There’s something gorgeously perverse about using a pristine new architecture building, one of those Diller Scofidio + Renfro joints where every angle’s been agonized over by people who wear only black, as the stage for bodies doing what bodies actually do, which is sweat and collide and fuck up the clean lines with their inconvenient humanity.
The Chocolate Heads aren’t christening this space. They’re violating it. In the best possible way.
What you’re looking at in these photographs isn’t just site specific dance. That term’s been strip mined of meaning by now anyway. This is bodies as insurgents, flesh as critique. That McMurtry Building wants to be about contemplation, about rarefied discourse, about Art with a capital A lounging in its temperature controlled reliquary. And here comes Aleta with her “Movement Band,” already love that phrase, the democratic whiff of it, treating those architectural geometries like they’re just another rhythm section to play against.
The “Planetarians” in their wearable sculptures look like they wandered in from some future where we finally admitted that humanity’s just a passing fashion statement for the universe. Those spherical headpieces, celestial bodies turned into constraints, or maybe liberations, depending on how you tilt your skull. There’s something both absurd and devastating about watching a performer navigate space when their perception’s been fundamentally altered. Makes you wonder who’s really seeing clearly: them or us.
And that’s before we get to the second line, which, Christ, the audacity. Taking a New Orleans funeral tradition, that gorgeous collision of grief and celebration, and dropping it into Stanford’s manicured quadrangles. You can almost hear the institutional confusion: is this Art or is this just… people being alive in ways that make administrators nervous?
What I am trying to capture, as I’ve learned to let a moment breathe, not to rush in with the shutter like some nervous documentary vampire, is the essential friction between the built environment’s promises and the body’s truths. Architecture says: here’s how you should move, how you should feel, what constitutes appropriate behavior in space. Dance says: watch me ruin that for you. Watch me make this supposedly neutral container reveal its biases.
The funding credits tell their own story: Stanford Arts Institute, Department of Art and Art History, Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Translation: this needed institutional blessing to happen, which means it’s already been partially defanged, made palatable. But look at these images, dancers sprawled, clustered, moving through those corridors like blood through new veins. The building hasn’t fully metabolized them yet. Maybe it never will.
There’s this moment in the composite shots where you can see the full scope of it, the way Aleta has orchestrated this collision between stillness and motion, between what architecture insists upon and what choreography refuses. It’s not harmony. It shouldn’t be. The best performances don’t celebrate the space. They interrogate it, make it confess what it’s really there to do, which is usually to make certain bodies feel welcome and others feel like they’re trespassing.
Building Score as title is almost too on the nose until you realize it’s not about scoring the building, it’s about the building having a score, being complicit in determining what sounds can be made within it. And Space Launch, yeah, we’re all just waiting for escape velocity, aren’t we? Waiting to break free of whatever gravitational field keeps pulling us back into comfortable, sanctioned, easily digestible gestures.
These photographs don’t ask you to like what you’re seeing. They ask you to recognize it as necessary.
Conception
Aleta Hayes
Architecture
McMurtry Art and Art History Building, Stanford University
Diller, Scofidio + Renfro
Director, Founder and Co-Choreographer
Aleta Hayes
Associate Choreographer
Adwoa Boakye
Assistant Choreographer
Natalie Marie Gonzalez
Music composer
Jeff Freymann
Music Score
Patrick Lotilla
Co-Choreography & Dance Performers
The Chocolate Heads Movement Band
Annie Dillon, Ben Cohn, Natalie Sanchez, Madeleine Lee, Lloyd Lucin, Judith Syrkin-Nikolau, Avisha Mehra, Amber Levine, Mikhail Grant, Mia Lewis, Patricia Ortiz-Tello, Sandhini Agarwal, Timothy Lee, Xixi Shi, Ellen Hanley-Woods
Planetarians (Wearable Sculpture Performance)
Issac Caswell, Timon Ruban, Kelly Kahuna, Danish Shabbir, Patricia Ortiz-Tello
Singer/Improvisor
Isaac Caswell
Choreographic Contribution (Second Line)
Rachel Carrico
Costume Coordination
Michelle Warner & Heather Patterson
Wearable Sculpture
Kelly Kahuna
Visual Installation
Xxavier Carter
Social Media Manager
Jessica Spicer
Brand Leader
Ben Cohn
Stage Manager
Meredith Charlson
Funded by
Stanford Arts Institute
Department of Art and Art History
Institute for the Diversity in the Arts
With Additional Support from
Architectural Design Program
Department of Theater and Performance Studies/Dance
Acknowledgements
Elis Imboden, Liz Celeste— Department of Art and Art History
Connie Wolf, Issa Lampe – Cantor Arts Center
John Barton, Amy Larimer – Architectural Design Program
Patience Young – Building Scene Project Advisor
Special Thanks
Charles Renfro, Alexander Nemerov, Matthew Tiews, Branislav Jakovljevic, Jeffrey Freymann, Patrick Lotilla, Ross P. Williams, Jeanette Smith-Laws, Shannon Silva, Jeff Chang, Patience Young, Michelle Hofmann, Elizabeth Stone, Jessica Spicer, Bee David, Patrice O’Dwyer, Charles Terry Pfoutz, Adwoa Boakye, Thomas Both, Jamie Lyons, Jessica Luo, Ben Cohn, Xxavier Carter, JiaJia Tong, Xixi Shi, Natalie Gonzalez, Michelle Warner, Heather Patterson Miller