San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art.
Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.
Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal.
That is the whole truth.
William Saroyan
The Wave Organ’s this crumbling concrete jetty that some madman stuck pipes into so the bay could gargle its own tidal bullshit at tourists, and here I am hauling these LINES dancers, Shuaib, Babatunji, Yujin, out there like I’m staging some kind of beautiful hostage situation with the city itself. These bodies are all geometric impossibilities and controlled abandon, threading themselves through that rubble strewn amphitheater while Alcatraz squats in the background like a chaperone at a rave. The whole enterprise reeks of doomed romanticism, this compulsion to jam the most refined human movement into the most indifferent architectural accident San Francisco ever coughed up, and somehow it works because the collision is the point. I’m not documenting dance, I’m catching the friction between what bodies can become and what cities leave behind, all those angles and extensions fighting against barnacled stone and bay water that doesn’t give a damn about line or form or any of my precious compositional concerns.
