The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here.
I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment when muscle memory becomes something like prayer.
The Japanese have a word for what I’m chasing here: ma. That interval, that negative space between the notes, between the gestures, between the bodies and Will Clift’s sculptures. The silence that gives shape to everything else. In the West, we don’t have a word for this. We just stumble around trying to capture it without knowing what to call it.
The light is impossible and perfect, pouring through those windows like it’s been waiting its whole life for this exact angle. The dancers, Ko Ishikawa (Japanese Mouth Organ), Nao Nishihara (Sound Environment), and the rest, carve through space like they’re making it visible. Like they understand that emptiness isn’t nothing. It’s substance.
I’m just trying not to mess up. Trying to photograph the space between things, which is maybe the most arrogant thing a someone can attempt.
In a Winter Garden: A Contemplative Performance Work for Dance, Music, and Sculpture by Diane Frank in Bing Concert Hall’s Gunn Atrium
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form“… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.
Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon, 2001) p 370.