I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo King sees when he makes a ballet. I don’t speak that language. But I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely, when technical perfection crosses over into the territory of the transcendent.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on a October night in 2018. LINES remount of Alonzo’s 2005 baroque meditation, Handel. The thing about shooting dance… real dance, not the bullshit, is that you are always chasing ghosts. These LINES dancers, they’re not human in the conventional sense. They are architecture in motion, physics made flesh. Extensions that defy the limitations of bone and tendon. Bodies spiraling through space like they’re drilling into another dimension.
Handel himself said of his final composition that he didn’t know if he was in his body or outside it when he wrote it. Alonzo’s choreography has that same out-of-body quality. You watch these dancers, Adji Cissoko, Robb Beresford, Madeline DeVries, the whole crew, and you wonder what kind of deal they made to move like that. What they sacrificed to achieve that level of control, that degree of abandon.
The photographer’s dilemma: you’re trying to freeze something that only exists in motion. Frame by frame, you’re documenting something that was never meant to be still. The dramatic level changes, bodies falling and crawling forward, that stylized downward dog that shouldn’t work but does. The way baroque structure meets contemporary athleticism. The juxtaposition of delicate musical passages with angular, wrenching physicality.
Handel’s score, arias, concerti, those fugal forms that Alonzo somehow makes visible, it’s all there in the limbs and torsos. Music made manifest. George Frideric would either be horrified or transported; I suspect the latter. There’s a compositional rigor to Alonzo’s work, a mathematical precision hiding underneath all that apparent spontaneity. Each arabesque, each fouetté is a sentence in a larger argument about beauty, about what bodies can articulate when pushed to their absolute limit.
The lighting at YBCA that night, Axel Morgenthaler’s design… brilliant. His atmosphere carved these dancers out of darkness like sculpture. My job was simple and impossible: capture that. Preserve what can’t be preserved. Make the ephemeral permanent, knowing full well that every photograph is a lie, a beautiful lie that tries to remember what it felt like to be in that theater, watching something that existed purely in that moment.
Robert Rosenwasser’s costumes… minimal, elegant, getting the hell out of the way so you can see what matters. That’s respect for the form. That’s understanding that sometimes the best thing you can do is subtract.
I’ve photographed a lot of things. DIY Paris to Dakar rallies with cars that cost less than a hundred bucks, Carnivale in Rio when the streets run with sweat and glitter, performance artists sprawled out on couches after a salon when the cocaine has worn off and all that’s left is the shitty wine. But there’s something about performance, about artists who have dedicated their entire lives to a craft that maybe a few thousand people will ever truly understand, that gets me. The commitment. The monks-of-motion discipline. The willingness to destroy your body in pursuit of something you can’t quite name.
That’s what’s in these frames. That’s what I was trying to steal from the air that night. Not just dancers, but devotion. Not just movement, but meaning. Handel wanted to make people better, not just entertain them. Alonzo’s working the same territory, three centuries later. And me? I’m just trying to bear witness. To say: this happened, this was real, this mattered…
I was there.
I should be sorry if I only entertained them,
I wish to make them better.
George Frideric Handel, published in William Forbes An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie (1806)