The light up here doesn’t give a shit about my plans. It’s volcanic, primal, the kind of unforgiving brilliance that strips away pretense and leaves me with nothing but the raw fact of a human body suspended against oblivion. Babatunji of LINES Ballet is launching himself into that void above Mafate, and my finger’s on the shutter, heart hammering like I’m trying to steal fire from the gods themselves.
This isn’t some sanitized studio shoot with softboxes and assistants fussing over reflectors while the Creative Director drinks his cappuccino in the corner. This is a mountain that still remembers being born in flame, air so thin it makes you light headed and reckless, and a dancer who moves like he’s arguing with gravity and winning. Every leap is a middle finger to physics, to safety, to the very reasonable human instinct that says don’t launch yourself off a cliff edge.
I’m chasing him through the viewfinder, trying to capture that split second where the human body becomes pure kinetic poetry, where sinew and will transcend the mundane geometry of bones. The wind’s whipping across the caldera, and there’s something darkly honest about that. No safety net. No second take with better lighting. Just the desperate communion between photographer and subject, both of us reaching for something that exists only in that impossible moment of suspension.
I am shooting a ballet rehearsal at LINES. Beautiful people doing beautiful things. It’s all very controlled, very precise. Art with a capital A.
Then I walk outside.
City Hall steps are packed. West Coast March for Gaza. Thousands of people, and they’re pissed. Not the polite, NPR-liberal kind of protest. This is urgent. Raw. The kind of anger that shuts down ports at 5 a.m., which is exactly what happened the day before in Oakland, longshore workers honoring picket lines, refusing to load weapons bound for Israel.
The whiplash is immediate and uncomfortable. Five minutes ago I’m documenting dancers perfecting their craft in the Old Fellows Building. Now I’m in the middle of people screaming about genocide. Day 100 of the assault. Twenty-four thousand dead. The numbers don’t lie, even when we wish they would.
You can’t ignore the contrast. The aesthetics of ballet, all that refinement, that pursuit of perfection, and then this messy, necessary chaos of democracy. Both are performance, in a way. Both demand to be seen.
The light was perfect, which feels almost obscene to mention. The light doesn’t care about your moral crisis or your complicity or the fact that you’re standing there trying to figure out how to photograph grief without exploiting it.
I was in that studio because someone was paying me. I was on those steps because I couldn’t walk away. That’s not Nobel. It’s just paying attention. Barely.
You document what’s in front of you. Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s both, and you don’t get to choose.
Here’s the thing about Aleta Hayes and those Stanford Facilities Operations workers that nobody wants to say out loud because it makes the PhD crowd uncomfortable as hell: these guys with their hands in the dirt, their backs bent over root systems and drainage patterns, thirty to fifty feet up in the goddamn canopy where one wrong move means you’re not finishing the composition, they’re operating on a level of artistic integrity that would make most tenured teaching professors weep into their summer festival applications.
Aleta knew it. She saw what the rest of the campus walked past every day like it was wallpaper, that the real aesthetic revolution was happening outside and above, where guys named Miguel and Chen were sculpting with chainsaws in the sky, pruning oaks with the kind of three-dimensional spatial awareness that would make a Giacometti look clumsy. Creating negative space while dangling from a harness, composing with biology and physics and gravity and seasons, painting with perennials that would bloom and die and bloom again.
Because try hanging fifty feet up a coast live oak with a Stihl saw and tell me about your performance art piece. Try reading the growth patterns, the stress points, the way light will hit those branches six months from now when the leaves fill in. Try not falling to your death while making aesthetic decisions that will shape the landscape for decades.
That’s commitment. That’s vision married to craft married to physical courage married to actual consequence. These are installations you can’t un-install, in a medium, living wood, that fights back, that has its own agenda, that will outlive everyone’s career and most people’s memory of who taught what where when.
Aletacollaborated, didn’t condescend, that’s the key difference. She recognized artists when she saw them, even if their studio was the sky and their materials had root systems and their safety equipment was more sophisticated than anything in the sculpture lab. She understood that working at height, with living systems, with real stakes, requires a kind of presence that most gallery artists only theorize about in their statements full of five-dollar words.
No pretensions. Just the work. The dangerous, essential, beautiful work that holds up the world while the academy argues about theory and who has the better office.
The Blood of a Poet is the kind of beautiful, pretentious mindfuck that makes you want to simultaneously punch a wall and weep into your bourbon at 3 AM. Cocteau made this thing in 1930, and it’s still got that raw, narcotic pull, like stumbling into someone else’s nightmare at the exact moment it gets interesting.
The film’s this non linear hallucination about creation and destruction, about the artist as both god and victim of his own making. And that statue, the one that comes alive, that breathes and bleeds and refuses to stay dead, that’s Lee Miller. Yes, that Lee Miller. Man Ray’s lover, his obsession, the woman whose face he couldn’t stop photographing because she contained more mystery than his entire surrealist playbook could decode.
But here’s where it gets good: Miller wasn’t just the muse. She wasn’t content to be the beautiful object in someone else’s frame. She picked up the camera herself and shot some of the most haunting, technically brilliant work of the era. War photography that could break your spine, portraits that stripped away every protective layer of civilization. She was in the rooms where history happened, not as decoration but as witness and chronicler.
So when you watch Cocteau’s statue, when you see that marble face animate with something between terror and desire, you’re looking at a woman who understood both sides of the lens. Who knew what it meant to be immortalized and who refused to accept immortality as a substitute for agency. The irony’s almost too perfect: Cocteau freezes her in time as a symbol of artistic obsession while Miller’s out there doing the actual work, making images that matter, that hurt.
The whole film’s got this claustrophobic, masturbatory quality. The artist alone with his creations, his mirrors, his impossible doorways. But Miller’s presence, even silent and sculpted, feels like an intrusion of something real into Cocteau’s aestheticized self regard. She’s the crack in the mirror that refuses to mend.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about surrealism: it’s always been about control masquerading as liberation. But Miller? She walked right through those trap doors Cocteau set up and came out the other side holding a camera pointed at the real monsters. Nazis, ruins, the actual architecture of human cruelty.
You can’t watch The Blood of a Poet the same way once you know who she really was.
You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge.
What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every muscle screaming in slow motion. It’s brutal. Beautiful, sure, but brutal first.
“A dialogue with gravity,” he calls it. Which sounds poetic until you watch someone spend forty-five minutes lowering themselves six inches while looking like they’re being torn apart from the inside. This isn’t dance as performance, it’s dance as excavation. Like they’re digging something out of themselves one agonizing movement at a time.
This is Stanford, not some temple in Kyoto. But somehow that makes it better. More honest. These dancers didn’t come here to transcend the body, they came to inhabit it so completely it becomes something else entirely.
Fifty years they’ve been doing this. Fifty years of falling down and getting back up in the most difficult way imaginable. That’s not art. That’s devotion bordering on insanity. And yes, I respect the hell out of it.
Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man’s struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. Butoh dancers bodies are like a cup filled to overflowing, one which cannot take one more drop of liquid- the body enters into a perfect state of balance. Ushio Amagatsu
Strauss’s Daphne directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci
Castellucci knows what you know but pretend to forget… that pastoral is a lie… always was. Those sunlit meadows and nymphs dancing? Bullshit. The world’s a wasteland and nature’s not your mother, she’s indifferent, she’s cold, she’ll bury you under six feet of snow and not think twice about it. So he takes Strauss’ Daphne, this 1938 opera dripping with late Romantic longing, and strips it down to bone. No green anywhere. Just snow. Perpetual, pitiless snow falling on that Berlin stage like the universe giving up.
And you sit there in the Staatsoper watching this and something breaks open in your chest because Boecker’s Daphne isn’t some pastoral fantasy, she’s us, alienated, desperate, trying to find something pure in a world that’s fundamentally polluted by human want, human need, human fucking touch. She’s singing her luminous soprano lines and she’s already a ghost, already transforming into something non-human because humanity is the disease, right? That’s what Romeo Castellucci’s saying with that giant projection of Eliot‘s Waste Land title page, that modernist desolation bleeding into ancient myth.
Because the Greeks knew it too. Daphne runs from Apollo not because she’s coy, not because she’s playing virgin games, but because she sees what he represents, desire as consumption, love as annihilation. And when she becomes the laurel tree in Castellucci’s vision, it’s not romantic transformation, it’s escape, it’s the only way out. Guggeis lets that final metamorphosis stretch out, the orchestra doing all the work while the visual becomes pure abstraction, pure withdrawal from the human project.
Pape and Černoch can sing the hell out of their roles, and they do, but they’re irrelevant the moment Daphne chooses extinction over connection. That’s the radical move here. Romeo Castellucci’s not interested in redemption or reconciliation. He’s showing you what it looks like when someone would rather become mineral, vegetable, anything than remain human in a world this broken. The snow keeps falling. The stage stays empty. And somehow Strauss’ sublime late-Romantic orchestration sounds more desperately beautiful for it.
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
You know what’s fucked up? Here’s this sign. Had a purpose once. Maybe it warned you about riptides that could drag you out to sea. Maybe it told you the beach hours, when the lifeguards went home. Something useful. Something that might have saved your stupid life.
But now? Now it’s buried under stickers. Band logos. Brewery names. Some surf shop that’ll be out of business in one year. Energy drink brands. Skateboard companies. Local restaurants serving seventeen-dollar fish tacos to tourists who think they’re discovering “authentic” beach culture.
Layer upon layer of this performative bullshit, this aesthetic vomit that’s supposed to signify something. Rebellion, maybe? Local pride? The “scene”? But really it’s just noise. Commercial noise pretending to be counterculture. Dead Kennedys next to Patagonia next to some IPA that costs nine bucks a pint. It’s the uniform of people who desperately want you to know they’re not wearing a uniform.
The beautiful, terrible irony? They’ve completely obscured whatever that sign was trying to tell them. Buried the actual message under their desperate need to leave a mark, to say “I was here,” to turn everything into a mood board for their fucking lifestyle.
This is who we are now. We take something with meaning, even if it’s just a mundane warning about beach safety, and we bury it under branding. Under declarations of taste. Under proof of purchase. We colonize every surface with our consumer identities and call it culture.
The ocean’s right there. Infinite. Indifferent. Actually dangerous. Actually sublime. It’s killed thousands of people. Drowned civilizations. Swallowed entire fleets. It doesn’t care about your carefully curated identity. It doesn’t recognize the difference between a tech bro in a Tesla and a fisherman who’s worked these waters for forty years. It’ll take you both with the same casual indifference, pull you under, fill your lungs, and keep right on rolling. Those waves have been breaking since before we crawled out of the fucking primordial soup, and they’ll be breaking long after the last brewery closes, the last surf shop locks its doors, the last sticker fades into illegible nothing. And we’re standing there, obsessing over which decal represents our personality better. Which brand validates our existence. As if any of it fucking matters. As if the ocean’s going to pause mid-tide and go, “Oh, wait, this one liked good music and local craft beer. Better show some respect.”
It won’t.
Nature’s going to swallow all of it eventually. The sign. The stickers. The brands they represent. The carefully constructed identities they’re meant to signal. The whole sun-faded, peeling, pseudo-rebellious mess will be gone. Rust and rot and salt air will reduce it all to the same molecular garbage. And when it does, when that sign finally collapses, when those stickers dissolve into toxic confetti in the sand, when the post itself gets claimed by the beach and buried and worn smooth, the ocean won’t even pause. Won’t mark the occasion. Won’t even notice the difference between the actual warning it consumed and the commercial garbage we pasted over it.
We’re cosmically insignificant. Every sticker is a tiny scream into the void: “I existed! I had preferences! I mattered!” But we don’t. Not to the wind. Not to the water. Not to the earth that’s going to grind our bones and our brands into the same indistinguishable dust.
We’re so small. So loud. So absolutely, pathetically convinced our clutter means something. That our marks will last. That someone will remember we were here, that we liked this band, drank that beer, wore those brands.
No one will. Nothing will. And honestly? That’s the only honest thing about this whole stupid photograph.
I’m not a religious man, but if I believed in grace, it would look something like this. Point Lobos on any given day. The same rocks, the same crashing Pacific that Edward Weston stared at through his 8×10, that Ansel Adams turned into icons of American landscape photography, that Imogen Cunningham explored with her singular eye. This is hallowed ground for anyone who’s ever held a camera and pretended to see.
But here’s the thing that really gets me, the thing that makes me stop and wonder what I did right in this life: I get to share this with two beautiful people. My family. The ones who’ll wake up on a Sunday and say, “Let’s go to Point Lobos,” like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like we’re just running to the corner store instead of making a pilgrimage to one of the most photographed stretches of coastline in history.
We’re walking the same trails where the masters walked. We’re seeing the same light break over the same cypress trees, gnarled and twisted by wind and time. And I’ve got my cameras, sure, probably not as good as what Weston or Adams were shooting with, but good enough. Good enough to try to capture what this means, what it feels like to be here with the people I love, in a place that’s been teaching photographers how to see for nearly a century.
This is luck. This is privilege. This is everything. The landscape isn’t going anywhere, but the people? The moments? Those are finite, precious, irreplaceable. I know it every time we’re there together.
Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph: not searching for unusual subject matter but making the commonplace unusual, nor indulging in extraordinary technique to attract attention. Work only when desire to the point of necessity impels – then do it honestly. Then so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing. Edward Weston April 26, 1930, Point Lobos.
Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want to know about sickness? The patients know. We’ve been down there. We’ve seen what you fuckers won’t look at, the hideous beauty you’re too chickenshit to acknowledge.
Listen to this recording. His voice sounds like gravel scraped across concrete, words forced through a mouth that electroshock had basically destroyed. He’s hammering out syllables, whistling them through broken teeth. And he hates it. He thinks his rhythm’s off, so he immediately does another one, Aliénation et magie noire, about waking up from electroshock, that absolute terror of not knowing who you are anymore. In this one, he just goes for the throat: French psychiatry is sexual butchery. They’re putting people into insulin comas, shock comas, artificial deaths, and robbing them. Death is black magic, Artaud says, and these doctors are practicing it.
But he’s still not satisfied. His voice on tape isn’t the voice in his head. So he disappears from radio for a year.
Then La Voix des Poétes (The voice of the poets) calls. Do whatever you want, they tell him. Two weeks later, two weeks, and the guy’s dying of anal cancer, he’s written Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. He’s rehearsed his collaborators once. That’s it. They record the pieces between November 22nd and 29th, 1947. Then on January 16, 1948, Antonin Artaud and Roger Blin (the guy who directed the first productions of Beckett’sWaiting For Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days) record the bruitage, the screams, the glossolalia, the percussion, the primal noise underneath language.
What you get is this cacophony of rhythm and chaos and laughter, sound trying to become physical image, fracturing space, marking both presence and absence simultaneously. It’s Artaud’s last stand against language itself: interrogating it, dissecting it, smashing it to pieces, trying to forge from the wreckage something that actually expresses what a human body is.
This time, finally, Antonin Artaud says yes. This is it. This transmission hits the nervous system directly.
I’ve spent enough time in theaters (dark ones, bright ones, ones that smelled like decades of dust and ambition) to know this much: we’re fucked when it comes to how we actually see bodies anymore.
Three ways to watch someone perform. Theater: you’re in the room, sharing oxygen, watching sweat happen in real time, no safety net. Cinema: that gorgeous, lying bastard, all perfect lighting and impossible angles. And video. Christ, video. The thing that never stops, never shuts up, keeps shoveling content at you until you can’t remember what it felt like to not be consuming something.
And here’s what decades of watching this shift has taught me: I don’t just watch differently across these mediums. I think differently. The postmodern performance artists I’ve documented (the ones doing things that make audiences walk out or throw up or question their entire moral framework) know this. They’ve weaponized it. They understand that cinema and video haven’t just changed our taste; they’ve rewired our brains. We’re all junkies now, desperate for our fix of bodies and stories, but only if they’re served up in exactly the visual language we’ve been conditioned to crave.
We call these aesthetic differences. Polite academic term. They’re not. They’re perceptual regimes. Cages we don’t even know we’re living in.
The Industrial Problem of Theater
Let’s be brutally fucking honest here: theater cannot win this fight. Not economically, not perceptually, not in any way that matters to the average person trying to decide what to do on a Friday night.
When unlimited streaming costs less than parking in most cities, what possible argument can live performance make? Because the ticket price is just the beginning of the extraction. There’s the parking fee that feels like a mugging. The intermission wine that costs twelve dollars and tastes like regret. The slow, creeping realization as you’re walking to your seats that you’ve already dropped $150, maybe $200, and you haven’t even eaten dinner yet.
Meanwhile Netflix is sitting there charging nineteen bucks a month to pump an endless stream of content directly into your cerebral cortex. And if you’ve got any taste (if you’ve developed even a basic sense of what actually matters) you’ve got the Criterion Channel serving up cinema that shaped the medium, for less than the cost of that sad intermission wine.
This isn’t just me bitching about economics. This shapes what audiences expect when they finally do shell out for theater. They want value. And in our current media landscape, “value” has been defined entirely by cinema: polish, seamlessness, narrative that holds your hand, realism so perfect you forget you’re watching a construction. Theater becomes the artisanal, overpriced craft beer of performance. Niche, defensive, something you have to explain to your friends who think you’re being pretentious.
Shannon Jackson nailed this. Called it the infrastructural problem (Jackson 12–18). The way institutions, funding models, real estate costs, labor systems all quietly dictate what forms of performance are even viable, what “counts” as legitimate. Bodies on stage aren’t just bodies. They’re entering an economy of space, time, and capital that audiences are reading unconsciously, whether they know it or not.
Now, sure, there’s site-specific theater trying to break this whole fucked-up economic model. Get the audience off their asses, out of those plush seats, take them to abandoned warehouses, parking garages, somebody’s apartment. Make it cheaper, make it accessible, make it weird and immediate and impossible to ignore. It’s a noble effort, and sometimes it actually works. But even that can’t compete with the sheer laziness enabled by the couch and the remote.
Cinema’s Triumph and the Realism Trap
When cinema first showed up, people wondered if it would save theater or murder it. Robert Edmund Jones actually fantasized that film would become theater’s structural support, its backbone (Jones 154). He was wrong. Film didn’t partner with theater; it colonized realism and then perfected it to the point where theater couldn’t compete.
Piscator tried to integrate film into theatrical space, thought he could make them collaborate (Piscator 89–91). It never caught on as standard practice because cinema was already doing that job better. Sharper, cleaner, more efficiently, without the awkward compromises of trying to make two mediums coexist.
By mastering those late-19th-century realist conventions (the ones that promised to show you life “as it really is”) film fundamentally rewired the public’s sense of what “real” even looks like. And American theater, poor bastard, still hasn’t recovered from that hangover. Even when realism is the least interesting thing theater could be doing, when it’s actively limiting what the medium can explore, audiences (raised on the seamlessness of cinema) expect it anyway.
This is the trap: realism became cinema’s religion, but somehow theater ended up as the one paying tithes at the altar.
But Here’s the Thing: Even Cinema Is Dying Now
And just when you think cinema won (when it seems like the movie theater conquered theatrical realism and claimed total victory) the pandemic comes along and reveals the ugly truth: cinema was always just one bad year away from irrelevance.
Post-pandemic, the movie theater is getting murdered by the same forces that killed theater a generation earlier. Streaming didn’t just compete with cinema. It replaced it. Why drive across town, pay for parking, sit in a sticky seat next to strangers, shell out fifteen dollars for popcorn that costs thirty cents to make, when you can stay home?
Because here’s what changed: home theaters got good. Seventy-five-inch 4K screens, Dolby Atmos sound systems, the whole setup available at Costco for less than you’d spend on a year of movie tickets. The suburban home theater, the urban entertainment isolation room. These aren’t just acceptable alternatives to the cinema experience anymore. For a lot of people, they’re better. Pause when you need to piss. No teenagers on their phones. No one kicking your seat. The perfect temperature. Your own food. Your own couch.
The theatrical experience (that communal gathering in the dark that was supposed to be sacred, irreplaceable) turns out to be pretty fucking replaceable when the alternative is this convenient and this comfortable.
And streaming services know it. They’re not even pretending to respect the theatrical window anymore. Films go to homes faster and faster, sometimes simultaneously. The economics are brutal and simple: why spend $200 million on a theatrical release when you can drop it on your platform, boost subscriber numbers, and let people consume it in their algorithmic feed between episodes of whatever Real Housewife or Kardashian they’re binging?
Cinema held the throne for a century by perfecting the thing theater couldn’t quite nail: realism at scale, stories so immersive you forgot you were watching a construction. Now it’s being dethroned by something even more perfect: personalized, on-demand, infinitely scrollable content delivered to entertainment spaces we’ve built in our own homes. Private screening rooms where we’re both king and prisoner.
The irony is almost funny. Cinema beat theater by offering a better, cheaper version of realism. Now streaming is beating cinema by offering an even better, even cheaper version of convenience. Each medium that dominated gets eaten by something more efficient, more isolated, more perfectly calibrated to our decreasing attention spans and increasing desire to never leave the house.
Then Video Shows Up and Breaks Everything
But cinema’s collapse isn’t just an economic story. It’s a perceptual one. Streaming didn’t destroy the movie theater by offering better cinema. It destroyed it by transforming cinema into something else entirely: video.
This is the part people keep missing. The death of the movie theater wasn’t caused by film failing. It was caused by film mutating—absorbed into the endless, frictionless flow of video. The moment movies became another tile on a platform, another object in a feed, they stopped functioning as cinema and started functioning as video content.
And video plays by different rules.
If cinema perfected realism (immersion, continuity, the fantasy of the seamless world) video perfected flow. The scroll. The channel-hop. The endless-now where nothing begins, nothing ends, everything bleeds into everything else. Cinema asked you to enter its world; video invades yours.
Fredric Jameson argued that literature and film were no longer the primary tools for understanding the system we’re all trapped in. That job passed to television and video: media built on discontinuity, repetition, saturation (Jameson 65). Even when a video program pretends to have structure, the broader system (endless channels, infinite scroll) dissolves it into pure sequence. Watch long enough and narrative just dies. What remains is sensation, fragments, intensities.
And video art? That’s the medium admitting what it is. Acconci’s early works… Centers, Theme Song, the masturbatory pieces: turn the camera into a weaponized intimacy, collapsing the distance between performer and viewer until the viewer becomes implicated, complicit (Acconci). It’s not cinema’s realism; it’s video’s proximity. Not spectacle, but intrusion.
Auslander would say this collapses the hierarchy between live and mediated performance entirely (Auslander 38–45). Schneider notes how the body becomes loopable, replayable, no longer tethered to disappearance (Schneider 102–110). And Jackson would remind us that none of this is neutral, that institutions create the very conditions that let these images circulate, be archived, be consumed at scale (Jackson 27–33).
Taken together, they’re saying the same thing: Video didn’t just replace cinema. It replaced our entire way of perceiving bodies.
The World Becomes the Screen
Cinema gave us perfected realism. Video gave us infinite flow. And together they’ve trained us to experience life itself as a perpetual feed. Curated, algorithmic, endless. Theater tries to offer presence, that old promise of the living body in space. But presence itself has been redefined by the screen.
A body on stage isn’t just a body anymore. It’s competing with its own digitized double. The idea of the body that audiences have absorbed from thousands of hours of streaming, scrolling, consuming. Bodies circulate now like currency. They’re flattened, sorted, consumed, memed, clipped, archived, looped, surveilled. They’re evidence. They’re spectacle. They’re content. They’re infrastructure.
After years of making commercials for tech companies, of documenting performance art that pushed every boundary, of working my way up through the institutional machinery of theater, I can tell you this is real. This is what’s happened.
Conclusion: What Do Bodies Mean in an Economy of Images?
So here we are. Bodies aren’t bodies anymore. They’re fucking interfaces. Data points. Aesthetic surfaces you swipe past on your way to the next thing. We don’t encounter them, we process them, the way you’d process a transaction or a jpeg or a piece of spam.
The physical body onstage? It’s become exotic. Almost quaint. This stubborn, sweaty, analog thing that insists on existing in real space and real time, that can actually fail, that bleeds and fucks up and smells like a person. It’s an interruption in the smooth, frictionless flow of content we’ve built our entire lives around.
Theater keeps trying to sell us on presence. On the real, living, breathing thing right there in front of you. But we don’t trust our own senses anymore. We trust the camera. We trust the edit. We trust the algorithm that knows what we want before we do. Our media diet hasn’t just changed our taste. It’s changed our goddamn perception. Bodies are images first. Maybe realities second. Probably third, if we’re being honest.
And here’s the thing that really fucks me up: I can’t believe I’ve gotten all the way through this essay without talking about porn. The single biggest reshaper of how we see bodies on screens, the most consumed visual medium on the planet, the thing that’s probably done more to rewire our neural pathways around bodies and desire and spectatorship than theater and cinema and video art combined. But that’s probably the next essay. That’s the one that really explains how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Because this isn’t just about art anymore. This isn’t about whether theater can compete with Netflix or whether cinema can survive the home entertainment center. This is about whether we can still see a body as anything other than content to be consumed. Whether we remember what it feels like to be in a room with other humans, watching another human do something dangerous and real and unrepeatable.
The crisis isn’t economic. It’s perceptual. It’s existential.
We’re not just watching the feed anymore. We’ve become it. We think like it. We see like it. We’ve trained ourselves to experience other human beings the way we experience everything else: as images to be scrolled past, rated, archived, forgotten.
And the worst part? Most of us don’t even notice it’s happened.
