All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin
Bodies moving in a public park at whatever-the-fuck-o’clock on a Tuesday is a beautiful fuck you to the entire premise of art as commodity. You’ve got these dancers, trained Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers, the kind who’ve destroyed their feet and their personal lives in the service of something most people will never understand, and they’re just out there in the goddamn bandshell where anyone can stumble across them. Some guy walking his dog. A cop on patrol. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Chaplin knew. Park, cop, pretty girl. The basic elements. Not because it’s simple but because those three things contain every possible human story if you are paying attention. These photos are not trying to sell you on the transcendence of ballet or the purity of the human form or any of that marketing bullshit to get you to buy a ticket. Rather, I’m trying to show you what happens when something as disciplined and unnatural as classical dance collides with the organic chaos of just being outside… in the rain.
That 1900 bandshell, Spreckels Temple of Music, what a ridiculous name, it’s seen everything by now. Seen its purpose get smaller and larger and disappear and return. And now it’s hosting this photoshoot thing, which is nonsense for “we’re doing it here because here matters, because the space is part of the conversation.”
And the conversation is: what the hell are we all doing? These dancers know they’re being watched and not watched simultaneously. Most people will never see this. Well, no…that first image of Adji will probably be on muni buses all over the city promoting LINES Fall Season… But in reality, the right now, it existed for maybe ninety minutes and now it’s gone except for these images, which aren’t the thing itself but the ghost of the thing. The shadow. Which might be all we ever get anyway.
That’s not cynicism, that’s just paying attention.