I stand there in the damp brick corridors of Fort Point with a camera and Shakespeare’s murder ballad echoing off Civil War-era walls, and I start to understand something about why I do this stupid, beautiful thing called documentation. Not because theater needs more goddamn photos. But because Ava and her company decided to stage Macbeth in a place that already knows about ambition, blood, and the slow rot of imperial dreams.
The light in this fort is a motherfucker, honest light, the kind that doesn’t apologize. Natural light cutting through gun ports originally designed to kill people, now framing Lady Macbeth‘s face as she summons spirits to unsex her. I’m crouching in archways, moving through the audience like some documentarian ghost, trying to catch the moment when Ava’s eyes go dead-cold with ambition, and I realize this isn’t performance art, it’s exorcism.
Site-integrated theater, they call it, which is just fancy talk for admitting that place matters, that a fortress built to protect San Francisco Bay from naval assault has its own violence to contribute to Shakespeare’s script. The actors move through spaces tourists photograph during the day, and suddenly you’re not shooting theater, you’re shooting possession. The fort becomes complicit.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. Thornton Wilder
Look at this thing. Just look at it.
Fort Point. 1861. Built to protect San Francisco Bay from Confederate ironclads that never came. Brick and mortar, cannon emplacements, the whole nineteenth-century military industrial complex compressed into one obsolete fortress. And then, seventy-something years later, some mad genius decides to build one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in human history right over the top of it. Doesn’t tear it down. Doesn’t fill it in. Just arches the whole goddamn structure right over it, like a steel rainbow giving the finger to history.
Here I am, standing on top of this relic, this monument to wars that didn’t happen and threats that never materialized, looking up at 746 feet of Art Deco engineering genius hanging in the fog. The Golden Gate. International Orange. Probably the most photographed bridge in the world, and somehow it never gets old.
But you know what nobody talks about? That sound. That constant, relentless humming and wheezing. It’s like the bridge is breathing. Like it’s alive. Wind through the cables, metal expanding and contracting, traffic vibrating through 27,000 tons of structural steel. It never stops. Day, night, doesn’t matter. The bridge hums.
Thornton Wilder said the bridge is love. Maybe he was onto something, but standing here, I think the bridge is more like memory. It’s the past and the future occupying the same space. Civil War fortifications below, twentieth-century modernism above, all of it humming, wheezing, trying to tell you something.
My grandfather. Opening day, May 27th, 1937. Two hundred thousand people showed up to walk across before they’d even let the cars on. Can you imagine that? The whole city turning out to see if this crazy thing would actually hold. And my grandfather was there, one of the first humans to cross, walking on a bridge that didn’t exist six months earlier.
Fifty years later, 1987, the anniversary, me and my father, doing the same walk. Except this time, three hundred thousand people had the same idea. So many bodies packed onto that deck that the bridge flattened. The arc disappeared. The engineers probably had heart attacks watching their beautiful suspension curve go flat as a Kansas highway.
Three generations. Same bridge. Same Pacific wind. Same fog rolling in like it’s been doing since before there were people here to see it. My grandfather probably couldn’t have imagined I’d be standing here decades later. And I can’t imagine what my kids, if I have kids, what they might feel if they stand here in another fifty years.
What’s the fuck is it saying? Maybe that everything we build is temporary. Maybe that beauty and paranoia can coexist in the same square mile. Maybe that the most important things in life are the ones that connect us, to each other, to history, to the other side of the bay.
Or maybe it’s just a bridge. But standing here, taking this photograph, listening to it breathe…
Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, it’s night.” Pronouns only, like she’s describing a dream she can barely remember. You don’t get to see the film, you only get her describing it in real-time, this weird oral translation that turns cinema into storytelling, passive watching into active imagining. It’s perverse, really, taking a visual medium and making it auditory, blocking the thing people came to see and replacing it with one woman’s account of gestures and mood and architecture. Could be maddening. Could be brilliant. Probably both. Depends on whether she’s got the voice for it, whether two hours of “she, he, they” becomes meditative or just makes you want to scream “WHO? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” But there’s something genuine in the attempt, stripping away the apparatus of cinema to get at what remains when it’s just one person trying to describe what light and bodies do in space.
Marcia Farquhar once performed a thirty-hour monologue, thirty goddamn hours of talking, which is longer than most people can stay awake, longer than most marriages last, longer than anyone should have to listen to anyone else under any circumstances. She called it The Omnibus because apparently she wanted to get everything in there, the whole messy sprawl of whatever fills a human brain when you give it thirty hours to empty itself out.
Now she’s offering Long Haul, which is the “abbreviated version,” and you have to love the nerve of calling anything abbreviated after you’ve already proven you can monologue for longer than a full day. What’s abbreviated here? Three hours? Five? Still too long, probably, but nothing compared to the original marathon. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable for me, Farquhar’s up there talking about her childhood, her lovers, what she had for breakfast in 1987, the pattern on a curtain she once saw, looping and digressing, but suddenly she’s looking at me, talking to me, talking about me, the guy with the camera who thought he was invisible, who thought he was documenting from outside the frame.
And now I’m in it. I’m part of her monologue. I’m material. The person trying to capture the performance has become the performance, and there’s no getting out because she won’t stop, she’ll just keep talking, weaving me into whatever endless narrative she’s constructing, and my camera’s suddenly not a shield anymore, it’s a prop in her show.
Jean Cocteau understood that love isn’t the beautiful lie we tell ourselves. It’s the phone call at 2 AM where you’re begging someone to remember when they used to think you were worth keeping alive. It’s the sound of your own voice getting smaller and smaller until you’re just static on a dead line.
Ingrid Bergman gets it. Sixty-six, and she’s still willing to strip down to the raw nerve endings, to show you what it looks like when a human being realizes they’ve been edited out of someone else’s story. No music. No cuts to anything that might give you relief. Just forty-seven minutes of a woman holding onto a telephone receiver like it’s the last solid thing in a world that’s turning to water beneath her feet.
This isn’t acting, this is vivisection. I’m watching someone perform the autopsy on their own heart in real time, and she won’t let me look away because looking away is what the bastard on the other end of that line is doing. He’s already gone. He’s been gone. But she’s still there, talking, lying to herself, pretending she’s okay with him marrying someone else tomorrow, tomorrow, and you can see her face doing that thing where it’s smiling and dying simultaneously.
The phone keeps cutting out. Technology fails us at exactly the moments we need it most, when we’re trying to transmit the untransmittable, that we’re drowning, that we need them, that five years should mean something. But the line’s bad, operator’s indifferent, and he’s probably already thinking about his new life while she’s swallowing pills and dog-lying about being fine.
Cocteau wrote this in 1930, Kotcheff filmed it in ’66, and it’ll still be true when we’re all dust: the person who loves more loses everything. Not some things. Everything. And the telephone, that cruel, modern oracle, just amplifies the silence, makes it official, gives your abandonment a dial tone.
Bergman doesn’t ask for pity. She just shows the thing itself: what it costs to love someone who’s already left. Watch her hands. Watch what happens to her breathing. That’s what truth looks like, ugly and desperate and absolutely human. No redemption, no catharsis, just a woman alone in a room, trying to make a connection that’s already been severed.
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective. Henry David Thoreau
Here’s the thing about getting on a boat with someone in the middle of San Francisco Bay: you find out real quick who’s full of shit and who knows their business. Ava Roy isn’t full of shit. Captain Ava Roy, and you better believe that “Captain” isn’t some weekend warrior affectation, it’s earned in wind and salt and the kind of hard-won competence that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Ingwe cuts through the water like she’s got somewhere to be, and Ava’s hands on those lines, on that helm, they tell you everything. No performance, no theater, just pure function married to something deeper, call it love, call it obsession, call it the only goddamn honest relationship most of us will ever witness. The bay will humble you or it will elevate you, and Ava? She’s elevated.
There’s something almost obscene about watching someone who’s actually, genuinely good at something in this age of ten thousand frauds. It’s intimate. It’s vulnerable. It makes you confront your own bullshit, your own half-assed approximations of mastery. The boat heels over, the wind fills that sail, Thoreau had it right, thin but full of life, and you realize this is what it looks like when someone stops pretending and starts being.
San Francisco does this thing, this cruel, beautiful thing, where it gives you the Golden Gate Bridge and then takes it away. Not entirely. Just enough. The fog rolls in like it has somewhere better to be but decided to fuck with you first, wrapping that iconic span in gray wool, turning one of the most photographed structures on Earth into a ghost, a suggestion, a maybe.
And here’s this guy on Baker Beach, fishing. Casting his line into the Pacific like he’s got all the time in the world, like the bridge being there or not being there makes no difference whatsoever. Tolstoy knew something about this, about the quiet dignity of doing something completely pointless with complete commitment.
Fishing is a stupid occupation.
It’s also possibly the sanest thing any of us can do.
The bridge is there. You know it’s there. You can see just enough of it through the fog to confirm its existence, but not enough to Facebook it into oblivion like every other tourist with a phone and an opinion. The fog makes you earn it. It makes you wait. It makes you stand on this beach with the cold Pacific wind cutting through your shitty jacket and wonder if maybe not seeing the whole thing is actually seeing it better.
He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who are right there in plain sight but everyone agrees to pretend they’re not, and together they’re navigating rooms the way certain indigenous cultures navigate landscape: through repeated song, through singing the space into existence as you move through it. You’re not just watching this, you’re in it, you’re the curious stranger in someone else’s house, trying to figure out what belongs to you and what doesn’t, what you’re allowed to touch. It’s Goldilocks as spiritual practice, which sounds ridiculous until you realize that’s exactly what Goldilocks was doing, trying on different lives, different sized chairs, different beds, looking for the one that fits. Hayes is asking you to feel that curiosity, that transgression, that searching for what’s “just right” in a space that isn’t yours. The sacred and the fairy tale bleeding into each other. Some rooms you sing your way through. Some rooms you have to break into. Sometimes they’re the same room.
I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around for longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event and see them only as symbols or indicators of what went on. ChrisBurden
