Backstage Sutra #2.
Tech rehearsal for Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s world premiere of SUTRA. A collaboration with Zakir Hussain and Sarangi master Sabir Kahn at YBCA Theater, San Francisco
I know nothing,
except what everyone knows –
if there when Grace dances,
I should dance.
W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
Backstage Sutra #1.
Tech rehearsal for Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s world premiere of SUTRA. A collaboration with Zakir Hussain and Sarangi master Sabir Kahn at YBCA Theater, San Francisco
Zakir Hussain rehearsing his collaboration with Alonzo King LINES Ballet and and Sarangi master Sabir Kahn for the world premiere of SUTRA, at YBCA.
Every time you step out on to the stage,
you learn something which helps you grow and be a better communicator.
It’s not like you’re the master.
You’re always a student.
Saint Dominics…
I like the silent church before the service begins,
better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
2390 Bush Street
San Francisco
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more and their wayback machine has saved more than 325 billion web pages over time.
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Speculation: LINES Ballet Sutra rehearsal with Zakir Hussain. The ballet premieres at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Then on the contrary,
her intense and velvety gaze fastened itself,
glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive,
that you felt that, in withdrawing,
it must tear away the skin.
Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Antonio’s Nut House, California Avenue, Palo Alto.
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter in the last year of his life.
Hewlett-Packard Building 15 manufactured small electronic transformers from 1965 to 1973, as well as circuit boards from 1965 to 1987. Acids, metals, and solvents were used throughout the manufacturing process and chemicals were stored in a storage shed from 1965 to 1973, and then in a chemical storage “bunker” from 1974 to 1987.
The site, which has been re-addressed as 3181 Porter Drive, Palo Alto, is part of the Hillview Porter regional toxic plume in Palo Alto, which encompasses facilities in the Stanford Research Park.
The site is overseen by the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) for ongoing operation and maintenance activities, which includes groundwater monitoring for an on-site groundwater extraction and treatment system, which currently operates to treat chlorinated volatile organic compounds (tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE), and their associated daughter products).
Palo Alto Tower Well, 201 Alma St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.
Thousands have lived without love,
not one without water.
W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956
Amazon delivery robots on the streets of Palo Alto: disruption imminent…
Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
The Barber of Palo Alto… The Cardinal Barber Shop opened in Palo Alto’s Cardinal Hotel in 1925 and Gerardo Macareño has been cutting, shaving and trimming customers their since 1982.
How do?
Welcome to my shop
Let me cut your mop
Let me shave your crop
Daintily, daintily…Hey, you!
Don’t look so perplexed
Why must you be vexed?
Can’t you see you’re next?
Yes, you’re next, you’re so next!
Bugs Bunny, Rabbit of Seville (1950)
The Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto…
This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.
James Franco, Palo Alto
Dominique Serrand’s adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream at Stanford Theater and Performance Studies Roble Theater.
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
What is life? A madness.
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a story.
And the greatest good is little enough:
for all life is a dream,
and dreams themselves are only dreams.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream, Act II, l. 1195.
Stanford Indian at 735 Emerson St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.
Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.
Vine Deloria Jr.
The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin in Stanford University’s Quad
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Auguste Rodin
quoted in Heads and Tales (1936) by Malvina Hoffman, p. 47
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais
Stanford University
LINES Ballet Studio: Alonzo King and Adji Cissoko
Art is the inheritance of every individual,
it activates evolutionary growth,
it is an intellectual virtue,
and the fostering principle for all that is made, done, or known.
Alonzo King
Figures in a California Landscape: a dance performance by movement troupe Chocolate Heads inspired by Manuel Neri’s sculptures in The Anderson Collection at Stanford University.
This piece is part of a year long Aleta Hayes/Chocolate Heads project exploring the idea of California. Native Californian, Manuel Neri with his interest in the human figure, provoked this deepened investigation of the moving body in the landscape, that began August 2017 on the Djerassi Artist Residency Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and came to completion in the Anderson Collection at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford Campus.
sometimes I want to break the structure down into certain areas,
and I use color to do that for me.
I use color to accent or as a destructive element on the figure.
Manuel Neri
Alonzo King LINES Ballet hosted an evening of music, dance, and discussion highlighting the company’s upcoming Spring Season world-premiere of SUTRA. Held at the Taube Atrium Theater, Wilsey Opera Center
