The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake, Letters
I point a camera at human bodies moving through space at the edge of the continent, where the cypress trees grow sideways from decades of wind telling them to get the fuck out of the way, and something happens. Or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground out there at Lands End.
The thing about LINES dancers is they don’t negotiate. They don’t ask permission from the landscape. They just move through it like they’ve got every right to be there, which, of course, they do, and the eucalyptus and the fog and the whole brutalized beautiful geography of that place either submits or it doesn’t.
I’m standing there with my camera, and I realize pretty quick that I’m not in control of anything. Not the light coming off the Pacific, not the way a dancer’s leg cuts through the air at the exact moment the fog decides to roll in like some hungover ghost. I’m just there. Witness to a collision between intention and chaos.
This is not the sterile geometry of the studio. This is bodies negotiating with entropy in real time. Wind, gravity, uneven ground, the whole pitiless machinery of the natural world grinding away, and somehow these dancers make it look like they planned it this way. Like they choreographed the fucking wind.
And I start to understand: the camera doesn’t capture this. It just tries to keep up. I’m scrambling, reframing, losing the shot, finding it again, completely at the mercy of these moments that will never happen again. Not like this. Not with this exact light, this exact gesture, this exact second when everything lines up and I think, yes, this, and then it’s gone.
That’s the whole game. Being present for the unrepeatable.
The William Blake quote about imagination… yeah, okay, fine. But what Blake doesn’t mention is that imagination requires a body. Requires muscle and sweat and the risk of looking absolutely ridiculous. These dancers, out there in the trees at the edge of everything, they’re not imagining shit. They’re doing it. And if I’m lucky, if I’m paying attention, I get to document the evidence.