Heterogeneous
SpectaclesJamie Lyons — News & Writing

No Safe Distance: Bodies, Voices, and the Willingness to Break

No Safe Distance: Bodies, Voices, and the Willingness to Break

These photographs. Bodies bent, faces caught mid transmission, that particular quality of light that happens when people stop performing and start doing. This is what happens when you take two traditions that refused to lie and smash them together in a room in San Francisco. Look at that close up, the woman’s face split open […]

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Marionettes of the Damned: Finding Beatrice in the Garbage

Niki Ulehla went to the San Francisco dump, not to throw something away, but to find something, and she pulled Dante’s entire cast of the damned out of discarded lumber, scrap metal, and abandoned leather, carved them into marionettes, and staged the Inferno right there among the mountains of our collective waste. This is the […]

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Marionettes of the Damned: Finding Beatrice in the Garbage
Catching Fire in a Gymnasium

Catching Fire in a Gymnasium

The title: I Am America. As if the work itself is saying, this howling, this reaching for something beyond commerce and comfort and the whole sick machinery, this is what America actually is when you strip away everything false.Β  And the Workcenter doing Ginsberg in a gym, that quintessentially American space of humiliation and aspiration, […]

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June 1, 2011 · Individualism

Heels Down on Mission

Heels Down on Mission

What we’ve got here is the whole beautiful fucked up contradiction laid out at ankle level. Those heels, man. They’re not asking permission, they’re not apologizing, they’re just there in the frame like some kind of manifesto written in sequins and fuck you platform architecture. This is what happens when the theater of identity stops […]

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Electric Party Songs in a Dying Basement: Grotowski Workcenter at Vericocha

Electric Party Songs in a Dying Basement: Grotowski Workcenter at Vericocha

Vericocha… is dying. Not in some romantic, poetic way, but in the way all good spaces in the Mission are dying now, rent creeping up, city breathing down their neck, same old San Francisco story of things that matter getting squeezed out for things that pay. It’s one of those spots you walk past a […]

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Grotowski Workcenter Electric Party

Grotowski Workcenter Electric Party

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is not a squat, not a nightclub, not someone’s living room where furniture gets shoved against the walls and something unrepeatable happens at 3:12 AM. It’s a museum. White walls, institutional lighting, the whole architecture of cultural legitimacy. And somehow, impossibly, the Workcenter agreed to bring Electric Party […]

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Off-Duty Mystics in a Moving Box

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. Hunter S. Thompson I don’t know what the fuck I expected. You show up at a museum, they hustle you into an elevator, and suddenly you’re trapped in a metal box with strangers while someone’s doing something that might […]

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Off-Duty Mystics in a Moving Box
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