Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness – fulfill ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent.
Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre
What I’ve documented here is the thing nobody wants to admit about art that matters: it’s not about being seen, it’s about being fucking obliterated. The Workcenter doesn’t give a shit about your comfort, your Instagram attention span, or whether you “get it.” These images capture bodies in the act of becoming something else, something that can’t be commodified or explained away with the emoji combo 🍾💥.
These performers aren’t performing; they’re excavating. Watch how the light falls on Saint-Louis Augustin’s face in that Stanford frame, how Rodriguez’s body becomes a question mark the audience has to answer for themselves. This isn’t spectacle, it’s anti-spectacle, the kind of work that makes you realize how much of your life you’ve spent watching instead of being.
The Open Program lineage carries this weird, beautiful burden: keeping alive a practice that refuses to be a product. It’s like maintaining a fire in a world addicted to LEDs. Hopefully my photographs don’t prettify this; my hope is that they convey the actual sweat, the strange intimacy of people willing to stand in a room and mean something without irony, without safety nets.
What gets me is how these spaces (Stanford, SFMOMA, PAI) become temporary churches for people who don’t believe in churches anymore. The darkness in these images isn’t just lighting choice; it’s metaphysical. These performers are doing what Grotowski demanded: crossing frontiers not by adding more but by stripping away until there’s nothing left but the irreducible core of human presence.
This work pisses off both the art establishment (too earnest, too rigorous) and the general public (too demanding, too weird). Which means it’s probably doing something right. This documentation catches people in the act of giving a damn about transformation in an age of performance, about depth in an era of surface. That quote you’ve got there, “what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent,” that’s not poetry. That’s a threat and a promise.
