It’s Inauguration Day, right? Day one of the Trump Era… So naturally everyone’s freaking out, reciting founding values like scripture, as if Thomas Jefferson’s ghost gives two shits about your a cappella group. But that’s not what’s happening in these frames. What’s happening is bodies moving through sacred architecture like they’re trying to shake loose from their own skins, string quartets sawing away at something older than policy or platform, dancers contorting in pews like they’re exorcising every ounce of civic dread through sheer kinetic desperation.
The church itself becomes complicit. Those vaulted ceilings aren’t just witnessing. They’re amplifying. Stone and stained glass converting performance into ritual, sweat into sacrament. This is what community actually looks like when it stops performing “community” and starts combusting into something messier, more necessary.
People don’t come to church for preachments,
of course,
but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut nails it. Except these dancers aren’t daydreaming. They’re thrashing through nightmares, transmuting anxiety into movement, using the only honest language left when words have been strip-mined of meaning by endless cable news punditry and social media rage spirals.
I caught the blur, the sweat, the genuine human urgency of bodies refusing to be still while everything outside these walls slides toward chaos.
Reinvigorating Community: a gathering to affirm the Stanford University’s and the nation’s founding values through reflection, music and dance with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Talisman A Cappella, and the Chocolate Heads Movement Band.