Look at this video. Vince Evan Pane dancing with a busted street lamp globe like it means something. And here’s the thing that’ll piss you off: it did mean something. In his hands, anyway. We shot this at three in the morning in the Stanford Quad. Three AM. Empty campus. Just us and the lights and Vince playing with a piece of broken municipal infrastructure like it was Yorick’s skull.
I worked with Vince on Chocolate Heads projects with Aleta Hayes. You know the type, Stanford performance art, the kind of thing that should be insufferable but somehow isn’t when the right people are involved. Vince was the right people. Which is rare. Most academic performance art is masturbatory nonsense created by people who’ve never actually lived, never actually risked anything, never gotten their hands dirty. Vince wasn’t that.
He was a chemistry PhD student working on bio-derived plastics for Martian habitats while simultaneously choreographing dances that involved tree climbing and roller skating. The kind of person who makes you feel lazy and small just by existing. The kind of person who studied human anatomy for two years at the med school just to get better at wood carving. Who the fuck does that?
Here’s what they don’t tell you about people like Vince: they make everyone around them uncomfortable. Not because they’re assholes, but because they refuse to accept the boundaries the rest of us have made peace with. Art over here, science over there, performance in this box, research in that one. Vince looked at those walls and walked straight through them like they were made of smoke.
That street lamp globe, some piece of campus trash, becomes something else in his hands. There’s a Gogol quote below about how street lamps lie, how the devil lights them to show everything wrong. Pretty words. Academic words. The kind of thing that usually signals someone’s about to disappear up their own ass with Theory. But Vince actually understood it. Not from reading about it, but from doing it. From moving through space. From making things with his hands.
Working with him on those Chocolate Heads projects meant dealing with someone who brought an almost offensive level of competence to everything. He didn’t just perform movement, he understood the physics of it, the anatomy of it, the material properties of whatever costume or prop he’d cobbled together from curtains and acorns and whatever other shit he’d found. He made his own clothes, his own jewelry. He could explain dendrology while carving wood into impossible shapes. He competed on American Ninja Warrior three times, because why the hell not?
And here’s the part that really stings: that energy, that curiosity, that relentless drive to make and do and understand, it’s gone. Vince died in a mountaineering accident in August 2024. Thirty-one years old. All that knowledge, all that potential, all those future projects, finished. Done. The speculation I mentioned when I originally posted this video? Never happened. Never will.
They held a celebration of life at Stanford. People showed up in roller blades and colorful costumes, which is what he would have wanted, which is also the kind of detail that feels both perfectly right and completely inadequate when someone dies at thirty-one. What are you supposed to do with that? With someone who accomplished more before his PhD defense than most people manage in a lifetime?
The truth is: nothing. You do nothing. You look at the video of him dancing with that discarded street lamp globe and you think about waste. Not the globe… the life. The cruel math of someone that talented, that curious, that genuinely good, being erased from the world while countless mediocre assholes keep breathing and collecting paychecks and creating nothing of value.
Gogol said the devil lights the lamps to make everything look wrong. But Vince used light to reveal things as they actually were. He picked up broken pieces of infrastructure and saw possibility. He moved through the world without fear or pretension. He taught juggling. He made haute couture from garbage. He knew the names of trees and the structure of proteins and the geometry of abalone shells.
And now he’s dead.
The street lamp globe in this video is probably in a landfill somewhere now, or maybe someone kept it, I don’t know. What I know is that Vince saw something in it that the rest of us walked past. That was his gift. That was what made working with him so goddamn humbling. He made you see differently. He made you want to try harder. He made you set an alarm for 2:30 AM and think, “Yeah, okay, this is worth it.”
That light globe dance, that’s what I’ve got now. A video. A memory of someone dancing with something broken and imagining it whole. Speculation for some future that never came.
Fuck.
But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks.
Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
