Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Catching Ghosts in the Cathedral of Bodies
Look, the thing about photographing dancers, especially LINES ballet dancers, is that I'm basically documenting evidence of something I missed. These impossibly articulated machines of muscle and nerve move faster than my shutter. The shutter clicks and I've already lost it. That moment where gravity forgot its job, where the body became briefly supernatural? Gone. What I've got is the corpse, the beautiful aftermath, the smear of motion where physics and human will had their little argument.
Rehearsal is where the real savagery happens. No makeup hiding the grimace, no theatrical lighting to soften the sheer fucking violence of a body deciding to defy every biological impulse for safety and comfort. I'm watching someone rebuild themselves, brick by brick, rep by rep, until the architecture of the impossible becomes muscle memory. It's raw, occasionally catastrophic, absolutely necessary. The dancers aren't performing; they're excavating something from deep in the chassis, negotiating with pain and limitation like they're haggling at a particularly brutal pawn shop.
Then there is the silence between the explosions. That dead space where the choreographer stops, says three words, and the dancer's face tells you they just received either enlightenment or a knife to the ribs. Documentation isn't about capturing the leap. Any idiot with a camera phone can freeze frame a ballet dancers athleticism. It's about that instant before, when I see the decision happening behind the eyes, or the instant after, when the body's already calculating what went wrong, what needs adjustment, what small murder of the self is required for the next attempt.
The camera is always lying, of course. It flattens, reduces, makes digestible. What I can't photograph is the smell of the rehearsal space, the acoustic signature of bodies hitting the floor, the particular quality of exhaustion that accumulates in the air like smoke. I can't capture how a gesture that looks effortless from the house took six hours of systematic destruction and rebuilding to achieve.
But I try anyway. Because occasionally, maybe once in a thousand clicks, I catch the ghost. That sliver of evidence that something transcendent happened, that human limitation got bent backward on itself, that beauty and brutality kissed hard on the mouth.
Dance Photography | Dance Documentation | Ballet Photography
Catching Ghosts in the Cathedral of Bodies
2026 Industries
There’s a moment when the body stops lying to you and starts telling the truth so hard it breaks something open. This is that moment. Yujin, caught in the gnarled throat of Golden Gate Park’s oldest arguments, those trees that have been twisting toward and away from each other for longer than any of us […]
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2025 Absolute Solipsism
There are moments that crystallize in memory like amber, perfectly preserved, weightless, eternal. This image of mine, caught between heartbeats that yesterday appeared in a SF Chronicle story, holds one of those moments: Adji and Alonzo in their element, light streaming through studio windows like benediction. For me, these days, a good photograph isn’t really […]
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2025 Collusion
I left a six month old baby at home to chase this thing. Let that sit in your chest for a minute. I walked away from someone who doesn’t understand time yet, who won’t remember my absence but felt it in their bones anyway, to go stand on a volcano half a world away with […]
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2024 Industries
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social […]
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2024 Cinematics
Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again. Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but […]
View2024 Collusion
The light up here doesn’t give a shit about my plans. It’s volcanic, primal, the kind of unforgiving brilliance that strips away pretense and leaves me with nothing but the raw fact of a human body suspended against oblivion. Babatunji of LINES Ballet is launching himself into that void above Mafate, and my finger’s on […]
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2023 Collusion
Here’s the thing about Aleta Hayes and those Stanford Facilities Operations workers that nobody wants to say out loud because it makes the PhD crowd uncomfortable as hell: these guys with their hands in the dirt, their backs bent over root systems and drainage patterns, thirty to fifty feet up in the goddamn canopy where […]
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2023 Industries
Let me be clear about something: Deep River works. It fucking works. But not because every element is worth a damn. It works because Alonzo King and Lisa Fischer have something real, something that cuts through the usual artist-meets-artist mutual noise. Alonzo doesn’t use Lisa Fischer as a voice. He listens. She doesn’t just sing […]
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2022 Industries
I’ve been in rooms where beauty and horror held hands and French kissed. But you know those nights, the ones that grab you by the throat and won’t let go? The ones where you’re sitting there in the dark and something happens that makes you forget you’re supposed to be the asshole taking photos? The […]
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2022 Industries
Photographing live performance? You get one shot at it. No retakes, no mulligans, no “can we do that again but with better light?” The thing happens once, in real time, and you either capture it or you don’t. That’s it. So I’m at YBCA, dress rehearsal for Alonzo King’s Deep River. But there’s an audience, […]
View2022 Collusion
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Jerry Saltz The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. […]
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2021 Collusion
I don’t do second takes. I don’t revisit. The world’s too big, too full of places I haven’t screwed up yet, haven’t disappointed myself in. But La Réunion? La Réunion gets a pass. First time around, I barely scratched the surface of this French-African-Indian Ocean fever dream floating off Madagascar’s coast. This time, I’m back […]
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2021 Cinematics
How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time. W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre Adji Cissoko, moving through a […]
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2021 Collusion
The pandemic turned everyone into bargain basement Beckett characters, didn’t it? Waiting for something that wasn’t coming, performing rituals in squares on screens, and here’s Aleta Hayes doing the honest work: admitting that rites of spring might just be imagined anyway, might always have been a kind of mass hallucination we agreed to because the […]
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2019 Industries
There’s something obscene about freezing a body mid-flight against all that falling water, obscene in the best way, the way that makes you understand why cameras were invented in the first place. Ive got these LINES Ballet dancers, people who’ve turned their spines into questions and their limbs into arguments, and I’ve set them against […]
View2019 Collusion
Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths in Green Library, Stanford University. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. Leonardo da Vinci Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths Green Library, Stanford University. A performance as part […]
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2019 Industries
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world. Patti Smith These Polaroids of bodies caught mid-leap off Reunion Island’s volcanic rock, they’re not documentation, they’re evidence of a crime against physics. In those original […]
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2019 Industries
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Standing on top of a volcanic ridge in the middle of the Indian Ocean, watching two impossibly flexible […]
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2019 Collusion
Réunion Island Volcano with Alonzo King LINES Ballet. You stand there in front of someone else’s vision, whether it’s Diane Arbus showing you how broken people are beautiful or Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moment horseshit, and it gets inside you like a virus, like Burroughs’ language virus, and suddenly you’re not seeing anymore, you’re remembering […]
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2019 Collusion
Pole Star isn’t ballet as usual or some cross cultural mash note. This is something else, bodies moving through my Reunion Island footage like they are mapping coordinates between volcanic eruptions and the đàn bầu’s single string howl, between lava fields cooling into black glass and Vietnamese tradition stretched taut across a stage at YBCA […]
View2018 Industries
The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all […]
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2018 Industries
Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry […]
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2018 Collusion
Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.” But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years […]
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2018 Industries
I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, 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. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, […]
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2018 Speculation
Standing in the wings at YBCA, Leica in hand, watching Alonzo King’s dancers move through Handel like light through water. When you’re backstage you’re seeing the machinery of transcendence. The sweat. The breath. The moments before and after the magic happens. Brodovitch knew this. Those ballet photographs of his weren’t about perfection, they were about […]
View2018 Cinematics
This city used to be where you could fuck around and find out. Not in some precious way, but in the way that actually meant something, where a choreographer could look at a quartet that’s been demolishing the boundaries of what four strings can do for decades and say, “Yeah, let’s see what happens when […]
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2018 Industries
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave […]
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2018 Speculation
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez Saturday, September 8th, at 2pm The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the […]
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2018 Cinematics
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that […]
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2018 Industries
So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own […]
View2018 Industries
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Charlie Chaplin Bodies moving in a public park at whatever-the-fuck-o’clock on a Tuesday is a beautiful fuck you to the entire premise of art as commodity. You’ve got these dancers, trained Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers, the kind who’ve […]
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2018 Collusion
The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. […]
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2018 Collusion
I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love. Rebecca Solnit The fog comes in off the Pacific like it owns the place. Because it does. And somewhere in Sea Cliff, where the money lives quiet and the views cost more than most people make in a lifetime, there are ballet […]
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2018 Collusion
This is the physical manifestation of erosion meeting precision, meat meeting myth at the absolute crumbling edge of America. Sutro Baths was always a monument to hubris, some gilded age dream of swimming pools carved into coastal apocalypse, and now it’s just honest ruins, which is when things finally get interesting. These dancers aren’t in […]
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2018 Collusion
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. William Blake, Letters I […]
View2018 Collusion
A site specific dance with Alonzo King LINES Ballet in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. At night I dream that you and I are two plantsthat grew together, roots entwined,and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,since we are made of earth and rain.Pablo Neruda, Regalo de un Poeta
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2018 Collusion
The thing about catching bodies in motion against those gritty San Francisco Chinatown backdrops, I’m threading this beautiful needle between the pristine and the profane, right? The classical line meeting the cracked sidewalk. It’s not some precious art school contradiction; it’s the only honest collision that matters. And we’re doing this from on top of […]
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2018 Speculation
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. William Saroyan The Wave Organ’s this crumbling concrete jetty that some madman stuck pipes into so the bay could gargle its own tidal […]
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2018 Industries
Painters have canvas and pigment, writers have words and delusions, musicians have strings and wood and air. But dancers? They’ve got meat and bone and the ticking clock of their own deteriorating ligaments. Every arabesque is a negotiation with gravity and mortality. You can’t separate the art from the artist because the artist is the […]
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2018 Speculation
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so […]
View2018 Collusion
Figures in a California Landscape: a dance performance by movement troupe Chocolate Heads inspired by Manuel Neri’s sculptures in The Anderson Collection at Stanford University. This piece is part of a year long Aleta Hayes/Chocolate Heads project exploring the idea of California. Native Californian, Manuel Neri with his interest in the human figure, provoked this deepened […]
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2018 Industries
Alonzo King LINES Ballet hosted an evening of music, dance, and discussion highlighting the company’s upcoming Spring Season world-premiere of SUTRA. Held at the Taube Atrium Theater, Wilsey Opera Center
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2018 Speculation
Tremble: your whole life is a rehearsal for the moment you are in now. Judith Malina Look at him, Babatunji is DESTROYING himself in that studio and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give because destruction is the only path to the real shit, not the performance, not opening night where everyone […]
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2018 Industries
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Desire Lines: Retrofit If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy […]
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2017 Industries
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while Marx, (Groucho) The whole fucking premise is so simple it hurts: you take artists, real ones, not the kind pumping out content for the algorithm gods, and you put them somewhere beautiful and remote and you say, “Here. No deadlines. No […]
View2017 Collusion
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to […]
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2017 Collusion
The Chocolate Heads came slithering through Pace Gallery’s pristine white corridors like they’d been unleashed from some wild ritual, all limbs and fabric swaddling their skulls, moving against David Hockney‘s lurid iPad Yosemites like beautiful vandals crashing a country club. This wasn’t some precious dance meets art dialogue. This was collision, the kind where you can’t […]
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2017 Industries
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here. I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment […]
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2016 Collusion
The fight is won or lostfar away from witnesses –behind the lines,in the gym,and out there on the road,long before I dance under those lights.Muhammad Ali Inga Weiss was the real deal in a world drowning in polite academic horseshit. This woman looked at post-war Germany, her good parents in Ansbach, the comfortable life, all […]
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2016 Speculation
Mirrors in metal, and the masked Mirror of mahogany that in its mist Of a red twilight hazes The face that is gazed on as it gazes. Jorge Luis Borges, MIRRORS Light poured through those high windows like it had somewhere to be, turning everything gold, everything impossible. The mirrors, smudged, honest and ancient, caught […]
View2016 Engineering
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]
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2016 Industries
The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body. Anna Halprin The city that gave us the Beats and the Summer of Love is turning into an open-air dormitory for software engineers who make more in a year than most families see in […]
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2015 Industries
This isn’t some gauzy statement about the fragility of memory. It’s literal: the Tinikling, that Filipino folk dance where you hop between bamboo poles that snap together like jaws, came out of Spanish colonial rice field punishments. People got their ankles crushed. And here’s Gerald Casel, generations later, making something beautiful out of inherited trauma […]
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2015 Collusion
I documented Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads‘ Space Launch thing at McMurtry, and it’s exactly the kind of beautiful, ridiculous, necessary chaos that makes you remember why live art matters. They’re building these chocolate head sculptures like some kind of collective ritual… tactile, ephemeral, with that Warhol meets launch pad energy where high concept […]
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2015 Industries
I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole […]
View2015 Industries
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
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2014 Individualism
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My […]
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2014 Industries
So here we are in the Cantor, Stanford’s marble temple to the idea that culture can be contained, catalogued, made safe for the children of tech money and inherited privilege. And into this pristine space comes Aleta Hayes with her Chocolate Heads, turning off the goddamn lights and switching on the black lights like some […]
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2014 Industries
I know what it looks like already. The body suspended mid leap or run, caught in that freeze frame mythology we’ve all agreed means “transcendence” or “freedom” or whatever bullshit someone is packaging this week. The lighting just so. The composition that genuflects about “liminal space” ever thumbtacked to a corkboard. It’s pornography, really, image […]
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2013 Industries
I’m full of shit, we’re all full of shit, every last one of us. And that’s not cynicism, that’s the most liberating truth you’ll ever swallow. We perform every goddamn day. For our lovers, our bosses, ourselves in the mirror at 3 AM when the pills have worn off and we’re wondering who the hell […]
View2013 Industries
Aleta Hayes, Signing in The Room Performance Studies international conference Stanford University Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who […]
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2013 Industries
Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are […]
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2013 Speculation
Looking at this rehearsal documentation, what strikes me is how Astrid understands that authenticity isn’t some precious thing you excavate from your soul like a goddamn archaeological dig. It’s messier than that. It’s the collision between what you’re trying to say and the violence of actually saying it. Her piece traffics in that space between […]
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2013 Speculation
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
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2012 Industries
Let My People Go isn’t some polite meditation on mortality. This is Astrid Bas standing in a room and saying: here are two women who made extraordinary things and then they were gone. One chose to go. One had that choice ripped away from her in the most obscene way human beings have ever devised. Sarah […]
View2010 Wanderlust
Here it is, mid fucking day in Avignon and the sun’s a blowtorch turned on this stone plaza, 100 plus degrees of Mediterranean fury, and there’s this ghost, this white painted wraith doing Butoh like he’s negotiating with death itself, and I’m the only sonofabitch here to see it. But here’s the thing that breaks […]
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2005 Individualism
We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Matthew Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them. White painted bodies coming at us like a slow motion avalanche of […]
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