. They’re the record.
They say: this happened. These people were here. This mattered.
In a city that keeps paving over its own past, that feels like radical work.
Anna Halprin lead a participatory sensory walk performance from the California Historical Society at Mission St. and 3rd St. to the Museum of Performance + Design at Folsom and 5th St in celebration of MP+D’s exhibition opening of Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin. A series of musical sensory experiences across the Yerba Buena Gardens area were imagined and cued by Anna Halprin. Co-hosted by California Historical Society and Museum of Performance + Design
Look at these pictures. This is where Anderson & Cristofani built ships, real goddamn ships, wooden scows for San Francisco Bay. From the early 1870s to the mid-1930s, right here along Innes Avenue in the India Basin at Hunter’s Point. A row of yards where men who actually knew what the hell they were doing turned timber into something that could carry weight across water.
Henry P. Anderson. Danish shipwright. Shows up in 1893, buys out Dircks’ yard on Innes Avenue, and gets to work. By 1906, he’s building Jack London’s The Snark, and then the whole city shakes itself to pieces. The earthquake hits. And Anderson? He keeps building.
1926, Alf Cristofani joins up. The yard gets a new name. They keep doing what they do, honest work, skilled work, the kind that’s nearly extinct now. Then the 1980s roll around and, because of course they do, property speculators buy the place. But wait, plot twist. The City manages to grab the North part of the yard in 1989, turns it into the India Basin Shoreline Park.
San Francisco likes to tell stories about itself. The Gold Rush. The earthquakes. The Summer of Love. The tech booms. Hell, they’ve got more origin myths than ancient Rome. But drive down Innes Avenue, past the freeway, past where the tourists stop looking at their maps, past where the venture capitalists’ Teslas fear to tread, and you’ll find a different story. One they’d rather you didn’t hear.
These aren’t neighborhoods that made it onto the postcards. They didn’t get the Ken Burns treatment. But they built the ships that won World War II. They housed the workers, Black families who came west during the Great Migration looking for something better than Jim Crow, who found jobs in the shipyards and made a community in the shadow of cranes and dry docks. Real people doing real work, the kind that gets your hands dirty, the kind that built America while America wasn’t looking.
For decades, decades, this place has been forgotten. Not benignly forgotten, like an old photo album in the attic. Actively, aggressively forgotten. Disinvested. Redlined. Poisoned. The city looked the other way while families lived on contaminated soil. While kids played in parks built on God-knows-what. While a whole community was basically told: you don’t matter enough to clean this up.
Walk down Innes Avenue now and you can still feel it. The weight of all that neglect. Boarded-up storefronts next to century-old Victorians that have seen better days. Chain-link fences around lots that used to be something, that could be something again. The kind of bones of a neighborhood that tell you: this place had life once. This place mattered.
But here’s where the story takes its predictable, infuriating turn.
Because now, now, suddenly the city remembers India Basin exists. Now that the rest of San Francisco is too expensive even for the tech workers, now that every other neighborhood has been strip-mined for condos and artisanal toast shops, the developers have turned their gaze toward Hunters Point. And they’re coming with their renderings and their community meetings and their promises about “revitalization.”
Revitalization. That word does a lot of work, doesn’t it? Makes it sound like you’re bringing something back to life. But you can’t revitalize a community that’s still very much alive, struggling, sure, overlooked, absolutely, but alive. What you’re really doing is replacement. Displacement with a prettier name.
They’ll “clean up” the contamination now. Now that there’s money to be made. Now that waterfront property is worth something to people who can actually afford it. They’ll pour a lawyer of cement over the toxins they ignored for forty years to seal them in, tear down what’s left of the old community, put up glass towers with names like “Shipyard Landing” or “Basin Point Luxury Residences”, some bullshit that commodifies the history without honoring it. Without remembering that real people lived here, died here, built lives here.
The longtime residents, the ones who stayed when everyone else abandoned this place, who made it through the neglect and the poison and the violence and the disinvestment, they’ll get pushed out by rising rents and property taxes. Priced out of their own neighborhood by the very “improvements” that should have been made decades ago when they actually needed them.
And in ten years, some tech bro will be jogging down Innes Avenue past boutique coffee shops and dog spas, and he won’t know a damn thing about the Hunters Point shipyard or the families who built it or the toxic legacy or the community that survived here against all odds. It’ll just be another “up-and-coming” neighborhood. Another success story of urban renewal.
But that history doesn’t disappear just because you built condos on top of it. The ghosts don’t go away because you painted the walls gray and called it “industrial chic.” The people who lived here, who remember, they know. And maybe that’s what this is about. Bearing witness. Saying their names. Remembering that before it was real estate, it was real life.
India Basin. Hunters Point. Innes Avenue.
A place that built warships and raised families and survived everything the city could throw at it. A place that deserved better fifty years ago and deserves better now than to be just another casualty of the only war San Francisco really cares about anymore: the one for square footage.
From Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark:
“Spare no money,” I said to Roscoe. “Let everything on the Snark be of the best. And never mind decoration. Plain pine boards is good enough finishing for me. But put the money into the construction. Let the Snark be as staunch and strong as any boat afloat. Never mind what it costs to make her staunch and strong; you see that she is made staunch and strong, and I’ll go on writing and earning the money to pay for it.”
And I did . . . as well as I could; for the Snark ate up money faster than I could earn it. In fact, every little while I had to borrow money with which to supplement my earnings. Now I borrowed one thousand dollars, now I borrowed two thousand dollars, and now I borrowed five thousand dollars. And all the time I went on working every day and sinking the earnings in the venture. I worked Sundays as well, and I took no holidays. But it was worth it. Every time I thought of the Snark I knew she was worth it.
For know, gentle reader, the staunchness of the Snark. She is forty-five feet long on the waterline. Her garboard strake is three inches thick; her planking two and one-half inches thick; her deck-planking two inches thick and in all her planking there are no butts. I know, for I ordered that planking especially from Puget Sound. Then the Snark has four water-tight compartments, which is to say that her length is broken by three water-tight bulkheads. Thus, no matter how large a leak the Snark may spring, Only one compartment can fill with water. The other three compartments will keep her afloat, anyway, and, besides, will enable us to mend the leak. There is another virtue in these bulkheads. The last compartment of all, in the very stern, contains six tanks that carry over one thousand gallons of gasolene. Now gasolene is a very dangerous article to carry in bulk on a small craft far out on the wide ocean. But when the six tanks that do not leak are themselves contained in a compartment hermetically sealed off from the rest of the boat, the danger will be seen to be very small indeed.
The Snark is a sail-boat. She was built primarily to sail. But incidentally, as an auxiliary, a seventy-horse-power engine was installed. This is a good, strong engine. I ought to know. I paid for it to come out all the way from New York City. Then, on deck, above the engine, is a windlass. It is a magnificent affair. It weighs several hundred pounds and takes up no end of deck-room. You see, it is ridiculous to hoist up anchor by hand-power when there is a seventy-horse-power engine on board. So we installed the windlass, transmitting power to it from the engine by means of a gear and castings specially made in a San Francisco foundry.
The Snark was made for comfort, and no expense was spared in this regard. There is the bath-room, for instance, small and compact, it is true, but containing all the conveniences of any bath-room upon land. The bath-room is a beautiful dream of schemes and devices, pumps, and levers, and sea-valves. Why, in the course of its building, I used to lie awake nights thinking about that bath-room. And next to the bath-room come the life-boat and the launch. They are carried on deck, and they take up what little space might have been left us for exercise. But then, they beat life insurance; and the prudent man, even if he has built as staunch and strong a craft as the Snark, will see to it that he has a good life-boat as well. And ours is a good one. It is a dandy. It was stipulated to cost one hundred and fifty dollars, and when I came to pay the bill, it turned out to be three hundred and ninety-five dollars. That shows how good a life-boat it is.
I could go on at great length relating the various virtues and excellences of the Snark, but I refrain. I have bragged enough as it is, and I have bragged to a purpose, as will be seen before my tale is ended. And please remember its title, “The Inconceivable and Monstrous.” It was planned that the Snark should sail on October 1, 1906. That she did not so sail was inconceivable and monstrous. There was no valid reason for not sailing except that she was not ready to sail, and there was no conceivable reason why she was not ready. She was promised on November first, on November fifteenth, on December first; and yet she was never ready. On December first Charmian and I left the sweet, clean Sonoma country and came down to live in the stifling city—but not for long, oh, no, only for two weeks, for we would sail on December fifteenth. And I guess we ought to know, for Roscoe said so, and it was on his advice that we came to the city to stay two weeks. Alas, the two weeks went by, four weeks went by, six weeks went by, eight weeks went by, and we were farther away from sailing than ever. Explain it? Who?—me? I can’t. It is the one thing in all my life that I have backed down on. There is no explaining it; if there were, I’d do it. I, who am an artisan of speech, confess my inability to explain why the Snark was not ready. As I have said, and as I must repeat, it was inconceivable and monstrous. Jack London, The Cruise of The Snark
You’re sitting there with your muse and your muse is telling you something and you’re following it, and you end up the next day looking at it and thinking “what the hell was the muse saying to me?” Nathan Oliveira
I rehearse in a room built for someone else’s kestrels, someone else’s vision of transcendence, and the whole time I’m thinking about Joey Oliveira and his baritone sax bleeding through the high school jazz band room. He drove one of those VW Rabbit pickup trucks, you remember those weird little bastards? Half car, half truck, all eighties West Coast practicality. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Last time I saw him was a few years after college. He was launching a catering business. That was cool too. Different cool, adult cool, the kind where you’ve figured out that passion and paying rent can occasionally occupy the same space if you’re willing to work your ass off.
Joey was always doing cool shit. That was his thing. While the rest of us were performing our various anxieties and ambitions, he was just, moving. Doing. Making shit happen. Now I’m in his father’s cathedral of contemplation, trying to make theater happen under the watch of painted birds, and I’m realizing that the Oliveira family’s whole deal was just that: making things, following the muse wherever it led, whether that meant canvases or catering or baritone sax lines that held a high school jazz band together.
His old man painted these birds. Nathan Oliveira. Five massive canvases of raptors hovering over the Stanford hills, and they hung them in this purpose-built temple of contemplation like some kind of spiritual IKEA showroom for the overstressed and underslept. Except here’s the thing, the paintings work. They pin you to the floor with their weight, these ghostly predators frozen mid-hunt, and suddenly your little theatrical exercises feel like what they are: fumbling around in church pretending you belong there.
I knew Nathan, sort of. The way you “know” your friend’s famous father, but really later in college when I’d see him at open studio days where Stanford kids wandered through like lost tourists, trying to seem deep. You didn’t ask stupid questions. You looked at the work and felt inadequate and left.
Now here I am, decades later, moving bodies through the space his paintings made holy. The Windhover Contemplative Center, they call it. Architects won awards for this building. Donors wrote checks. The university needed somewhere to warehouse the emotional wreckage of ambitious children, so they built this pristine box and filled it with Nathan’s birds and called it healing.
And goddamn if it doesn’t feel like something.
You block a scene and these painted kestrels watch. They’ve been watching since before the walls went up, since Nathan stood in those same hills squinting at real birds doing real bird things, hunting, hovering, surviving. Joey probably knew stories about those paintings I’ll never hear. About which one gave his dad the most trouble, which one arrived like grace. That knowledge died with the family intimacy that created it.
So you rehearse anyway. You move through Oliveira’s cathedral of controlled artistic vision with your messy human bodies and your half-formed ideas, knowing you’re not worthy of the space but taking it anyway because someone said you could have it for three hours on Tuesday afternoons. The baritone sax is long gone. Joey’s somewhere else now. Nathan’s been gone since 2010, four years before they finished his monument.
The muse tells you something, he said. You follow it. Next day you look at what you made and think “what the hell was the muse saying?”
Yeah, Nathan Oliveira. Still trying to figure that out. Your birds are still hovering. We’re still stumbling around beneath them, making our small noises, hoping something takes flight.
Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan TacatarunningEuripidesfragment #91 on this windswept chunk of rock above the Golden Gate, the irony burns clean off.
This is theater stripped to its original brutality, no wings, no fourth wall, just actors and air and the Pacific Ocean deciding whether it gives a damn about your emotional arc. Fragment #91 isn’t even a complete play, just shards of something that mattered enough 2,400 years ago that someone bothered to save the pieces. And here’s Muriel cutting through the morning fog like she’s trying to wake the dead, or maybe just wake San Francisco across the water, that sleeping beast of a city pretending it doesn’t see us up here, pretending it doesn’t matter.
The thing about site-specific work is it’s either completely alive or it’s graduate school masturbation. There’s no middle ground. The Headlands don’t care about your PhD or your Stanislavski. The wind will steal your lines, the fog will swallow your blocking, and that bridge, that perfect, arrogant bridge, will upstage us every single time unless we’re brave enough to collaborate with it instead of against it.
That’s what makes this work. Not despite the location, but because of it.
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
some theorists locate special value in the human performer in live performance this presence is ephemeral each appearance is unique finite disappears from a spectator’s field of vision after the moment of display
Performance in this sense is distinct from video or film or anything pre recorded
The same theoretical point of view identifies the function of the pre recorded document as a strategy to arrest the inevitable disappearance of human presence an attempt to preserve the moment
the empirical reality of the human performer which may appear to us as more substantial in performance palpably there in its corporeality becomes in the retrospective moment of theorizing more fragile more volatile and transitory in contrast to the greater recoverability and endurance of the recorded document
a sense of the relative stability of a recorded document derives from a perception that a moment from the past has been captured but any intense examination of this arrest reveals that the technology does not wholly recover the prior event merely marks a moment that no longer exists retains presence only through the record of some aspects of its previous presence
this extrapolation from film theory suggest that prerecorded representations of a human figure like the picture or film signifies primarily as a reference to an event in the past
Roland Barthes claims that when we study a photograph we do not see a presence “being there,” rather a presence that “has been there.”
he claims there is a peculiar conflation or “illogical connection” of here and then
I recognize the subject of the photograph displays what is not really here the still photograph in this sense has no projective power
according to Barthes because the cinema employs narration fiction audiences identify film not as the experience of what “has been there,” as in a photograph but, rather, responds to the experience as “There it is.”
yet Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet integrates live performance and recorded media 40 pre recorded segments displaying the presence of those 40 performers while inviting or making the audience a performing body rendering Barthes’ distinction among here and then and “There it is” much more complicated
as a spectator I confront two different presences one that is empirical– materially realized in the present moment– and an other that clearly reproduces an earlier moment that on it’s own holds some projective power
the operation of the pre-recorded vocals its manifestation of a moment prior to performance alters the behavior (or work) of the audience interacting with it
the interaction reveals an equivocation between the here and then with the audience functioning in the performance as image
the pre recorded sound plays a game of being immediate the spectator recognizes that this “illusion” is an aesthetic lie an artistic conceit but the audience plays the game of being in the same time frame as the recorded sound in a time frame they know is prior to the performance despite the artifice of immediacy consequently the performance oscillates between temporal stations in a dynamic that doesn’t ever come to rest
at some level of consciousness I recognize that the recorded sound captured an event from the past and that what I now hear is only the physical residue left from that earlier moment projected in the present yet this awareness provides in my role as spectator as I witness the audience move in and out of the space move amongst the 40 speakers listening their facial expressions their postures their brief exchanges with each other leaving me with a sense of a gratitude as I recognizing that the plenitude of a documented prior moment/performance can be reborn in a powerful meaningful new way
The Forty Part Motet is a forty-part choral performance of English composer Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century composition Spem in Alium, sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. The performance is played in a fourteen-minute loop that includes eleven minutes of singing and three minutes of intermission. Individually recorded parts are projected through forty speakers arranged inward in an oval formation, allowing visitors to walk throughout the installation, listening to individual voices along with the whole.
Book 6. Nausicaa. The one where Odysseus washes up like human driftwood, salt-caked and wrecked and basically naked, and has to beg a princess for help without seeming like either a pervert or a pathetic case. It’s about being broken and trying to hold onto some shred of dignity while you’re covered in seaweed and your own exhaustion.
And Jamie Freebury’s out there in those concrete pools that used to be Sutro’s wet dream of democratic bathing, those ruins that the ocean’s been patiently reclaiming since 1966, performing this story about shipwreck and survival and the distance between where you thought you’d be and where you actually ended up. The Pacific’s right there doing what it’s always done, which is exactly nothing and absolutely everything simultaneously, and somewhere in that space between the ancient Greek understanding that the universe wants to destroy you and the decidedly American ruins of a robber baron’s vision of leisure, something’s happening that probably shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
Because here’s the thing about performing 2,800 year old poetry in a place that’s actively falling apart: it’s either the most pretentious bullshit imaginable or it’s an honest attempt to get at something. There’s no middle ground. And standing there with the fog rolling in and the ruins refusing to be metaphorical because they’re too busy being literal ruins, you realize Homer knew all along that this is what happens, civilizations build their bathhouses and their certainties and the sea just waits.
