Heterogeneous
SpectaclesJamie Lyons — News & Writing

Against Closure: The Collision, Not the Cleanup

Here’s the thing about rehearsals that nobody wants to admit: they’re not more truthful because they’re purer. They’re more truthful because the lie hasn’t settled yet, hasn’t hardened into the kind of official story you can sell tickets to. A rehearsal is where readings collide, actors, designers, text, space, institution, like cars entering an intersection […]

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Against Closure: The Collision, Not the Cleanup
Surrender Your Skull: Notes on Directing as Dangerous Hospitality or How to Let a Dead French Guy Rearrange Your Furniture

Surrender Your Skull: Notes on Directing as Dangerous Hospitality or How to Let a Dead French Guy Rearrange Your Furniture

I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at […]

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June 10, 2024 · Resistance

Toxic City, or How We Started in Prison and Ended Up on a Book Cover

Toxic City, or How We Started in Prison and Ended Up on a Book Cover

We met in prison. San Quentin. Which sounds like the opening line of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony and how much faith you’ve still got left in coincidence as a delivery mechanism for the divine. So far it’s been the former, knock wood, spit […]

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LINES Rehearsal: Concerto for Two Violins

LINES Rehearsal: Concerto for Two Violins

Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again. RΓ©pΓ©tition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but […]

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Leap of Faith Above the Burning Caldera

Leap of Faith Above the Burning Caldera

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 […]

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West Coast March for Gaza

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. […]

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West Coast March for Gaza
Chocolate Heads: Gardening after Dark

Chocolate Heads: Gardening after Dark

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 […]

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