Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves…art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light. Jerzy Grotowski
.
I don’t pretend to understand everything about Polish experimental theater. But when the Grotowski Work Center makes its way from Pontedera, Italy to San Francisco, and it just so happens to coincide with Julia and Aram tying the knot, well, that’s the kind of beautiful collision that restores your faith in the universe’s sense of timing.
Franconia. That house where Michael, Niki, and Ciara lived. Where Julia crashed for a while too. The kind of place that becomes more than an address, it becomes mythology. These spaces always do when the right people pass through them at the right time.
They celebrated with song and dance, which is exactly what Grotowski would have wanted. Not some bloodless, intellectualized performance-about-performance bullshit. Real bodies, real voices, real joy erupting in real space. The Polish master understood that theater, real theater, is about breaking down the barriers, filling the emptiness, emerging “from darkness into a blaze of light.”
A wedding is theater. Life is theater. And somewhere in the middle of all this, the avant-garde meeting the ancient ritual of marriage, the Work Center’s rigorous practice colliding with champagne and dancing… there was Sharka. The greatest dog in the world, according to sources. Every great party, every genuine moment of human transcendence, needs a great dog bearing witness. Sharka knew what was up.
This is what happens when you let art breathe, when you stop treating culture like a museum piece and let it be what it was always meant to be: alive, messy, joyful, transformative. Julia and Aram got married. People sang. People danced. The Work Center came to town. Sharka was there.
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave. Colette, Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure), 1932
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. One name, like she didn’t need anything else. French writer, novelist, performer, scandal. She wrote about desire, about women’s lives, about the body and pleasure and all the things polite society pretended didn’t exist. Gigi. The Claudine novels. Fifty novels, dozens of short stories. She didn’t stop.
She married three times. Had affairs with men and women. Performed in music halls, half-naked, while her first husband sold her books under his own name. She took the work back eventually, reclaimed it, kept writing.
She lived exactly as she wanted, which in early 20th century France, hell, anywhere, meant pissing a lot of people off.
When she died in 1954, they gave her a state funeral. First French woman writer to get one. The Catholic Church refused to participate because of how she’d lived. Their loss.
Now she’s here, in Père Lachaise, same cemetery as Gerda Taro, as Oscar Wilde, as Edith Piaf, as so many others who lived and died on their own terms.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
May 05, 2023 | Categories: | Comments Off on Colette (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise)
Let me be clear about something: Deep River works. It fucking works. But not because every element is worth a damn. It works because Alonzo King and Lisa Fischer have something real, something that cuts through the usual artist-meets-artist mutual noise.
Alonzo doesn’t use Lisa Fischer as a voice. He listens. She doesn’t just sing to the choreography, she’s in genuine conversation with it, a dialogue that’s taken years to build. You can see it: the way the dancers respond to her phrasing, the way she holds a note and bodies suspend mid-air, waiting. It’s years of artistic dialogue distilled into movement and sound. That relationship, that’s the spine of the whole thing.
Misrach made his name shooting deserts and environmental collapse. Fine. Deserved, even. But these projections? This is the visual equivalent of Enya. Soft-focus landscapes. Ambient nature porn. The kind of imagery you’d see in a Marriott lobby, behind a TED talk about “finding your authentic self”, or behind some Silicon Valley exec’s LinkedIn headshot. It’s pretty. It’s safe. It’s utterly forgettable.
It’s not just aesthetically bankrupt, it’s a technical catastrophe.
They wash out the dancers in sickly cyan and amber, creating flat, muddy tones that make human skin look either radioactive or necrotic. The contrast is fucked. One minute you’ve got workable light, the next you’re shooting into what looks like a Windows XP screensaver having an existential crisis.
It’s hack work dressed up in art-world credibility.
But here’s the thing: Fischer and King are so good, so ruthlessly committed to the work, that they drag this whole production forward. The dancers, these freakish athletes with their impossible lines and their bodies that shouldn’t exist in nature, they’re not competing with the projections. They’re ignoring them. Dancing through them like they’re weather. Like they’re just one more obstacle to transcend on the way to something true.
Moran’s compositions do the other half of the rescue operation. Complex, uncompromising jazz that meets Fischer’s gospel power head-on without flinching. When Fischer opens her mouth, when those first notes come out, when the dancers respond… that’s when you remember why you’re in the room. That’s when the corporate wellness retreat playing on the walls behind them becomes irrelevant background noise.
As a photographer, you make a choice: document the flawed whole or isolate what actually matters. I chose the bodies. The faces. The moment Fischer’s voice and those dancers’ movements become the same thing. Let someone else shoot the pretty pictures projected on the wall. I’m there for the thing that can’t be repeated, the thing that lives once and then dies.
That’s the only job worth doing.
As artists, which we all are, our obsession is to crumble the veils of delusion, to make the invisible apparent, and to see behind all appearance. If I’ve come to a realization where I’ve left the sense of ‘me‘, and expanded to the sense of ‘we’, finally stepping into the idea of ‘oneness’, how can I exploit a mountain? How can I exploit a people? Because I realize that people and that mountain, is me. That ocean that is being polluted is me. Alonzo King
On ne meurt qu’une fois; et c’est pour si longtemps!
We die only once, and for such a long time! Molière, Le Dépit Amoureux , 1656, Act V, sc. iii
Molière. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin if you want to get technical. 1622 to 1673. French playwright, actor, the guy who invented modern comedy and pissed off everyone who mattered while doing it.
He wrote satire. Sharp, vicious, brilliant. Went after the Church, the aristocracy, the hypocrisy of French society. Tartuffe, about a religious con man, got him in so much shit with the Catholic Church they banned it. Twice. He kept rewriting it, kept pushing. Louis XIV loved him, which was the only reason he didn’t end up in prison.
Actor too. Ran his own theater company. Performed in his own plays, which back then was considered low-class. Actors were barely above prostitutes in the social hierarchy.
February 17th, 1673. He’s on stage performing The Imaginary Invalid. Playing a hypochondriac. The irony is so thick you could choke on it. He collapses during the fourth performance. They get him home. He dies that night. Coughing up blood.
Here’s the thing: because he was an actor, and because he died without renouncing the profession, the Church refused to bury him in sacred ground. His widow had to beg the king to intervene. Finally, they let him be buried. At night. In secret. In an area of the cemetery reserved for unbaptized infants.
The guy who made France laugh. Buried like a criminal.
Later they moved him here. Gave him a proper grave.
Too little, too late.
Again. Always too late.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
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And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world’s attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own. Richard Wright, The Long Dream, 1958
Born in Mississippi, 1908. Black kid in the Deep South, Jim Crow at its most vicious. Sharecropper’s son. Hunger. Violence. The kind of racism that wasn’t subtle, wasn’t coded, it was a boot on your neck every single day.
He got out. Moved to Memphis, then Chicago. Joined the Communist Party because in the 1930s, if you were Black in America and you wanted to fight the system, that’s where you went. They were the only ones talking about racial equality like it actually mattered.
1940: Native Son. Changed everything. Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in Chicago, trapped by poverty and racism, commits murder. Not a hero. Not a victim. A human being destroyed by a system designed to destroy him. The book was raw, brutal, honest. White America lost its fucking mind. Black America finally saw itself on the page.
1945: Black Boy. His autobiography. Growing up in the South, the beatings, the hunger, the constant degradation. No sentimentality. No redemption narrative. Just the truth.
The Communist Party turned on him. Always happens. He left.
1947: he moved to Paris. Exile. Could not live in America anymore. The racism, the surveillance, the pressure, it was killing him. Paris gave him space to breathe, to write, to exist.
November 28th, 1960. Heart attack in Paris. Dead at 52.
Buried here. An American writer who had to leave America to survive, who told the truth about race when no one wanted to hear it.
Native Son is still banned in schools across America. Still too dangerous. Still too true.
That’s how you know he got it right.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
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To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: “To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.” Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source.
My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life. Isadora Duncan, As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers, 1912 by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 105.
Isadora Duncan. Born in San Francisco, 1877. Died in Nice, 1927, strangled by her own scarf.
She invented modern dance. Barefoot, flowing tunics, hair loose. While everyone else was doing rigid ballet bullshit, she was moving like a human being, free, natural, expressive. Danced to Beethoven, to Chopin. Made it look like breathing.
Free love. Bohemian life. Had kids out of wedlock, didn’t care what anyone thought. Lived in Europe, danced for packed houses, changed everything about how people understood movement and the body.
1913: her two children, Deirdre and Patrick, drown in the Seine. The car they’re in with their nanny stalls on a bridge, rolls backward into the river. Both kids gone. Just like that.
She never really recovered. Kept dancing, kept living, but something broke that day and didn’t come back.
September 14th, 1927. Nice, France. She’s riding in an open car, wearing a long silk scarf. Her signature. She says “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!”
“Farewell, my friends. I go to glory!”
The scarf catches in the wheel. Snaps her neck instantly. Fifty years old.
The thing that made her iconic, that flowing, dramatic scarf, killed her in the most absurd, horrible way possible.
Genius. Tragedy. A death so perfectly, cruelly ironic it almost feels made up.
But it’s not.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
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Gerta Pohorylle. Born August 1st, 1910. Dead July 26th, 1937. Twenty-six years old.
German Jew. War photographer. But before she was Gerda Taro, she and Endre Friedmann, another photographer, another refugee, cooked up a scheme. They invented Robert Capa. A fictional American photographer whose work they could sell for more money because, well, Americans got paid better than a couple of broke European Jews in Paris.
They both worked under the Capa alias at first. A lot of that early iconic work? Hers. His. Theirs. Hard to say where one ended and the other began.
Then they split the alias. She became Gerda Taro. He kept Capa. They started publishing independently, but they stayed together, professionally, romantically, messily. He proposed. She said no. They kept going anyway.
She covered the Spanish Civil War with a camera when most people had the good sense to run the other direction. First woman photojournalist killed on the frontline. That’s the distinction. That’s what she gets remembered for, not just her work, but how she died doing it.
They buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Alberto Giacometti designed her grave. The sculptor made a falcon, Horus, the Egyptian god, to mark where she’s buried.
The epitaph is in French and Catalan: “So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world.”
Twenty-six years old. Camera in hand. Died trying to show people what war actually looks like.
Capa became a legend. Taro became a footnote for decades. But she was there first. She helped invent him.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Jan 05, 2023 | Categories: | Comments Off on Gerda Taro (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise)
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.
I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on it because, and here’s the thing, it does.aGoffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) We’re all doing this twenty-four-hour-a-day show that nobody bought tickets for and nobody can leave, and if you fuck up your lines, if you stand too close or laugh too loud or just generally fail to execute the choreography everyone somehow already knows, you pay for it. Maybe with embarrassment, maybe with your job, maybe with something worse. The show must go on because the alternative is getting kicked out of the theater, except the theater is society and there’s nowhere else to go.bIbid.
Everyday performance is enforced. End of story.
Now Erving Goffman figured this out decades ago. That we’re all actors on stages we didn’t build, performing roles we didn’t write. And everyone treats his work like it’s this cute metaphor, this clever little way of thinking about social life.cIbid. But that’s bullshit. Goffman wasn’t being metaphorical. He was describing a prison. Frontstage, backstage. These aren’t just academic concepts, they’re survival zones. You slip up frontstage and you get punished: shame, exclusion, unemployment, violence. The backstage is just wherever you’re allowed to drop the act for five seconds before somebody walks in and you have to snap back into character. This isn’t theater as art. This is theater as control system. And you can’t refuse to participate because you’re already in the show, you’ve always been in the show, you were born into the fucking show.
Which brings me to the problem, the real problem: actual theater (you know, the kind with stages and lights and programs you pay money for) is supposed to be different from this nightmare.dIser, The Act of Reading (1978) Wolfgang Iser talks about theater as a bracketed space, an “as if” world that’s deliberately separated from reality, and he’s right, that’s exactly what makes it powerful.eIbid. In the theater you can stage murder, betrayal, revolution, impossible desires. All the things that would destroy you in real life. Because everyone agrees it’s not really happening. The distance isn’t a bug, it’s the entire point. That separation is what lets you think instead of just react, what lets contradiction and impossibility breathe for a minute without getting someone killed.
Here’s where I’m going to fuck with you: that distance is also the problem.fIbid. The same thing that gives theater its power (that safety, that separation) is what makes it ultimately toothless. When the bracket becomes absolute, when the audience is completely insulated from consequence, theater stops mattering. It becomes beautiful, sure. Skillful. But it’s a corpse. The alibi that enables thought becomes the excuse for doing nothing. And I don’t know how to resolve this paradox and I’m not going to pretend I do. Theater needs distance to work but distance kills its ability to change anything. Sit with that. I have to.
This is where paratheatrical work comes in. Not as some avant-garde novelty but as a desperate response to the fact that the alibi is failing. Paratheatrical work doesn’t invent performance, it just points at the performance that’s already happening everywhere, all the time, crushing us. It says: look, these aren’t natural laws, these are aesthetic rules, and someone made them up, and someone else enforces them, and we’ve all agreed to pretend they’re inevitable when they’re not. Once you see that, once those rules become visible, power stops looking like spectacle and starts looking like what it actually is: repetition. The same gestures over and over until they feel like the only possible way to be human.
And meanwhile American theater (I’m talking about the big institutions, the subscription-series bourgeois comfort zones) has turned into a fucking museum. You know the drill: sit down, shut up, receive your Culture, clap at the right moments, leave feeling vaguely improved. Herbert Blau was right that audiences are never truly passive, that watching is always an act, but decades of institutional discipline have trained us to be safe. Meaning arrives pre-digested. Risk is cosplay. Nobody’s in danger, least of all the people in the expensive seats.
And look, popular performance promises us something else. Danger, transgression, the real thing. But it’s lying.gDebord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967/1994) Guy Debord saw this coming when he wrote about the spectacle, but his critique needs an update because spectacle has gotten smarter. It doesn’t need passive consumption anymore. It wants your participation, your comments, your shares, your feelings. It wants you to feel implicated, like you’re part of something wild and real, while keeping you structurally insulated from anything that might actually cost you something. We get to perform transgression as aesthetic experience (look how edgy I am!) without any of the ethical exposure that makes transgression mean something. The spectacle doesn’t suppress dissent anymore. It sells it back to you as content.
The whole thing comes apart most clearly when the containment fails and nobody meant for it to fail. The Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter is the perfect case study because it’s a document of exactly that collapse.hMaysles Brothers, Gimme Shelter (1970) The Altamont concert was supposed to be this countercultural performance, this ritual of freedom and intensity and collective rebellion. Instead someone got murdered. Meredith Hunter died on camera while a hundred thousand people watched or didn’t watch or watched without understanding what they were seeing. What collapsed wasn’t just crowd control. It was the entire distance between performance and consequence. The bracket broke.
And here’s what really gets me about Gimme Shelter: it’s not just what the film captures, it’s how watching itself becomes unbearable. The camera doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t stabilize the chaos. It just witnesses the failure. The worst moments come later, when the performers watch the footage trying to figure out what they were part of, what their responsibility was. And their attention changes nothing. Recognition comes too late. The spectacle promised us transgression and delivered blood, and nobody knew what their role was supposed to be once the rules dissolved.
Altamont shows what happens when aesthetic distance collapses by accident: not political awakening, just catastrophe. The audience didn’t become emancipated. They became exposed, implicated without consent, and their attention without responsibility meant exactly nothing.
Now let me tell you about Victor García’s production of The Balcony because this is where someone actually figured out how to stage this problem deliberately instead of letting it explode in everyone’s face. Genet’s play is already obsessed with performance as power. These pathetic men rehearsing authority in a brothel, dressing up as bishops and judges and generals while real revolution happens outside. Power as image, power as role-play, power as spectacle that doesn’t need any actual power to function. García doesn’t clean this up or make it easier to swallow. He makes it architectural.
He built this cylindrical, vertiginous space and stuck the audience around and above the action, suspended in positions that make you feel like authority (elevated, surveying, safe) while simultaneously making you physically vulnerable through height and instability. There’s no innocent place to sit. You can’t just watch and decode meaning from a distance. You have to feel how your looking participates in the whole machinery of domination. Attention isn’t contemplative here. It’s positional. The act of watching aligns you with the thing you’re watching, whether you like it or not.
This is spectacle without the reassurance. García refuses to give you the moral high ground, refuses to let you judge from outside. You’re not outside. There is no outside. Theatrical distance still exists but it’s compressed until it hurts.
And here’s why García matters alongside Gimme Shelter: Altamont shows the chaos that happens when distance collapses and nobody has an alternative framework ready. García shows what becomes possible when you destabilize the distance on purpose, with structure, with intention. He doesn’t invite you to intervene physically and he doesn’t let you off the hook through passivity. You just have to sit there feeling complicit while the performance stays intact as performance.
This is the distinction that keeps me from giving up entirely: danger doesn’t have to mean physical risk to be real. Ethical danger (recognizing your implication in representation and power) can be staged without dissolving theater into chaos or abandoning public accountability. García proves you can expose the audience without erasing them. He offers a counterpoint to Grotowski’s trajectory, which I’ll get to in a second, but the key thing is: he keeps the theater as theater while making watching unbearable in all the right ways.
If Gimme Shelter shows spectacle losing control, García shows spectacle weaponized. Both prove that spectatorship is never neutral, never innocent. But García insists (and this is crucial) that audiences owe more than attention. They owe an awareness of their position, an acknowledgment of complicity, and a willingness to stay with discomfort instead of retreating into safe interpretation. Watching isn’t innocent but it’s still accountable.
The most extreme response to all this is to just burn it down completely, which is basically what JerzyGrotowski did after 1975.iGrotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) He said fuck public theater entirely and disappeared into paratheatrical and ritual experiments where the boundary between performer and spectator doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone’s participating, nobody’s watching, and theater as a public art form just dissolves. This functions less as a model than as a warning about what happens when you follow this logic all the way to its conclusion. What remains might be transformative for the people actually doing it, but it stops being accountable to anyone outside the room. It becomes private, hermetic, sealed off.
So the task (and I’m being dead serious now) isn’t to destroy theatrical distance and it isn’t to preserve it like some precious artifact. It’s to destabilize it deliberately, to keep it uncertain and alive. And just dragging performance outside institutional spaces doesn’t do this automatically. Site-specific work can reproduce the same hierarchies under new management. What’s required is a complete renegotiation of roles, and this is hard, this is the work nobody wants to do.
Performers need to learn listening and responsiveness instead of mastery. Designers need aesthetic systems that accommodate contingency instead of control. And audiences (fuck me, audiences need to be retrained from the ground up).jRancière, The Emancipated Spectator(2009) Not as consumers buying experiences, not as passive receivers of meaning, but as co-present bodies whose attention and choices and refusals carry actual consequence.
This is the ethical demand: not belief, not interpretation, but responsibility. To be present is to be implicated. To watch is to act. Theater stays alive only as long as it keeps testing this unstable boundary between representation and reality. Risking transformation without abandoning public accountability.
That’s the tightrope. That’s the whole game.
Because without that risk, theater just hardens into museum practice. Skillful, elegant, expensive, and completely detached from the conditions under which actual people actually live. I can’t accept that. I refuse to accept that. Theater matters or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t matter then what the hell are we doing here?
What went down 50 years ago at the Château de Ferrières on December 12, 1972 wasn’t just some party. It was the kind of decadent, surreal fever dream that makes you question whether you’ve been living wrong your entire life or whether these people had simply lost the plot so completely that they’d achieved some kind of transcendent madness.
Marie Helene de Rothschild, and Christ, you’ve got to hand it to her, didn’t just throw a costume party. She orchestrated a waking hallucination, a Dalí painting brought to sweating, breathing, champagne-soaked life. The invitations arrived written backwards, fucking backwards, readable only when held to a mirror, which is either brilliantly pretentious or pretentiously brilliant, and honestly, at this level of wealth and audacity, what’s the fucking difference?
The chateau itself was lit orange to look like it was burning. THE ENTIRE CASTLE. Like some apocalyptic vision, some end-times theatre that said “yes, we have so much money we can make our home look like it’s being consumed by flames FOR FUN.” And you walked up to this supposedly burning building past footmen dressed as cats, not people in cat masks, mind you, but people in full feline regalia, pretending to sleep on the steps, because why wouldn’t you? The line between reality and madness had been erased entirely, and everyone agreed to pretend this was normal.
Inside, Audrey Hepburn, AUDREY HEPBURN, glided through rooms hung with black ribbons wearing a birdcage on her head. What really twists the knife: this wasn’t performance art, not in the modern sense. This was just Tuesday night for these people. Who the fuck holds parties on Tuesdays? Only the filthy rich. This was what passed for entertainment when you had dynasties of money, when your last name alone could move markets and topple governments.
Salvador Dalí sat there like a mad king, because where else would Dalí be?, at a table decorated with deformed plastic dolls, probably pontificating about the liquefaction of time or the erotic geometry of the unconscious or some other brilliant nonsense that was simultaneously profound and completely full of shit. And Helene Rochas, the perfumer, wore an actual gramophone on her head. A GRAMOPHONE. Not as irony, not as commentary, but as genuine surrealist commitment to the bit.
But the hostess, Marie Helene wore an oversized stag’s head, antlers spreading like a crown of thorns, decorated with tears made from actual diamonds. DIAMOND FUCKING TEARS. Because regular tears weren’t enough. Maybe the village peasants were all cried out, who knows? Regardless, when you’re this rich, even your costume’s emotional display needs to be literally priceless.
What absolutely destroys me about all this? It’s not the excess, excess I can understand, excess is human, excess gives us the pyramids and the Spice Girls… it’s the natural endpoint of desire freed from consequence. It’s that these people understood something about breaking reality that we’ve lost. They knew that life is a performance, that identity is costume, that meaning is what you make of it when you’ve got a château and infinite money and absolutely nothing left to prove.
The dress code was “black tie, long dresses and surrealist heads,” which is simultaneously pretentious and genius. Like they weren’t asking people to dress up, they were demanding conscious participation in a shared delusion. They were saying: leave your pedestrian reality at the door. Tonight we’re all living inside the melting clocks.
This was 1972, Vietnam still grinding on, Watergate about to crack open, the world coming apart at the seams, and here were these people in a French castle pretending to be burning, dressed as fever dreams, dancing with mannequins and nightmares. Was it decadent? Absolutely. Tone deaf? Undoubtedly. But was it also somehow honest about what we all are, these desperate creatures playacting meaning in an absurd universe, only with better costumes and more diamonds? Maybe. Probably. Hell, definitely.
The reality is we’re all wearing surrealist heads. We’re all pretending. They just had the money and the audacity to make the pretense spectacular. To turn the performance into art. To say fuck it, if life is meaningless chaos, let’s at least make it beautiful, bizarre, unforgettable chaos. Let’s wear the gramophone. Let’s light the castle on fire. Let’s put on the stag head with the diamond tears and own the absurdity completely.
And you know what? Standing here fifty years later, drowning in our own mundane performances, our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram aesthetics and carefully curated authenticity, maybe the Surrealist Ball of ’72 wasn’t the problem. Maybe we are, with our pedestrian pretenses that we’re not performing at all.
At least they committed to the madness. At least their masks were honest about being masks.
