Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng
Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish
Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing
Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moonTwo hands form into yīn and yáng palms
Two palms crossed over for locking jointsWait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes
Create opportunity by following the opponent’s forceWu Jianquan, son of Wu Quanyou (from a didactic poem quoted by his son Wu Gongzao in Wu Family T’ai Chi Ch’uan (吳家太極拳)), Hong Kong, 1980 (originally published in Changsha, 1935)
These bodies in Golden Gate Park, caught mid-gesture, practicing forms that are older than anyone’s grandparents’ grandparents’ bullshit. I stand there with my camera or my stupid fucking aesthetic appreciation and I think I’m getting it, I think I’m capturing something real.
I’m not.
Because what I see are dancers doing T’ai Chi in public space, and what they’re living is something else entirely. The space between intention and execution, between what they mean to do with their bodies and what actually happens, that’s where all the real shit lives. That’s the irony Wu Jianquan was writing about in 1935, except he was being poetic about it: “Wait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes.” What he meant was I can plan all I want, but the world’s going to fuck with my choreography.
I’m documenting something spontaneous, random, which is just another word for trying to get closer to something that keeps sliding away from me. Every photograph here is an admission of defeat. I’m outside their body, outside their experience, and all I can do is point my lens at the surface of what they’re doing and pretend that means I understand the physics of their pain, the geometry of their discipline.
Because that’s the hustle, isn’t it? I consume other people’s art, their struggle, their form, their tragedy, and I tell myself I get it. I don’t get shit. Somebody else’s perfected gesture, their moment of grace captured between the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences, that’s not mine. I can witness it, I can appreciate it, I can even be moved by it, but I can’t climb inside their skin and feel what they felt when they finally nailed that transition from stillness to motion.
The cruel joke is that I keep trying anyway. The dancers keep moving, photographer keeps shooting, and maybe you keep looking at these images thinking maybe this time you’ll break through the membrane and actually know what it’s like. You won’t. The best you’ll get is a beautiful document of your own incomprehension, which, if we’re being honest, is still worth something.
Bodies moving in sunlight, separate tragedies we’ll never fully comprehend, transformed into pixels we can scroll past on our way to the next thing we’ll fail to understand.
Shuaib Elhassan and Michael Montgomery of Alonzo King LINES Ballet
practicing T’ai Chi in The Music Concourse
in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park