Two institutions that define this city, LINES Ballet and Kronos Quartet, finally getting in the same room together for the first time. Thirty-five years it took. Thirty-five years of near misses and scheduling conflicts before these two forces of nature could align. Sometimes the most obvious collaborations are the hardest to pull off.
My role wasn’t just to document it. Robert Rossenwasser wanted video. Projections. He wanted Sutro Baths, based on an earlier photo shoot I had done with them. That ruined monument to Victorian excess on the city’s western edge, where the Pacific beats itself against crumbling concrete and corroded rebar. Where the ocean doesn’t ask permission, just takes what it wants, one wave at a time.
So I shot it. The moody, fog-saturated coastline. Craggy islets of rock in the middle distance. An eroding seawall in the foreground—because everything in San Francisco is always eroding, always in transition, always becoming something else. Seabirds wheeling overhead. Waves lapping against stone. The sound of water doing what water does: persisting, wearing down, transforming.
This wasn’t just pretty B-roll. This was the show’s opening statement, projected onto the scrim at YBCA Theater. The piece was called Common Ground, an ode to this impossible city, and it needed to start with water. San Francisco is a peninsula, surrounded by ocean, by bay, by fog that rolls in like it owns the place. Water is the common ground. Water is what we all share, what none of us can escape.
The scrim filled with my footage. Surface tensions, the liminal space where sea meets sky. Then it lifted, revealing Kronos upstage in shadows, David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, Sunny Yang, their instruments catching just enough light to gleam but not quite enough to fully see. And the dancers emerged wearing Robert’s costumes: whites and blues with tiered scallops like mermaid tails, soft ruffles like wave curls. Everything referencing water, everything fluid.
Kronos played music from their Fifty for the Future project, Trey Spruance, Merlijn Twaalfhoven, Yotam Haber, Aleksander Kościów. Compositions designed to be shared, not hoarded. Music that believes in commons, in collective resources, in the radical idea that not everything has to be locked down and monetized. They plucked strings like water droplets. They stomped their feet. They turned their instruments into percussion. They had a conversation with the dancers, and the dancers answered in a vocabulary of extensions and spirals and impossible balances.
I kept shooting throughout tech, throughout the premiere, catching the way light moved through Robert’s costumes, the way bodies carved space. The way Adji Cissoko‘s legs seemed to extend into next week. The way the partnering oscillated between push and pull, embrace and release. The way everything felt like an underwater ecosystem, unpredictable, surprising, full of contrasts. Consonance and dissonance. Lightness and weight. Individual steps that contradicted themselves: lofty jumps immediately frozen into charged stillness.
Forty minutes of this. Not long for a dance piece, but when you’re shooting, when you’re tracking movement through a viewfinder, when you’re trying to anticipate where the next brilliant moment will happen, it’s an eternity and an instant simultaneously.
The video projection work, that’s the thing most people don’t think about when they think about documenting performance. They think you show up with a camera. They don’t think about pre-production, about driving out to Sutro Baths at dawn to catch the right light. About understanding what Robert and Alonzo need before they articulate it. About creating imagery that doesn’t compete with the dancers but amplifies them. That sets the emotional temperature for what’s about to happen.
This was a love letter to San Francisco written by two of its most important cultural ambassadors. And my job was to provide the opening paragraph, the water, the fog, the erosion, the persistence. The reminder that this city exists on the edge of the continent, always half-wild, always in dialogue with forces bigger than itself.
Everything is global whether we recognize it or not. What one does affects everyone else. Our positive or negative thoughts and actions don’t exist in isolation. They uplift or pollute the environment. For me that’s what the piece was about. That’s what the water imagery was about. That’s what made this collaboration between King and Kronos seem necessary, urgent, inevitable.
And I got to help open the door. Frame the conversation before the first note was played, before the first dancer moved. Pretty cool.
Everything is global whether we recognize it or not. What one does affects everyone else. Our positive or negative thoughts and actions don’t exist in isolation. They uplift or pollute the environment.
Alonzo King in La Republica