On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do this? That meant something.
This is part of something called IOTA, this beautiful, slightly mad project where we’re resurrecting fragments, literally pieces, scraps of lost Greek tragedies. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Plays that have been gone for two thousand years, and we’re bringing them back, breathing life into the shadows.
Now, about Laocoön. Forget Virgil’s version for a minute: forget “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” forget the Trojan Horse. Sophocles had a darker, more personal story. His Laocoön was Apollo’s priest who fucked up in the most human way possible: he broke his vow of celibacy. Got married. Had kids. And Apollo, being the vengeful prick that gods tend to be, sent serpents that killed both his sons. But here’s the twist: Laocoön lives. He has to stand there and watch his children die because he dared to be human.
The play itself? Gone. What survives are fragments, references from other writers, vase paintings, echoes. But the story, the story had legs. It inspired that famous Hellenistic sculpture, the one that made El Greco and the Renaissance masters lose their minds.
The craftsmanship, the ambition of doing this, taking these broken pieces and making theater out of them, in the city where I first learned to see the world. That’s the kind of thing that reminds you why any of this matters.
The Fragment
And fire shines on the altar in the street
as it sends up a vapor from drops of myrrh,
exotic scents.
Poseidon, you who range over the capes of the Aegean
or in the depths of the gray sea rule over the windswept waters above the lofty cliffs…
And now at the gates stands Aeneas,
the son of the goddess,
carrying on his shoulders his father
with his linen robe
stained with the discharge
caused by the lightning,
and about him
the whole horde of his servants.
And with him follows a crowd,
you cannot imagine how great,
of those who are eager to take part
in this migration of the Phrygians.
When one is no longer weary, labors are delightful.
For one takes no account
of trouble that is in the past.
The Location
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive sits at 2120 Oxford Street in downtown Berkeley. Used to be a UC printing plant, the same one that printed the official UN Charter in 1945. The document that was supposed to prevent World War III, hammered out on industrial presses in right here.
In 2013, the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro came in and redesigned the whole space. These are the architects behind The High Line and the The Shed in New York City and The Broad in Los Angeles. They took this industrial workhorse of a building and turned it into a spectacular contemporary museum and film archive.
Babatunji was breaking on street corners in Hilo at fifteen. Street corners. In Hawaii. Not some fancy conservatory with mirrors and barres and trust funds. And somehow that kid, moving his body to the beat in all the wrong places by all the right measures, ended up with Alonzo King and created something entirely his own. Ballet meets breaking meets contemporary meets hip hop.
Aleta Hayes started as a performer for Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson, the guy who makes theater that’s like watching glaciers if glaciers wore Armani and had something profound to say. You learn something working for a visionary like that. You learn that rules are just suggestions and that weird is a compass, not a warning. At Stanford she leads the Chocolate Heads Movement Band, interdisciplinary, multi-genre, all university words that usually mean nothing, but in Aleta’s case she’s done the work. Princeton, Tisch, the Sorbonne. She knows the rules well enough to break them properly. That’s the difference between rebellion and revolution.
What these two have in common is this: they understand that movement is language, that the body tells truths the mouth can’t, and that the best art comes from people who have traveled far from where they started and refused to forget the journey.